CZ:Editorial Council Resolution 0006/Member position statements

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Rules

This page contains the official positions of Citizendium Editorial Council Members about Editorial Council Resolution 0006.

The governing rules for discussion are found at Editorial Council Rules of Procedure. The following are reminders.

• Council Members should place their comments, limited to 600 words maximum, underneath their names on this page. Comments will be ordered based on when they first appeared on this page; new comments should simply be appended to the bottom.

• Members may edit their comments throughout the discussion period.

• Each Member will be required to read this page before voting.

• There are other methods of commentary on the resolution, but no commentary is required reading for Members other than this page.

• This page will be closed for editing when voting begins.

• The closing date for position statements can be found on the resolution page and will be announced on cz-editcouncil, followed by reminders. Note that Members may move to extend discussion.

Member position statements

1. David Shapinsky: The argument for this is very straightforward and I favor the resolution. As with so many things, however, the question will be how to manage the submissions, assuming they become numerous. And there is also the question of style, consistency, etc. I know that all of us wish to have Citizendium achieve the highest possible quality. That is a huge task in itself. I would merely ask what impact this initiative might have on the overall project - and whether this is where we should put our resources at this time? I, myself, do not have an answer or a clear sense of how well we are meeting our goals. That said I support the ideas embodied in the resolution completely.
2. David Goodman: I strongly object to this as in opposition to our fundamental goals. Our goal is to make a reliable encyclopedia, not run a open site. This is meant to attract people who may want to participate in the encyclopedia--a worthy goal--but it does so by asking them to contribute content that may be unsuitable for an free encyclopedia, or any encyclopedia at all, to a site under our sponsorship and linked to what we propose as reliable. In particular i object to: (1) "License. You specify the license. If you do not, we will treat the article as being exclusively copyrighted by you." Although we have not decided on our license, we certainly are not considering one that will no permit the reuse of content at all. I think we are not considering one more restrictive than attribution no-commerical use, and we should

not accept content less free than that. (2) "Add...Category:WYA CZ no to indicate that we may not use it." How does this even potentially help us build our real encyclopedia? (3) "Business owners may write introductory articles about their businesses. " This is providing a directory site, or a site for advertising. What does this have to do with our goals. it's the opposite of what we came her for. (4) "You may make your article an introduction to yourself and your own life. This project does not have a 'notability" or "maintainability' policy". Again, the opposite of our purpose. (5) "External links (including links to your own writings) are permissible." Are we trying to compete with Facebook? They do it better. Everything here will presumable be searchable. Everything here will come up on google with our project name attached or implied. I think the publicity in this will either kill the project, or take over the project entirely. Those who wish to do this should do it is a way not associated with us. I have no opposition to the idea per se. I do oppose it being connected with Citizendium. I thought we came here to do just the opposite--a better and more reliable source of information than wikipedia, not a worse. ~David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.

1. Gary Giamboi: I think this is a great idea. I would like to know how we will handle articles with the same title?
2. Larry Sanger: My statement: Briefly, the main arguments for these initiatives are (1) they have the potential to attract a very large number of new contributors, some from Wikipedia, some from elsewhere; and (2) "What's Your Article?" has the potential to create a lot of new, high-quality (the best people can do--which is usually quite good) articles, which might serve as first drafts. The hope is that the open, inviting nature of the program, together with personal recognition, will lead participants to tell their friends about us, who will tell their friends, and so forth. A large portion of this (hopefully) expanding body of contributors will make their way into the main project. If I am right, CZ can benefit from the same sort of peer-to-peer viral networking that builds social networking sites like FaceBook. This differs from the Google-mediated viral growth that built Wikipedia, and which we have experienced only to a limited extent so far. Do bear in mind that none of these articles will be placed in the main namespace; they should be very easy to distinguish from regular articles and subpages. We may use a special template to achieve this distinctive look. I think it's definitely worth a try, and I see little downside.