CZ:Signed Articles

What are Signed Articles?

Signed articles are introductory, overview, general review, and perspectival articles attributed one person or a small group of people. Such articles have two fundamental requirements: first, they must be characterizable as reference material, and neither brand new research nor mere polemics; second, they must be crafted by people who are unquestionably experts on the topic in question.

The Citizendium, with the approval of the Editorial Council, may enter into an agreement with external organizations, which become Citizendium editors for the express purpose of using the wiki to host articles. Such organizations may then have their own homepage and categories on the wiki, in which they organize the presentation of the articles in their care. All such articles should, however, live on subpages of "signed articles" pages (see below).

Furthermore, any Citizendium workgroup may play this role, if it selects a project editor according to a process the Editorial Council can regard as fair.

Finally, any individual or group of individuals, with the approval of the Editorial Council, may undertake to upload large sources of free content to signed article pages, if we do not plan to use them in the main namespace. For example, we might want to give this treatment to the 11th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica or the Catholic Encyclopedia--or even, in a future French Citizendium, Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie.

Purpose

The central purpose of signed articles is simply to increase the store of expert-created, credible content available to readers for free.

An ancillary purpose is to give the Citizendium community a solid basis on which to enter into relationships with existing organizations. There are many professional organizations and other credible groups who might wish to use the resources of our wiki and community, while still allowing their members to take exclusive credit for a piece of work. This is convenient and advantageous for everyone. The Citizendium gains both free content and editors who might be won over to "the wiki way," while our partnering organizations gain a free host for their content and a ready-made community to help manage and promote it.

Moreover, there are often people who are willing to contribute content to our cause, but who--perhaps not understanding, or simply not agreeing with, the collaborative nature of our central endeavor--simply send us articles, or post articles to the wiki without realizing that others actually can edit them. When we come into ownership of such content, we would like a place to put it where others can benefit from it.

Guidelines for editing

While they may contain some recognizable bias and opinion-stating on the part of an author, the Citizendium will not publish anything that rises to the level of polemic, much less propaganda. Furthermore, in the interest of maintaining a solid reputation for political, religious, and other sorts of neutrality, we may refuse further articles on a topic from a certain point of view until the articles con

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