Citiz end ium

braintickle — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 23:07:06 +0000

When Wikipedia co, er, oh, it seems I can say that now, when Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger founded his second attempt at an open encyclopedia, by the wonderful name of citizendium (why not go for armapedia or wikigeddon?), he fantasized that he would soon reign over an army of “tenure level qualified” experts who would flutter their cute little whips over another army of ~~footsoldiers~~ “citizens” to do his bidding. Sounds all a bit oompa-loompa? Larry is no man of small ambitions. While rival Wikipedia has been busy breaking toolservers in the anticipation of its hallowed redeemer Stable Versions (who, btw, never came), Larry and his pals, in no more than 1.5 years, have managed to write 700 “developed articles” on topics of general interest, such as compressible flow analysis and concurrent use registration. I have to tip my hat to the academicians, who, at about 1.5 articles a day, manage to cope with about twice the workload of a single Cambridge undergraduate. Go, boffins, go! Maybe you’ll get all the way to “list of questions with no answers” and “irresistible strangulation urge” before the investors pull the plug. Meanwhile Larry, who tanked a career as an academic philosopher (don’t worry, getting ousted is a hobby, nothing to do with philosophy being such a rigorous discipline *snrf*) has fulfilled his lifetime ambition of redefining what philosophy is (sound like Mzoli’s Meats, anyone?).

When Larry is not entertaining tabbed navigation sales people, he likes to fantasize about the day when his site will be ranked as one of the top 100,000 sites on the web, and soundly beat out co-languisher wikinfo.org (even Larry has given up on battling FUD fan (yes, one with rotors) conservapedia). Until that day, like wikinfo, he will continue to provide CC and GFDL-licensed fodder for the zit-riddled teenagers and homeless people that ~~steal~~ ~~write~~ steal back for Wikipedia. May the funding be with you. Amen.

Fun facts: Many (most?) of citizendium’s 4500 articles came straight from Wikipedia. Citizendium has 10,000 registered users (Wikipedia reached 1 million users in February 2006). The English Wikipedia has 2.2 million articles. Jointly, the various language editions of Wikipedia are ranked as the ninth most visited site word-wide by alexa.com

This wolf is committed to continuing to take the piss out of Citizendium until it improves.

Whatever happened to consensus?

Citiz end ium