Archive:Notice Board

This page is for notices and reminders--memo-type stuff--to everyone working on this wiki. It's for administrative notices concerning day-to-day operations, important policy clarifications, requests, technical announcements, etc. Why not append it to your watchlist?

For news, use the Citizendium Blog.

Have questions? Ask here.

For discussion, use the Citizendium Forums.

For community-wide announcements, use Citizendium-L.

For announcements just to editors, use Citizendium-Editors.

For previous notices, see CZ:Notice Board/Archive.

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September 5, 2007 (but see below!)

The big monthly "Write-a-Thon," takes place this Wednesday (September 5, which starts on September 4, 1200 UTC, in New Zealand, and ends on September 6, 1000 UTC, in Hawaii). Come start a new article, edit a new article, and join a global rolling party! The last time was lots of fun and created bunches of free, excellent content. So let's do it again!

CZ:Monthly Write-a-Thon

If you need an excuse to spend some "quality time" on the wiki, this is it.

August 19, 2007

If anyone wants to voice an opinion with respect to the style of the subpage navigation box (vertical buttons or horizontal tabs) check out this page: CZ:Subpages/Which_style?.

August 12, 2007

CZ:Weekly Wiki announced for Wednesday--a weekly meeting--real-time interaction for the regulars. Any takers? Please RSVP.

August 8, 2007

New exciting page, CZ:New Article of the Week, see you there :-)

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July 28, 2007

The CZ mail server is down temporarily. This means that you won't be able to send mail to people with @citizendium.org mail addresses (including Larry). | | | | | | | | UPDATE: Seems to be working okay now, 2:30 pm EST.

Interested in an Article of the Week?

July 26, 2007

What should be the name of subpage set?

July 25, 2007

Let's choose Article of the Week.

July 20, 2007

Call for Constables

Citizendium is in need of six additional constables. Constables are Citizendium's sysops or community moderators, for more information see CZ:Constabulary Home.

To apply send an email of interest to personnel@citizendium.org and include verification that you are 25 years old and have a bachelor's degree.

July 8, 2007

You might notice that subpages are now indicated not with a slash but with a colon. The URL and the method of linking remain the same, but the colon appears in the page titles and in the title bar. See Biology/Draft for an example. (You may have to hard refresh if you've got a copy of that page in your cache.)

30 approved. With the approval of DNA (announced on CZ:Approval Announcements), we now have 30 approved articles. Most of our approved articles are quite remarkable, because they represent strong collaborations (see Part I) among experts and the general public. Of course, as we ramp up recruitment, and simply make more progress on articles, we'll increase our pace of approval.

July 5, 2007

We recently passed 2,200 articles. Way to go, Citizens!

Let's do a CZ 2.0 pilot project! Please help us to get some very interesting experience with the subpage and subproject proposal; let's together add a bunch of subpages to an article. The first step: nominate what article you want us to work on. See CZ:Subpage Pilot please.

June 29, 2007

Please read, and, if you're interested, give your thoughts about Toward CZ 2.0.

June 26, 2007

CZ:Cold Storage is now our (perhaps temporary) home for material that we want to make available to contributors, but to which we don't want to permit edits. Think of it as an alternative location for deleted material.

June 25, 2007

How did you hear about CZ?‎‎ Please share!

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CZ:Feedback requests has lots of articles. Stop by a moment and offer a fellow-contributor your feedback!

June 24, 2007

SVG and OGG support are tested and working.

June 9, 2007

HELP!!! Draft articles are only for approved articles and should only be generated by constables. Somehow- we have 2 separate non-approved DNA articles- DNA and DNA/draft. Please fix this - we need to keep the better one, and delete the other. This probably means moving changes made recently to DNA over to DNA/draft and then moving DNA/draft to DNA. PLEASE never make a draft article unless you are a constable who is generating a draft at the time of approval. This is a mess. Nancy Sculerati 10:38, 9 June 2007 (CDT)

June 6, 2007

Contributors, please monitor our new pages and add The Article Checklist (linked on the left) as necessary.

The 2000th article marked "CZ Live" was Metabolic diseases (human), created late last night!

May 24, 2007

Another article was approved today, and several well-developed article are ready for your attention. See Approval Announcements.

May 22, 2007

The link to the list of mailing lists has been changed on the sidebar (finally), and now there are links to the list of lists on CZ:Workgroups as well as individual workgroup pages. The latter should (and eventually will) link directly to the list, but this is something we haven't prepared yet.

All active Citizens should realize that you can use these mailing lists to make announcements to all or almost all of the editors of a given workgroup. Just for example, the Biology Workgroup mailing list, cz-biology, has 23 subscribers, most of them editors. So, for example, if you wish to get feedback on a particular article, you can call for feedback from the list.

