After considerable deliberation, indicating broad support, we have decided to delete all inactive Wikipedia articles from the Citizendium pilot project wiki. This will leave us with only those articles that we’ve been working on. The deletion will take place on Saturday at noon, Eastern time.
This is an experiment. In other words, we’re quite seriously thinking of not forking Wikipedia after all....
Let me emphasize that we have had good success on the wiki so far....We merely think that we can do better, and this change might be a way to do better....
We probably have had as much or more activity as Wikipedia did in its early months, and a similar number of contributors, but --well, the passion hasn’t been the same. I have been idly puzzling over what the difference might be. Then it occurred to me, a few days ago, that 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....
So why not simply get rid of all those articles, and encourage people, by default, to start new articles altogether?...
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....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/20/2007 02:50:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
