Larry Sanger started Citizendium with a detailed plan for precisely
how it would work, which he detailed in a Slashdot article in 2005 and
kept firmly to. This produced the weird phenomenon where he treated
user suggestions like they were *threats*. I just read a Paul Graham
article which contains a line summing up the problem here:
If you want a recipe for a startup that's going to die, here it
is: a couple of founders who have some great idea they know everyone
is going to love, and that's what they're going to build, no matter
what.
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.
- d.