May 20, 2007

Apparently, as has happened today in 2 articles nominated for approval -Bacteriophage and Contraception (medical methods), an author has been changing the pointer for the version that the nominating editor has nominated. ONLY a nominating editor or constable should edit that template. This is evident from our policies concerning nomination and approval.

May 18, 2007

Some people have asked for an easier way to insert symbols, and special and non-Latin characters, into articles. If you scroll down past the editing window on any page, you will now see a handy tool for doing just that. You can also use it to add a few pieces of Wiki markup you may not know by heart. ---Stephen Ewen

May 17, 2007

• Two new articles have been nominated for approval. Which ones? See:CZ:Approval_Announcements
• There is currently a discussion on the approvals process going on at CZ_Talk:Approval_Process

May 16, 2007

The Big Cleanup staff may be interested in taking a look at Unchecklisted Articles.

May 15,2007

New approvals announced! [1]

May 14, 2007

I've put Template:Checklist blank on the wiki's sidebar (second from the bottom under "project pages"). Now the blank checklist is easy to find and you have no excuse not to put it on new articles you start! --Larry Sanger 18:05, 14 May 2007 (CDT) But for those who like to classify, one way to participate is to look for N! articles and fill out those checklists if they are not part of the discussion page. Nancy Sculerati 13:22, 15 May 2007 (CDT)

May 9, 2007

You might have noticed various fundraising-related activity on the wiki lately. We're putting finishing touches on CZ:Donate--feel free to donate your time to improving that page, if you can't donate money!

May 5, 2007

Special:Upload (the page where you upload media such as images) has been improved with what I hope are easy-to-follow directions. Plus there is a drop-down list of licenses. Special thanks goes to JoeQuick and others who have helped in the (ongoing, you can help!) effort to create licensing templates, as well as to Jason Potkanski for doing a bit of tech magic behind the scenes. If you have any suggestions to make this whole area better and as user-friendly as possible, please offer your input at the Images Forum. Stephen Ewen 14:33, 5 May 2007 (CDT)

May 2, 2007

NEW APPROVALS For news on articles that are nearing approval and nominated for approval:[2]

• (One of them is a lead article!)

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• Favicon.ico has been changed. (Provided by Larry Sanger).
• Forums dedicated to workgroups have reciprocal links to workgroup pages on the wiki. Adding this required a change to the default theme of the forum software.

Jason Potkanski 23:49, 2 May 2007 (CDT)

April 27, 2007

Recently, a notice board dedicated to articles that are negotiating the approvals process has been created. Please see [CZ:Approval Announcements]. Also, the Aikido article has been restored; for why, see CZ Talk:Approval Announcements#Follow-up on Aikido.

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Reid (one of our webservers) has had software upgrades and has been added back to the rotation of servers. Any quirks or strange happenings please report to bugs @ cz email address. Also, our hosting provider is doing network upgrades which may make the site unavailable around 2AM CDT.Jason Potkanski 17:21, 27 April 2007 (CDT)

April 25,2007

From 3:05 to about 3:20 CST it appears our hosting provider had routing trouble which resulted in CZ being unavailable. Also, in the same breath, Router Maintenance will occur this Friday at around 2AM CST for an planned outage of 15 to 20 minutes. https://support.steadfast.net/index.php?_m=news&_a=viewnews&newsid=137&group=default Jason Potkanski 15:32, 25 April 2007 (CDT)

April 24,2007

It's Tuesday Night- see CZ:Approval_Announcements. We have our first Health Sciences Approved article, and 3 newly nominated articles for approval (in 2 Disciplines that have no approved articles as yet). All these articles need your eyes and comments, please! Nancy Sculerati 20:51, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

April 23, 2007

I've registered eduzendium.org--try it out. --Larry Sanger 23:34, 22 April 2007 (CDT)

We've also set up the "TI" (Topic Informant) namespace. See Topic Informant Workgroup.

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I have accidentally nuked recentchanges using maintenance script rebuildrecentchanges.php. The result was unexpected and related to squishing a request for watchlist histories to bechave like Wikipedia's (30 days as opposed to default 7), working to correct. Jason Potkanski 07:45, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

Update: Recent Changes has been repaired. The good: recent changes now goes back 30 days, and watchlist data does as well. Statistic: A count of the recentchanges database table showed 27,000 edits in the last 30 days. The bad: Log entries such as new user creation, delete, etc that appeared in recent changes are missing but are still available by accessing the special:log pages directly. Jason Potkanski 09:01, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

April 21, 2007

A penguin takes on all of Biology on behalf of the Computers Workgroup. Watch out!

What, the Computers Workgroup has an approved article? Yes, indeed, the first of many is now here in all its (his?) glory, da da DA DA....Tux. Congratulations!

