Citizens’ Encyclopædia

Larry Sanger initated recently a debate on whether it would be better to start Citizendium from scratch instead of forking Wikipedia.

Arguments have been brought forward, for both variants: Wikipedia has many good articles, but also a lot of mediocre or poor quality and his idea is that the poor quality articles would prevent experts from taking Citizendium seriously. Also, a lot of Wikipedia articles are the infamous “Pokemons”, articles about obscure topics, mostly on fiction, which the CZ people don’t like and they want them deleted from their fork. This brings the problem of size: Wikipedia, with its 1.6 million articles is huge and this is a work for many people, not for a couple dozen volunteers which are currently active on Citizendium.

However, there is another point, which I don’t think was ever raised: Google usually likes original content over mirrors and forks: it would appreciate more the pages which are not found elsewhere versus wikipedia articles with minor changes. That is a particular important point, as probably most of Wikipedia’s editors and readers learnt about it from a Google result page.

Digital Universe is supposed to be an encyclopedia project started by the dot-com entrepreneur Joe Firmage with the help of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger. The wikipedia article on it says that:

On the basis of interviews given by the founders, the Digital Universe concept appears to be undergoing rapid evolution, so it may be difficult to give a fully self-consistent explanation of the goals of the founders.

So, basically, they haven’t decided yet how it should be, despite starting the project more than a year ago. On the other hand, they worked on their interface, which is complicated enough, so, it confuses the visitors and it won’t work in some browsers, such as Opera:

There has been an error.

You will be redirected to the page where you can contact our support and give us your feedback.

The interface software is a good example of what happens when programmers try to impress the PHBs instead of the users. The Digital Universe bureaucratic way of doing business, which includes meetings, secretaries, workflows, etc., is very different from the informal way of Wikipedia’s IRC leadership.

In fact, this appears to have pissed off Larry Sanger and hence his idea of starting his own expert-based fork right away. Sanger wanted that his project would be included in the Digital Universe Foundation, but it seems that no decision was taken yet.