User talk:Donald Albury

Tasks: start a new article • add basic, wanted or requested articles • add definitions • add metadata • edit new pages

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start, and see Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, our help system and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forum is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any user or the editors for help, too. Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun! John Stephenson 10:18, 12 August 2007 (CDT)

Good stuff!

Good stuff, Donald! We like to see people getting involved quickly rather than just lurking. John Stephenson 21:13, 14 August 2007 (CDT)

Yes, I was dropping by, as a fellow Floridian, to say the same thing. :-)  —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 22:32, 28 August 2007 (CDT)

Florida state pages

Thanks for the addtion of items to the Florida RA pages. If you would like to do more, you can find population data from the U.S. Census Bureau pages:

US Census Bureau data for Florida

The link takes you directly to the Florida page. It is a search page from which you can get the cities from a drop-down menu. I have also been using "boilerplate" tefinitions:

A city in the north central part of the U.S. state of Arizona; 2006 estimated population 58,000.

That is for Flagstaff, Arizona. Obvious modifications can be made for other cities.

James F. Perry 16:33, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I've added the rest of the State Universities and a number of private colleges and universities. According to Wikipedia there are 48 private colleges and universities in Florida. Some are well-known, some are large and some have a long and rich history, but others are not very notable. Has there been any discussion about how prominent a school should be to deserve an article? Another complication is that the state's community colleges have been renamed 'state colleges', and many, if not most, are now offering some 4-year degrees, but I don'I think we are ready for articles about the 28 colleges. The same question applies to cities. Some of the cities I added are well-known, but others are simply large (Miami Gardens has a population over 100,000, but I would be hard pressed to cite any facts about it, and I once lived just a few miles from what later became the city). -- Donald Albury 17:41, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

One of the most infuriating things about CZ is the impossibility of finding an official guideline or rule that you *know* is there buried somewhere in the structure -- you've seen it, but now you can't find it again. I *know* that in an official page about what CZ articles are and are not, there is at least a mention of the school question. Ie, do we want to have an article about *every* non-notable school, middle school, and high school in the country? The answer was No. But I doubt if this applies to universities, and probably not to colleges of any sort. But who knows? If I could *find* the damn place again, I could tell you.... Hayford Peirce 18:02, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

In constructing the Related Articles pages for the states, I have been guided not so much by whether CZ should have an article on the subject, but by my own personal views that the topic listings in the RA pages should include just the more important articles. So I ask myself whether an individual reading the Florida article would likely be interested also in the __________ article. On this view, the decision to include or to not include a topic on the RA page is one of personal judgement as to its relative importance.

By this view, the criteria for inclusion would be different for "inclusion in CZ" and for "inclusion on the RA page" Again, that is just my view. James F. Perry 19:05, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I remember reading a couple of years ago something to the effect that since it would be a long time until Citizendium could have articles about all of the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S. it should not have articles about any county. That rule obviously doesn't translate very well to other topics, like cities. Certainly, we should not be worrying about minor subjects when so much needs to be done on major articles. On the other hand, people will write about what interests them, and for now my interest is in topics related to the history of Florida, so I probably won't be writing articles on cities or schools in Florida or elsewhere. -- Donald Albury 20:35, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Although there are others at CZ who disagree with my position, I have always advised people wondering about what they should write about to write precisely about those things that interest them. It if interests them enough to want to write about it, that means there are probably other people somewhere who would be interested enough in the same subject to want to read about it. So write about what you want to, without worrying about its cosmic implications or importance, whether in the greater world without or even here at CZ. Hayford Peirce 21:02, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Here is the Maintainability policy you're talking about. However, that doesn't answer the basic question of "where to draw the line" for a normal school vs one that crosses the line to becoming something that sets it apart enough that it can be written about. Certainly FSU could have an article, couldn't it? I think that's why it's left to the editors. Constables should take direction from them on where they want the line to be drawn. D. Matt Innis 03:08, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the link, Matt! But this is a *perfect* example of what I was complaining about above -- here I am, a *regular* contributor for more than 2 years now, a Kop for more than 8 months, and I *still* can't find the reference I want. Why should such a *really* important topic such as this be hiding in perhaps the single most obscure text in all of Citizendium, Maintainability, instead of half a dozen other more logical places to put it?! You've gotta be either a genius or an idiot to figure out that this is where the answer to my question lay. Couldn't someone make an Index or Table of Contents so that Citizens can find what they want in the guidelines, rules, precedents, decisions, etc.? Hayford Peirce 03:49, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

And just what does that policy mean? It says that Citizendium doesn't have a 'notability' policy, but says we should not have articles about "undistinguished" schools, and then seems to say we should not have any articles about U.S. counties. The policy defines 'maintainablity' in terms of having enough editors to maintain a given class of article. I think another useful filter is 'notability' as defined here. In other words, if there are multiple independent published sources about a subject, we can normally presume that the subject is not "undistinguished". The existence of multiple published sources doesn't mean Citizendium should have a given article or class of articles, however. There are dozens of books about lighthouses, but damned few lighthouses about which much can be written (although Citizendium should have an article on Lighthouse). -- Donald Albury 10:43, 7 September 2009 (UTC)