April 20, 2007

Infant colic

Infant colic is shortly to be nominated (by me) for approval. Authored by User:Christo Muller, a physician experienced in the care of inconsolable infants, it is important that the article itself is not changed by edits, please, at this stage. HOWEVER, it needs eyes for copyediting and comments. As it is a sensitive subject that directly bears on the care of infants, I ask that these comments be put on the talk page. They will be addressed. Nancy Sculerati 07:17, 20 April 2007 (CDT)

Editorial Council now in its infancy

The Editorial Council has just been kicked off. See CZ Editorial Council Members for a list of members; its wiki home will be at Editorial Council; the section of the Policy Outline that gives its (current!) governing rules is right here; and its mailing list archives are available (little there right now).

April 14, 2007

Pictures wanted - for series on normal infant and child development. For parents who are willing to let CZ publish their own pictures of their own children, we would appreciate pictures of babies smiling, holding things, and youngsters crawling, standing, and walking. Especially those -"first standing holding on" type shots. Crying infants for Infant colic who are between about 1 and 3 months of age also wanted. These pictures can only be used if uploaded with permission for CZ to use and a statement that says the pictures were taken by you (you have copyright). Thanks (and for those whose babies are the furry and four-legged (or feathered) we need pets, too! Nancy Sculerati 16:35, 14 April 2007 (CDT)

April 13, 2007

Servers are behaving badly. Looking into it.

UPDATE: Database server had a disk full problem. Fixes are in place. No data was lost. The database is doing an unscheduled vacuum at the moment as a sanity check. Site will be slow and sometimes unresponsive while the vacuum is running.

UPDATE: One web server was just behaving badly. Locke was taken out of rotation and had it's operating system upgraded inplace from CentOS 4.4 to CentOS 5.0. Locke will rejoin the rotation shortly after testing. Jason Potkanski 22:49, 13 April 2007 (CDT)

April 4, 2007

Thanks to many people hard at work on The Big Cleanup, the pages in our database that have been checklisted now number 721. That represents a lot of useful work; we're over a quarter finished, since the total number of pages to go through is about 2800, and not all of them are articles, so not all of them will be checklisted. This also means that we can get a rough idea of the breakdown of our articles. (The count is skewed to a certain extent by the fact that some people went through Jaap Winius' copious snake articles, which upped the count of "external" articles.) Anyway, 331 of the articles, or 46%, are nonstub articles, meaning they are over 100 words or so, and are not merely copied here from elsewhere. Only 232, or 32%, are marked as external articles, meaning articles that began life elsewhere (typically, Wikipedia) and have not been significantly changed since they were uploaded. We have been deleting these pretty aggressively.

• Anti Vandal changed not synced to reid properly, done so.

• Error searching for images and returning a database error was fixed by Greg.

• Textop.org wiki locked from spam.

• Creation of new testbeds on dev server for development use. Electrawn 01:21, 5 April 2007 (CDT)

April 3, 2007

• Anti Vandal extension modified to send a no-cache, must-revalidate header. Users blocked by the extension were ending up in squid's cache, causing genuine users to occasionally get blocked messages. Electrawn 03:39, 3 April 2007 (CDT)

April 2, 2007

Vandalism update

We just had our first vandal attack outside of our self-registration period. All the damage has been undone. The user account was made during our self-registration period--a "sleeper account." There's a chance there's a few more of these, so this evening, constables will be checking through our account list for bogus accounts. We'll also be deleting older, never-used accounts soon. It remains the case that vandalism has been exclusively the result of self-registration.

Technical update

• PHP Sessions are now shared between servers via NFS. Not the best solution, but problems with suddenly being logged out should clear.

• A Math/TeX rendering bug has been fixed and submitted to MediaWiki developers as a patch. As a side effect, servers are much more stable.

• A change was made to our anti vandal extension to enable it to work with our Squid proxy configuration. 403 errors claiming to be a "Major search engine bot" should disappear. Electrawn 01:18, 2 April 2007 (CDT)

April 1, 2007

We now have more articles than Wikipedia!

(April Fool!)

Well, if we keep creating very short articles, called "stubs," we will. Please, while it's all right to create a few stubs, particularly if you're committed to expanding them sometime soon, we would prefer that you focus on a smaller number of longer articles. It really does not do anyone good to have many very short articles. Stubs contain almost no information, and therefore not the information for which people might want to search; they "scratch the itch" of red links, when we would like that itch more fully scratched with a good article; they are a poor example to newer people, who follow the example by writing short articles of their own; and they are, arguably, a sign of vanity, because they merely add to the number of articles you've started!

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Congratulations to Petréa_Mitchell, who put the right workgroup category on the United States of America. Thank you.