User:Thomas Wright Sulcer

I am an independent thinker from New Jersey. I read extensively. I'm a handyman.

Welcome to my Citizendium page.

Interests

One of these days I'm going to learn how to make a cool waterfall animation better than this one.

My interests: philosophy, gender relations, politics, history, medicine, terrorism. I used to be a market researcher so I'm good with numbers. When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, I read philosophy extensively and tried to figure out what life was all about, but even at this time in my life, I realize that I still don't know. My favorite philosopher is Spinoza. I want to write articles that people enjoy reading. I love great pictures and animations in articles. I write simply, clearly, sometimes with too many stop-and-start sentences.

Sandboxes

My sandbox page: User talk:Thomas Wright Sulcer/sandbox currently "terrorism prevention strategies". Current plan: chop this up and use as material in other articles as per Howard Berkowitz, and assist with researching if asked. Urging HB to make this a real article.

Another sandbox: User talk:Thomas Wright Sulcer/sandbox2 currently "History of U.S. citizenship" (which I wrote on WP) awaiting word from User:Martin Baldwin-Edwards about how to proceed; Howard Berkowitz has suggestions as well. My status: made it into a real article. Did ancillary articles, but will keep doing more.

Another sandbox: User talk:Thomas Wright Sulcer/sandbox4 currently "Criticism of United States foreign policy" awaiting feedback from politics editors. General take: perhaps belongs in an article such as "Foreign policy of the United States". Paragraph format preferred to bullet point format. Status: waiting.

Another sandbox: User talk:Thomas Wright Sulcer/sandbox5 currently "Famous tennis players" but it's way too long; importing from WP. Status: wait and see, perhaps HP may want to do something with it. Will leave there for now.

Another sandbox: User talk:Thomas Wright Sulcer/sandbox7 currently possibilities for Panton Principles.

Another sandbox: User talk:Thomas Wright Sulcer/sandbox9 currently my way to keep track of articles needing my attention and status such as improving WP imports.

Another sandbox: User talk:Thomas Wright Sulcer/sandbox11 currently a wikitable experiment. It suggests SEO factors -- PageRank and "what links here" are highly correlated. It suggests a way to boost the web presence of any Citizendium article is to have a thicket of interlinking articles on a subject -- not just a lone article. This will increase an article's "PageRank" -- a Google metric which predicts an article's relevancy and which is a big (but not the only) factor on where an article appears on the SERP page. Moved this to a CZ article.

General approach

My approach has shifted. I like the people at CZ but my problem is that the encyclopedia has scant web exposure. For me, a big motivation in wanting to contribute is writing quality articles that people actually read; but I notice when I do a Google search, even for articles I created, that they don't appear even after ten pages; after a month or so, the articles still fail to appear on the web. So, initially my project was to try to boost CZ readership by adding "hot" articles here -- in-demand topics drawing large audiences at WP (based on traffic statistics) with a preference for unique or unusual-sounding titles, such as Acai berry or Elin Nordegren. I wanted to do this quickly while maintaining quality, so I often would start from the WP article, add new information, rewrite the LEDE, trim material I thought was unimportant, and bring it in. These efforts, generally, were viewed with suspicion by others here, with fears that I was polluting the project with substandard material. But the whole purpose of this porting project (I ported perhaps 20-40 articles, and wrote many articles from scratch) was to try to jump-start CZ's readership. By working on articles like SEO, by learning about how Google's page-ranking system, by testing out the Google PageRank tool in a wikitable, my thinking changed.

I've since come to the conclusion that this effort of porting "hot" articles was a waste of time. Articles like Lady Gaga still don't appear in a Google search, and I doubt that they're having any effect in rerouting web traffic to CZ. Rather, with Citizendium, the best approach is to create a thicket of interlinking articles built on related themes -- contextualization is the word -- to boost CZ's web exposure. Then, this will work only for specific themes or articles; I doubt CZ will ever attract as many readers as Wikipedia unless it substantially changes its outlook. Other approaches to boosting readership may help, such as putting links to CZ content on external websites, and should be explored.

Progress on specific articles

Note: see Tom's wikitable of articles in progress.

