Put a fork in the plan to fork
Larry Sanger has decided that
Citizendium, his
alternative to Wikipedia, can grow faster and be better by creating original articles from the ground up, rather than editing Wikipedia entries as originally planned. He
writes:
Citizendians (or maybe we’ll be “Citizens”) are just disheartened by
the fact that their first obligation seems to be to edit mediocre
Wikipedia articles. After all, that’s what forking Wikipedia seems to
require. I myself have said we’ll be cleaning out the Augean Stables.
Here’s your shovel!...
...When you come down to it, it’s a question of our identity. Do we want to be Wikipedia 2.0–but still a version of Wikipedia? Or, instead, do we want to be the Citizendium, a newer and better project, with its own identity that takes the best of Wikipedia’s process
and jettisons all sorts of stuff that hasn’t worked for Wikipedia? If
we start over, then we can create our own more distinctive culture, and
we can take more pride in our articles and in the processes we
develop. In short, we can be ourselves. And putting yourself into a piece of work is what gives you passion in creating it.
