User talk:Joseph L. Mabel

Welcome!

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start. You'll probably want to know how to get started as an author. Just look at CZ:Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. Be sure to stay abreast of events via the Citizendium-L (broadcast) mailing list (do join!) and the blog. Please also join the workgroup mailing list(s) that concern your particular interests. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forums is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any constable for help, too. Me, for instance! Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun! D. Matt Innis 08:53, 2 September 2008 (CDT)

Hi Joe, can I ask what you were discouraged from doing here? I just read something to that effect on the forums thread discussing welcoming new users. And welcome :) FYI, I see CZ and WP as complementary. Chris Day 21:19, 4 September 2008 (CDT)

Pretty much the first place I headed after signing up was the forum. I wanted to understand whether my single-author articles from Wikipedia would be welcome (I now understand that they are not unless I want to continue working on them here). A topic about civility toward Wikipedians was about the first thing that caught my eye. One of the first posts I read was to the general effect that there was really only room for one online encyclopedia and that the question was how to destroy Wikipedia: this in a discussion on civility! Another of the first half-dozen posts I ran into was one conjecturing that Wikipedia pays off Google for its high rankings. Frankly, this is the sort of stuff I'd expect from participants in Wikipedia Watch or some such, not Citizendium.

Since one of the supposed advantages of Citizendium is greater civility, I'll admit I'm starting off with some doubts. "Civility" shouldn't just mean "civility toward the people I agree with". It is clear that at least some of the people here - and I have no idea how many - have enormous doubts about the good faith of people involved in Wikipedia. Since I remain one of the latter, I have my doubts about how welcome I will be here.

Several people have assured me that what I ran across wasn't typical. Maybe not. I don't know yet. Hitting two such things in a small sample tends to mean there's more of the same out there.

I think that for the moment, I will mostly confine my participation in Citizendium to making suggestions where I see things that could be improved, and see how that works out. I recently made my first such suggestion at Talk:Liberalism. - Joseph L. Mabel 22:55, 4 September 2008 (CDT)

Glad you feel you can make some contributions. It is possible to work at wikipedia AND citizendium. I would still encourage you to move articles from wikipedia that you feel are interesting and informative. Feel free to ask any questions with regard to the differences here compared to wikipedia. Chris Day 23:16, 4 September 2008 (CDT)

Joe, I too, want to encourage you to bring over your material from WP. You should place a note on the talk page stating that you are the sole writer of this material on WP. I think we have a WPbox or something like that. YOU don't have to maintain the article. You can place it here and leave it alone. Other people can maintain it as new facts develop for a particular article. You will see on the forum mentioned previously that many of our active writers imported some outstanding articles that they first wrote for WP. So, don't be discouraged, and if you ever question what you can or cannot do, be sure to ask any of the active editors and authors you see on the Recent Changes page. David E. Volk 09:57, 5 September 2008 (CDT)

Hi. Joe, welcome to CZ (regardless of whether you remain at WP or not). I seem to recall having had some discussions with you on WP, and you were one of the sane voices there. (It was on Romanian emigration, I think.) Anyway, please do persevere with our slightly different culture on CZ, where intelligent but civil debate is actually encouraged. Martin Baldwin-Edwards 07:04, 7 September 2008 (CDT)

I added the Elinor Smith article a couple of days ago, and no one seems to be objecting; I'll go look for some other possibilities. - Joseph L. Mabel 20:02, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

I put some of this on the article page. The Elinor Smith article was quite interesting, and I think set off some good discussions that are improving our ideas how to index.

Is there a general theme to your articles, such as "History of Aviation"? One good rule for articles is to try to avoid having them "orphaned". That typically means that at least three other article or Related Article pages reference them, and they link to at least three other pages. I'd be glad to help with finding linkages. From your user page, it seems like you have a wide range of interests, and one of the things I like is that some seem to be on subjects where we don't have much content. 'Same thing applies for Romania or other subjects: while we don't have a formal policy yet, a number of us believe very strongly that "orphaned" and some other kinds of isolation are not desirable. It must be hard, however, for someone not familiar with CZ to know how and where to link; we have some methods that don't exist at WP.

I'm laughing a bit, because there was a talk page, well, heated discussion a while ago when I referred to Leo Rosten's Joys of Yinglish. There was some argument about Yiddish language and literature, and it was not an area where I felt competent to discuss. You might have been very helful.

Let me look through your other articles, and, if you haven't done so, I may add some of our linkage and metadata that I certainly didn't understand when I got here. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:24, 11 January 2009 (UTC)