Ported "Handyman" from WP which I revamped. Added some new material. Wondering what else to do here. Handyman Also working on Philosophy of Spinoza. Curley's Spinoza translation arrived; hope to update this article in the next week or so. Wrote Julian Hatton -- abstract landscape artist. Created this article on WP, ported. Ported Dana Delany -- actor; I wrote much of the text on WP. Ported Georgina Starr -- artist from G.Britain; I revamped this article substantially a month or so ago on WP. Ported Lady Gaga -- hot topic; 12th most popular article on WP in Dec 2009 with 90K views PER DAY, but added new material and rewrote it somewhat to improve it. Wrote The Fame -- hot first album by Lady Gaga. Added new information (some references from WP) but mostly rewritten. Shorter than the WP version but with less extraneous stuff. I have no clue how to make the "Related Articles" or "Metadata" stuff work. Or, maybe I should add "Lady Gaga" to the related articles page of "The Fame" as a parent? Ported Script kiddie, rewrote it, added new references and tried to spruce it up. It's the 11th most popular article on WP in Dec 2009 with 100,000 views per day. Ported Search engine optimization from WP, rewrote it, kept references, added new pictures. This gets 6000 hits PER DAY on WP, and is also a list of "keywords driving traffic"; hopefully it will boost traffic here to CZ. There are a slew of related articles which can be added too. Also added SERP. Ported and rewrote Acai berry. Ported James M. Bennett from WP (which I wrote) and porting FairTax which I support (but will strive for neutrality) which gets 500 readers PER DAY -- not too shabby. Wrote Naruto which is a hot pop culture Japanese anime phenomenon, often gets 16K readers per day on WP, hopefully more here on CZ. Rewrote & ported Digital versatile disk better known as DVDs. Same logic. Wrote Quiz show so What is the can redirect to it. Wrote Skive and Elin Nordegren and Jamie Cullum (new material) and Sanford Levinson (I wrote originally the Levinson article on WP.) Wrote HDMI mostly fresh material (borrowed some WP sections but trimmed & rewrote). Wrote Cat adoption from scratch -- couldn't resist the pun. Ported, rewrote LEDE, added new info on Brittany Murphy -- sometimes traffic spikes to 50K viewers per day. Wrote Romantic love mostly new, with some pilfering of you know where. Wrote Scrubs (TV show). Wrote Bromance as part of the Love group stuff. Redid the Love article so now there are three related articles -- love, romantic love, and bromance. Wrote 2012, pop culture bunk like Y2K. Writing Nibiru (fictional planet forecast to bump into Earth in 2012, possibly causing skateboarders worldwide to lose their footing for an instant.

New articles done: Public sphere and The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and History of U.S. citizenship and CZ:PageRank analysis of Citizendium articles and Benjamin Ginsberg. Revamped nitrogen cycle and added a section on air about the nitrogen cycle. Also ideas for revamping Panton Principles and Panton Arms.

Possible future articles that drive traffic

Note: see Tom's wikitable of articles in progress. This has a sortable list of articles with information on WP traffic statistics, opportunities, possible future projects, and whether they need my attention or not.

My biases

The following are my biases which I'll try to keep OUT of Citizendium. I'm exposing my biases so other editors can call me on it if they creep into my contributions:

Non-partisan terrorism prevention activist and political reformer

My biases: Politically I'm non-partisan but see a need for serious peaceful political reform of the US government; there's a part of me which is libertarian, but there are socialist parts too. My view on American politics is that it's broken, dysfunctional, corrupt. I think a parliamentary approach (eg Britain's) is superior to a constitutional approach (US model). I believe citizenship is important and requires active participation by people in local government, but I don't think most Americans are "citizens" by any stretch since they're loathe to participate in politics. There are reasons why this is so. I believe in states' rights. I continue to advocate for a Second Constitutional Convention as a way to repair America. I have criticized America's strategy to prevent terrorism repeatedly. I see terrorism as "violence against individual rights" with three inter-related components: crime (terrorism by a neighbor), tyranny (by our own government) and foreign terrorism (by powerful foreign individuals, groups, or governments). My book tries to show how these types cause each other, and how one type of terrorist can morph into another (my ultimate terrorist = Hitler). And the common way to prevent all three types is with "light"; for example, to prevent crime, citizens must agree to end all anonymous movement in public but that tight privacy fences be put around this information. This permits authorities to prevent terrorism while preserving privacy. This is only one part of my rather difficult strategy which, I claim, can prevent serious terrorism such as smuggled nuclear bombs. I realize many of my views are extreme, and I'm well aware that most people don't even like to THINK about such topics, and there is a practical, cynical side to me which realizes that changes along the lines I propose will never happen. What's cool is this: the name "Citizen-dium" -- I see participation here as a form of citizenship. And I'm a big fan of exposed movement in public -- again, consistent with Citizendium's policies of using REAL NAMES. If interested in my book Common Sense II email me for a free pdf copy. I also write book reviews on Amazon (and these are highly point-of-view). But here on Citizendium I'll try to keep my biases out of my contributions, and participate in a mainstream way.

