[WikiEN-l] Citizendium

Mon Sep 18 11:10:07 UTC 2006

On 9/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17/09/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> > If I had to guess, one response would be: the opportunity for a genuine
> > expert to work hand in hand with other genuine experts, without the
> > social difficulty of having to interact with the general public, some of
> > whom are quite noticeably stupid and annoying.
> > We try, as a community, to be welcoming and respectful of experts.  We
> > have good people in the community who try to help experts deal with the
> > trolls, vandals, and general nonsense that is likely to come up from
> > time to time.  But we can also all easily admit that sometimes it does
> > not go perfectly, and that genuine experts end up leaving rather than
> > wasting time arguing with idiots.
>
>
> Yeah. On Wikipedia, dealing with people you consider to be noisy
> useless idiots is not optional. You can't refuse to suffer fools. If
> Larry can get a live project going that doesn't do that, I think it'll
> lure a lot of contributors - some from Wikipedia, but also many who
> won't go near Wikipedia because there's no cure for stupid. At least
> with "expert" qualifications the idiots will be expert idiots, and any
> good academic has way too much experience dealing with those.

This is a good articulation for why one should not summarily dismiss
this project as "yet another bad creation."

The same way Netnanny makes the raw Internet safe for kids,
Citizendium could be making the raw Wikipedia safe for academics. :)
OTOH, anyone who's used parental filters knows exactly how good, or
not good, they are.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)