Matt Thompson on an Omaha paper’s acquisition of WikiCity:

WikiCity in its current state strikes me as a textbook example of a site built by robots. Such sites tend, in my experience, to appeal mostly to other robots. Contrast it to Wikipedia, whose every page was built, word by work, link by link, on the actions of individual people. Or to Everyblock, whose pages run on powerful algorithms, lovingly engineered and hand-polished by a brilliant and careful team of makers. These are large sites built on millions of niches, but neither were built that way to start.

It’s certainly hard to scale up, but it’s true that it’s even harder to scale down. I don’t think it’s impossible, but the idea really has to be killer to work if it’s been designed for a large-scale from the start.