My experience with Wikipedia

I was an active Wikipedian for perhaps eight months editing under the user handle "Tomwsulcer", and I wrote many articles along Wikipedia's lines of neutrality, verifiability, and no original research. I added perhaps about 50 articles, either started from scratch, or revamped substantially. But I have major problems with Wikipedia. Biggest problem = anonymity; it permits anonymous bullies (particularly administrators) to push around contributors, and contributes to incivility, bullying, rudeness, vandalism, sock puppetry (users pretending to be other users). Wikipedia, in my view, has many pluses which I hope Citizendium has retained, such as Wikipedia's code, internal linking, pictures, most of its policies. I wrote often on a page called "Wikipedia:Areas for Reform" with many ideas for improvements which I think may possibly apply to Citizendium too, but I'm waiting to learn more how this site works before offering them. For example, a great under-used feature Wikipedia has is its measures of article readership. I think readership statistics should play a bigger role in determining what we focus on here in Citizendium (since our contributions will most likely be more neutral). Even better would be feedback from readers along the lines of Amazon's question "Was this review helpful", so we can get some kind of reader rating of article quality. What I see happening with Wikipedia, at present, is a battle within the elite of core administrators who actively participate for power; it's analogous to the infighting which happened within the leadership of the Soviet Union during its early days (1917+). In January 2010, I quit Wikipedia.

Publications

Common Sense II: How to prevent the three types of terrorism (Amazon/Kindle) free pdf if requested by email or on my talk page. And the pdf is free for everybody to distribute.

I also write Amazon book reviews. I wrote a screenplay but it needs further revisions; it's a romantic comedy ("Notting Hill" meets "There's Something About Mary". I'm working on a second screenplay called "Polar Planet" -- it's sexual science fiction.

Ideas about Citizendium

Generally, at this point, my thinking is that Wikipedia has the best overall approach except for the huge mistake of anonymous accounts; but in every other respect, Wikipedia I think has made smart choices. I have some issues with Citizendium's expert approach, subpage system (confuses Google crawlers) and reluctance to import Wikipedia articles, but other than that, I'm happy here for now, and content to go along with the way others do things here, while continuing to urge reform.

• Target disaffected Wikipedia contributors.
• Readership statistics. I like the "page view" count at the bottom of articles; if we can get a count of non-CZ traffic per day on the tops of each article, that would be great!
• Readership feedback. Amazon asks "Was this review helpful?" And prevents over-clicking. I think this would be a great idea.
• Importing good Wikipedia articles. I realize few agree with me about this, and I'll go along with the group, but people, this is the way to jump-start this encyclopedia; WP lifts our content regularly. I think the two encyclopedias shouldn't compete in terms of content but rather in terms of great place to contribute. Here, CZ wins hands down.
• CZ web presence. Boosted by the thicket approach.
• Problems with expert focus. Generally I like the idea that experts prevail. But the focus on experts can hurt us here in some ways. (1) intimidates possibly good contributors who aren't experts (2) intimidates us to try to be perfect all the time (and nobody's perfect), slows down our writing, etc. (3) it's possible for established CZ users to use so-called expertise as a way to unfairly gain advantage in editorial disputes. (4) possible bias against references (since it's like calling in a "competing expert"). (5) causes needless extra steps like this "approved" vs "draft" label on articles which, in my view, is like shooting ourselves in the foot, since it says, in effect, "don't trust this unapproved article".
• Honoring contributors. A way to find out, quickly, who an article's major creators are. It's also a quasi-reward for major contributors. Newspaper articles have bylines; why can't CZ? It can help us avoid editing disputes too.

Specific suggestions to improve Citizendium

As a nooB here, from WP to CZ, I'm noticing many things that may not be obvious to people who've been here awhile, but they're specific areas in which CZ can improve. It's a rough work-in-progress outline:

• Time lag between request for CZ citizenship and approval. My approval took three days. Why so long? I've learned that my email address was a free one (which caused concerns). At one point I thought my application may have been rejected or forgotten. I realize there's a risk in allowing a nooB into CZ to edit stuff without approval, but I'm wondering if there isn't some technological way to counter this which meets both goals -- giving possibly new contributors a chance to contribute, while making the "undo" or "cleanup" task easier if it turns out their edits are destructive or incorrect or mistaken. It's this: let unconfirmed users edit (pending approval) BUT let Constables be able to revert all their edits if it turns out they're no good. That is, one click by a Constable and all edits coming from a foreign computer get reverted. Is this possible? (I propose a related strategy farther down in this section.)

