CZ:Getting Started

Welcome to the Citizendium pilot project!

This is a general orientation for new contributors. This is a comprehensive summary, but it is just a summary; there are links to pages with more detail (right now, many of them haven't been started).

What makes us different?

We're glad to have you here and hope you'll join our friendly little (but growing!) community as an active contributor. What makes us different? Well, for one thing, we're all contributing under our own real names. We take responsibility for our own work, and we like to think we're a bit more civil than your average Internet community. For another thing, there are editors working right alongside authors. Editors can make decisions about articles in their areas of expertise, but for the most part, we collaborate just as folks do on Wikipedia--only with more collegiality. Editors also have a special task that doesn't exist on Wikipedia: they can approve articles.

We aren't Wikipedia. On January 20, we started an experiment. Although we started the pilot project as a fork of Wikipedia, we decided to try "unforking," i.e., deleting all the inactive articles, leaving us with only articles that we'd worked on. We want to develop our own community, with our own rules and guidelines that might, in fact, be quite different from Wikipedia's. A few differences, apart from the real names requirement and the presence of editors, are that we do not use "in group" abbreviations like "POV," and we really do take our neutrality policy seriously. Also, we don't permit user boxes on user pages; nor do we permit essays linked from user pages. Finally, our project governance, which is still under rapid development, will be quite different. We have a number of non-negotiable policies, and new policies will not be adopted by "consensus" but by vote of democratically selected representatives.

Be bold!

One of the first things you must realize is that you've got to be bold if this project is going to work. It is natural to be cautious about editing stuff that other people have written. The fact that there are many highly-educated types here makes some people afraid to touch the wiki, period. But this is a huge mistake. We want and need the participation of a wide array of people. This isn't an experts-only project in the least; most of our registered contributors are, in fact, authors, not (expert) editors. Also, keep in mind that most people here are quite friendly. So far, anyway, we've had very little unpleasantness here.

So, please, be bold about contributing. Want to start a new article on a subject? Please do! You don't need to ask anyone's permission. Want to fix someone's spelling or grammar? Dive in, this is a collaboration. Want to add a new section, or revamp a bibliography? Add, revamp, and edit away!

But before you edit an article that seems pretty far along, have a look at the article's "talk" page (press the "discussion" tab at the top of the screen) and check for comments that people might have made. On the use of the "talk page," see below.

Some faux pas to avoid (but remember that "be bold" business!)

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Note to persons editing this page: when finished, if you have created any links to any new/planned project page, make a link to that planned page from CZ:Project Home. If the link goes under the "Policy" section, then add it also to CZ:Policy Outline. --Larry Sanger 16:39, 21 January 2007 (CST)