CZ:Editorial Council Resolution 0010/Member position statements

Rules

This page contains the official positions of Citizendium Editorial Council Members about Editorial Council Resolution 0010.

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.

Original Member position statements

1. Supten Sarbadhikari: This proposal is supposed to only adopt the "CZ:Proposals/Romanization" in principle. That, in turn, will be guided by the policy stated there. Therefore, all the members who wish to modify those may do so at the respective talk pages and also further when John Stephenson forms the designated group for its implementation. The discussions on Resolution 0010 should only state arguments in favor or against adopting the said proposal in principle.
2. Martin Baldwin-Edwards There is a lack of clarity concerning the relation between this proposal and Naming Conventions policy on CZ. Some discussion on the transliteration of non-Latin names has taken place on the Talk page of Osama bin Laden and was not resolved, other than the claim (by some) that the most common contemporary transliterated form should be used. I am not convinced that this is necessary or desirable on a wiki (whereas it clearly is in a printed encyclopedia) since we can easily redirect. Furthermore, the function of an encyclopedia is to educate rather than reproduce popular misconceptions and errors. Given that the CZ:Naming_Conventions has not been approved by the Editorial Council, I propose that we put Resolution 0010 temporarily on hold and formalise the Naming Conventions as another resolution. Thus, the content of the Naming Conventions has to be discussed before we can accept it as shaping the content of this Resolution. I think that's easier, and fomally more correct, than quickly trying to reformulate this Resolution. Postscript: apropos of the comment below by kay, about standardized systems, here is a very good link provided by Anthony Sebastian: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html
3. Gary Giamboi It seems most of us agree on the need for this Wiki to be precise and correct. It also seems everyone has a different idea about how to accomplish this. So I agree to put Resolution 10 on hold until we can agree on which variation of precision we want to hold forth as precise enough for Citizendium. I do have one question though: if we agree on spellings that are not the most popular, how can we insure that when someone does a search for term using an "accepted" spelling different than the one we use, Citizendium's article we still appear in the search results?
4. k kay shearin Whether we vote on this now or later, the issues will be the same: CZ is an encyclopedia, which means we report what has happened, and we do it impartially (= NPOV), like a good newspaper reporter. The Editorial Council makes policy only for CZ, not for the world. English-speakers can't even agree on "Magna Carta" or "Magna Charta" (much less on diacritical marks on words such as "résumé"), and even if some body could force one choice or the other, some of us (and I speak as someone who grew up with Wade-Giles) would be disgruntled, and there's no reason to annoy us: The great power of the wiki is that it can deal with whatever fads in spelling (or even pronunciation) occur in the future, and there are authorities that officially decide how to transliterate documents for various purposes, so we needn't reinvent the wheel. Instead of a group within CZ to decide how to Romanize words, what we need is a group to make sure that whatever spellings we use of foreign words are each correct under some recognized system and are abundantly linked to the alternatives, so that whenever the fashions in Romanization change, adding another link will keep the related articles connected.
5. DavidGoodman We need the committee specifically to resolve disagreements tike this and, along with Baldwin, I consider it within their remit. There is clearly a basic disagreement here, and it has to be settled one way or another. We are writing an encyclopedia, and can not debate this indefinitely--although we can rely on the ability to change it later programmatically--wikis invariably can do that. And Google does pick up alternate spellings if wee include them in the article text. (My own view on the underlying issue that we should adopt the forms in general, rather than highly specialized, academic discourse. The most rigorous general scholarly online encyclopedia I know, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, uses Osama. So do all the 8 university presses I checked, including OUP & Harvard).

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