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Squaring up to Wikipedia

October 30, 2007 7:32pm
by Richard Waters

Citizendium Larry Sanger is still predicting big things for Citizendium, the expert-moderated alternative to the "open" encyclopedia Wikipedia that he launched a year ago (we wrote about the launch here, and the implications of the Citizendium v Wikipedia battle here.)

Given the scale of his ambition, the results so far are decidedly modest: 3,300 articles, growing at the rate of 14 a day, compared to more than 2m on the English-language version of Wikipedia. Still, Sanger, who was in at the beginning of Wikipedia, is unabashed, as his update today demonstrates:

At some point, possibly very soon, the Citizendium will grow explosively–say, quadruple the number of its active contributors, or even grow by an order of magnitude.  And it will experience that growth over the course of a month or two, and its growth will continue to accelerate from that higher rate.

Comments like that make it sound like Sanger is succumbing to wishful thinking in his efforts to hit back at old nemesis Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. Still, he has a point in one regard. Projects like this are deeply viral, and many of the experts he wants to attract will only jump in once they feel a tipping point has been reached.

As Wikipedia’s extraordinary expansion continues, I for one hope Sanger gets the formula right. It’s way too early in the development of the internet to hand so much influence over what passes for human knowledge to a single, still largely experimental website like Wikipedia.

October 30, 2007 7:32pm in Internet | Comment

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