Clean slate for Citizendium
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.