[WikiEN-l] Citizendium

Tue Sep 19 11:34:18 UTC 2006

On 19/09/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> Yes, why should another site not get the grunt work done? I guess because they start with a 'more chiefs than Indians' model of intellectual work? Delegation to the nearest graduate student actually works in academia, sort of. People get doctorates for doing what someone memorably called the more boring parts broken off the professor's research program.
> Just who gets excited enough to add all those variants of [[John of Jandun]], for a random example, on a site based on a star system (as if that was a panacea)?

Wikipedia gets people willing to do the ridiculously boring jobs
because they believe in the project and this is a way they can help
it.

An example that I find striking: The [[Puffing Billy Railway,
Melbourne]] is a tourist steam railway. They have volunteers out
warming up the engine every morning at 3am! Reliably! People volunteer
to do jobs that when paid workers did them brought socialist
revolution to mind.

Citizendium will, I suspect, need to attract people who belileve in
the project and want to help it however they can and do the *really
boring bits*.

- d.