Forum Moderators: phranque
In just six years, Wikipedia has mushroomed into one of the Web's most astonishing successes, with 1.7 million articles in English alone. The downside is that the free encyclopedia has its share of errors and juvenile vandalism, and sometimes the writing is incomprehensibly arcane......To Sanger — who was present at the creation of Wikipedia (in fact, call him a co-founder, although that, like many things within Wikipedia, is disputed) — its charms seem to outweigh its warts simply because it has no competition...
...This week, Sanger takes the wraps off a Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium. His goal is to capture Wikipedia's bustle but this time, avoid the vandalism and inconsistency that are its pitfalls.
Sanger to Take Wraps Off Wikipedia Alternative: Citizendium [news.yahoo.com]
This should be interesting!
Great... another site that will soon rank above mine for my keywords.
If you site is good enough then it will be referencing your website!
If you site is good enough then it will be referencing your website!
In the months since the Citizendium began, we have created and borrowed many articles
Borrowed?
I think wikipedia mirrors that. I think it was an absolutely brilliant idea and anything that follows will be extremely difficult to establish.
[edited by: Keniki at 1:28 am (utc) on Mar. 26, 2007]
This website you're on at the moment proves that Citizendium has merit. You're a new member here, but if you post enough you'll run into the mods who will keep you on the straight and narrow. WW has built a very useful resource using volunteers.
Richard Wright wrote a book called NonZero. He attempts to make the case saying that human progress is built not everyone winning and that mankind (and even much of nature) has in its being a desire to be helpful to others.
I do agree with others, however, that I'll never learn to spell Citizendium. How do you say it: Sit-I-zen-de-um? Bah.
I followed a link at the bottom of the article and found a website with Adsense saying that they were currently re-designing their site.
A good start to using Citizendium - I think not!
How does Google view re-using articles from wiki and similiar sources?
Wikipedia is basically duplicate content: all of its articles are supposed to be referenced from other more authoritative sources. Quite often, that means it's nothing more than a rehash of the information you can easily find on the rest of the web. And if Wiki wasn't at the top of every single SERP, this original information would be that much easier to find in the first place.
Excuse me, I need to go buy my fish a bicycle...
nerd.
The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
That's I got from any link on the front page. Not very impressive at all right now. How can I put this.... buy yourself some bandwidth.
You maybe right I certainly wish Citizendium the best of luck. I think the fact Wikipedia needs competition is valid. I just wonder what happened to "encarta" and why they didn't take a leaf out of wikipedia and open the thing up.
What's most striking to me: how did they manage to get their story into yahoo AND webmasterworld? There is a lot to learn from this, for sure.
how did they manage to get their story into yahoo AND webmasterworld? There is a lot to learn from this, for sure.
It's simply riding the coattails of Wikipedia, which is the flavor of the month. It seems like you can't go a week without some minor Wikipedia article causing a controversy which makes it into the mainstream press (e.g. Sinbad reported dead).
The site will also be Slashdotted soon, if it hasn't been already, because they love to argue Wikipedia over there as well.
