Sharpening the Wiki

I spent a bit of the holiday explaining the Pleiades project to my family, and how it compares to Wikipedia and Citizendium. Like Citizendium, we aim to expertly moderate openly contributed knowledge. On the other hand, we're not forking the entirety of Wikipedia, but instead are scoping down and building upon an unequaled scholarly work -- the Barrington Atlas. Ben Vershbow, in Scholarpedia: sharpening the wiki for expert results (via Peter Suber), says we're on the right track:

One problem of open source knowledge projects is that they're often too general in scope (Scholarpedia says it all). A federation of specialized encyclopedias, produced by focused communities of scholars both academic and independent -- and with some inter-disciplinary porousness -- would be a more valuable, if less radical, counterpart to Wikipedia, and more likely to succeed than the Citizendium chimera.

Expertise will continue to have value in our wiki future. I'm already convinced that Pleiades has a solid mission, but it's nice to find reinforcements.