Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-11-15/News and notes


 * Ha Ha! 1474 hits/sec and we didn't even break a sweat.. thanks for comin' out guys! -- &oelig; &trade; 00:32, 16 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Impressive round-up chaps, keep up the industrious work!  Skomorokh   00:58, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Citizendium

 * Let Citizendium hang. Honestly, while Jimbo wasn't ideal in his behavior towards Larry, Larry has outright attempted to sink Wikipedia, and shamelessly promoted his project it its place, among other highly unethical actions. From a purely market perspective, if Citizendium cannot support itself, it doesn't deserve to exist. Harsh, but that's how a competitive market works. If Wikipedia has 99% of the market share, and therefore 99% of the funding, it has no obligation to bail out the competitor that has the other 1%, with Wikipedia funding, at no cost ever to Citizendium, especially if Citizendium plays dirty. Let Citizendium hang. Sven Manguard  Talk  06:32, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Information is NOT just a product like you treat it in economics. If Citizendium has ways to create free information in a way that is more effective and leads to higher quality than Wikipedia (and it probably does), we have the moral obligation to rescue it. The fight between our founders should have nothing to do with this. We are not talking about a hostile take-over here, but about a way to reach/accomplish our own values, goals and policies.  W oo dwa lk er talk 08:22, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm not impressed by Citizendium, which disappoints me because I initially favored their methods. However, in practice I've found the articles there are often worse than the ones here. For example, if you compare our George III to theirs, ours is better. I see no provable increase in quality as a result of their editing model. DrKiernan (talk) 10:46, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I'd like to see some hard data before extending a hand or sitting back and laughing. What would it actually cost us to host them? If nothing else, I think the goodwill alone might help with the brain drain we've been suffering lately.  bahamut0013  words deeds 12:50, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Citizendium was a great idea a few years ago but it really just has not panned out. It needed a lot more promotion to be able to work. It's basically a dead site that nobody uses (and why would they, their articles are a joke). Having a fund drive for it is like having a funds drive for Montgomery Ward. They also have pretty much the ugliest website ever. I can't stand reading their articles because the layout is so hideous. - Burpelson AFB ✈ 13:55, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * They designed their site so it would be the anti-wikipedia. They even went so far as to using PostgreSQL rather than MySQL for their database. I agree with you on their design. It's a hideous cluttered layout. Sanger shouldn't take all the blame for this though - it was a group decision by the few individuals remaining over there to do it. Czobserver (talk) 07:56, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It is way too early to write off Citizendium, but it would be far better for the Foundation to pay for three to five years of its very meager expenses than it would be to try to merge projects so different and between which there is so much obvious animosity. The way this years Jimbo-stare-fest fundraiser is going so well, it's easily affordable. Ginger Conspiracy (talk) 16:20, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * There's noting wrong with us helping Citizendium in principle, however I see trouble in the future if the assistance was ever withdrawn "WP finishes off CZ" and they have not much that we don't in terms of approved content (see WikiProject Citizendium Porting), and significant problems with special interest groups owning articles last I looked. Also about 1/3 of their approved articles are by one editor who is no longer active in either project.  If they simply cut their hosting costs to what is needed they should be able to keep going more or less indefinitely. Rich Farmbrough, 17:21, 16 November 2010 (UTC).
 * There's noting wrong with us helping Citizendium in principle, however I see trouble in the future if the assistance was ever withdrawn "WP finishes off CZ" and they have not much that we don't in terms of approved content (see WikiProject Citizendium Porting), and significant problems with special interest groups owning articles last I looked. Also about 1/3 of their approved articles are by one editor who is no longer active in either project.  If they simply cut their hosting costs to what is needed they should be able to keep going more or less indefinitely. Rich Farmbrough, 17:21, 16 November 2010 (UTC).

There's nothing wrong with Citizendium in principle. It's an attempt to fix a major problem on Wikipedia, which is the gap between the quality of different articles. Look at Volcano as compared to Tropical cyclone, for instance. There's an obvious gap in quality there. Most Wikipedia articles are either patchwork efforts that don't stand out in quality or well-written, singular efforts. Individual editors and groups make large dents in their chosen areas, but overall with the rapidly increasing number of articles, quality simply cannot keep up; try playing with Special:Random, for instance, to see what I mean. The average quality of Wikipedia is, sorry to say, very low.

However, in practice, it's a disaster. For the one part, the project tries to directly compete with Wikipedia, and given our great size, that's very difficult (Google's Knol does a better job circumnavigating us, by purposely avoiding being a set-and-stack encyclopedia). Secondly, it attempts to fix the quality problem by forcing the writership to conform to professional standards. They will, but at a great cost&mdash;experienced writers without degrees in a particular subject, like me, cannot hope to achieve much there, but can on Wikipedia. Third, the project was and continues to be (intellectually) led by that character, Larry Sanger. Comments along the lines of "won't touch with a ten-foot pole" and "We're not that desperate" don't help his case, and neither does trying to storm down Wikipedia with such acts as the FBI scene and the whole escapade on Jimbo's talk page a while back.

So, I'd say that if we have the techs to do this easily, then if we can get Sanger to get out of his aggressive mentality, then why not. Sorry for the editorial, but I had to put my opinion out on, er, e-paper. Res Mar 22:08, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I'd be against helping out Citizendium - hell, if Sanger can only give his baby $250 (I'm sure he's got a hell of a lot more than that in his bank available for him to give), then why should we help them? They need $9000 a year for their hosting? Well, going by the figures above, then they should be able to get the money to keep going from donations. If they can't, sorry, that's the way the world works - the only way I could see it getting help from the WMF was for it to become a WMF project, and no way will Sanger allow that! I see no real advantage in helping them, and plenty of reasons for not doing so --  Phantom Steve / talk &#124; contribs \ 23:15, 16 November 2010 (UTC)


 * As noted on the CZ forums, Wikipedia is already supporting Citizendium in another way, by being "the number 1 site linking to CZ" (according to Alexa). And this is an important way of helping them, because Citizendium is not only lacking contributors and money, but also inbound links.
 * My personal view, which I advocated in a talk at last year's Wikimania, is that exactly because of their different approach, Citizendium has great value for Wikipedia, as a long-term experiment testing several fundamental policy changes in the real world (things that thousands of people have been discussing over and over without actually trying them out, like introducing stable expert-approved versions of articles). A value that would easily justify a Foundation grant over a few thousand dollars. However, as I hope the Signpost article has indicated, that hosting suggestion wasn't much more than an idea, with important details not yet being thought through.
 * Regards, HaeB (talk) 13:22, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia's David Gerard has apparently been banned indefinitely from citizendium after criticising one of its members. One assumes it was Larry Sanger. See here. Czobserver (talk) 06:49, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It wasn't. See .— Thomas Larsen 07:44, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, I've been banned from a project I last made an edit to nearly three years ago. Well, I guess that'll tell me what-for. Not to mention its valuable signaling power to properly dissuade others from writing about CZ on RationalWiki and give Citizens confidence their constabulary are doing useful things and that their money is being spent wisely - David Gerard (talk) 12:54, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Just set up (as Thomas Larsen notes): RationalWiki:What is going on at Citizendium? And discussion - David Gerard (talk) 12:54, 20 November 2010 (UTC)


 * CZ can go to hell. We have no reason to help them, and even if we did Sanger would never let that happen. Divebomb is not British 18:36, 26 November 2010 (UTC)