On 07/04/2011 19:26, David Gerard wrote:
<snip>
Knowino (and Argopedia, and the survivors of
Citizendium, and everyone
in fact) needs to look at this and see what they can do. Is there room
in the encyclopedia game? I sure hope so. How do you beat Wikipedia?
Work like a startup. Wikipedia now changes at dinosaur pace and seems
utterly unable to solve the problems it knows it has, let alone the
ones it doesn't. If room to zip around it exists, something small
enough to be nimble can find it.
Of course the niches are there. The real question
is more like this: you
have to avoid the "general" encyclopedia market for the "general
reader". So what do you set out to do? One idea is to have a forum as
front end, and a team of editors who collate material from the forum as
back end. This was pretty much the theory of the first wiki I worked on
(except the forum was a newsgroup). The Web is full of transient
material, and specialised discussions, and all you really need is some
working understanding of what kind of "collation" is worthwhile.
Charles