DISQUS

Dave, I just gave a talk at Harvard in which I made similar arguments: http://www.larrysanger.org/realnames.html

In some respects, what you're pointing toward is what the Citizendium already does. We're a new project, but I think in the next few years you're going to see a lot more of us and a lot more considering the merits of our sort of project.

Tony, Mathew -- I just gotta say, given the sometimes hostile reaction to Citizendium by people like Mick O'Leary, and others who desperately want us to fail, I do feel like a "New Media Orphan." A New Media Apostate, more like. ;-)

I'm not sure you actually read the essay you linked to, Tim. I think you missed the point by a mile: we are growing, at an accelerating rate. Alexa ranking and comparisons to Wikipedia are utterly and completely irrelevant--of course. And as anyone who knows much about the growth vectors of projects like this understands.

Another point left out of the essay, which I just found out about, is that CZ has slightly more words (5 million) than Wikipedia had after one year. See:

http://blog.citizendium.org/2007/11/01/our-word...

As to the ridiculous notion that the Citizendium has no "point"--well, that's so silly it needs no reply. If you don't know what the point of the project is, you don't know anything about the project.

"when do you project to pass Wikipedia in terms of popularity?"

I haven't got a single clue. It all depends on how quickly we build up our body of articles. We're growing exponentially, as Wikipedia did from the beginning, but it's hard to know in advance how steep the growth curve will be.

"the latter hasn’t exactly set the world on fire since its launch."

It takes time to set the whole world on fire. We've definitely made great progress since launch, increasing our "live" article almost by 50% (over 1700) and almost doubling our number of authors. Arguably, we're looking better now than Wikipedia did after six months...