• Related articles versus See also:. The Citizendium solution is to have a tiny little tab at the top of each article which only says "Related article"; I bet few readers have the patience to hunt for this little tag which obscures the names of the actual articles or subjects that are, indeed, related. My sense is the Wikipedia "See Also" solution wins hands down because it only requires ONE click -- boom -- a reader gets the information wanted -- AND it highlights the specific related information, and these tags can be placed anywhere in the article where the information may be needed.. The Wikipedia "See Also" solution is speedier, direct. Further, it's EASIER for us writers to put in a "See Also" than wade through the extra steps of creating an article entitled "Related articles" with the dubious "subpages" command.

• CZ is less user-friendly The whole "subpages" system is complex. Why not use the Wikipedia system? Are we stuck with the current system? Isn't the code free? If so, why not use it? I'm not a techie here but after several weeks on CZ, I still don't feel comfortable with the article tags such as "bibliography", "definitions", etc. Generally I feel the whole related articles system adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to the project.

• Referencing. This is one area where Wikipedia falls apart as well as CZ. It's tricky doing referencing. I'm talking about the mechanics of inserting a reference into an article being written. When at Wikipedia, I tried working with others to come up with simpler instructions (but believe it or not, there were some administrators who felt very strongly about which reference method they preferred, and fought me on this!) At the very least, we need simpler instructions here on CZ to explain the mechanics of referencing using the template method, or whatever methods make it easier. But ideally, the best way would be this: if contributors are using a split screen (word processing file on the left, google search on the right). And they strategically place their cursor within the article where the reference should go; next, they hit a button and boom -- the "reference" to the right gets sucked into the article (including url, name of publication, date, author, date of accessing etc) and formatted properly without all the copying and pasting. That would be great! I bet it's possible to write something close but it wouldn't be perfect, but that tool would be really great to have.

• Quick guide for converts from Wikipedia. This is something I hope to write when I learn more stuff, but I'd like some kind of simple, quick guide which gets converts from Wikipedia up to speed about how to work here. Like, what's different from WP (such as subpages, related articles, brief overview of policies). Right now there are too many guidelines here on CZ in too many places; ideally what I'm envisioning is one document with all the basic pointers which enables a WPian to start contributing right away without hunting for guidelines.

• Automatically start users with the Wikipedia SKIN. A CZ user showed me how to use this, but why not start off all Wikipedian converts to CZ with the same Wikipedia page layout, typeface, and look? It would make them feel more comfortable here, perhaps.

• Put the IDENTIFY YOURSELF PLEASE roadblock after the first five edits. Think of the requirement of "reveal your real name" requirement as a roadblock, like a guard house at the border guarding Citizendium-land. This keeps a lot of people out, including vandals, as well as well-meaning and possible constructive contributors. The proper place for this roadblock, perhaps, is NOT before a user has contributed anything whatsoever, but AFTER they've had a chance to contribute a few edits, perhaps, say five edits. This will give a possible new user a chance to see what it's like here -- plus it gives us a chance to see whether the new user is any good or not. A policy like this would cut down on the huge amount of work for the constables which involves approving people who never do anything (Hayford said 50 approvals = 1 contributor). There would be fewer applications to review, and more likelihood that the applicant would, indeed, if approved, continue to contribute. Then we'd ask the contributor to provide proof somehow of their identity: if they pass, they're IN; if they fail to convince us they are who they say, then all of their previous five edits should be automatically undone, so there's no work for us to try to repair any damage -- that is, this happens automatically, and Citizendium goes back to the way it was before the five edits happened.

• Actively solicit quality WP contributors by leaving messages for them on their user pages. It should be fairly straightforward to identify who they are by examining the past history of their edits, and invite them here. Another way to identify them: see which ones have become inactive after a few months (which means they're possibly disaffected) and either send them an email or pitch them on the WP user page. I found out about CZ after a discussion on WP Supreme Court of the US's talk page.

• Enable Google web crawlers to find our user names. This increases the internal linking, and would probably help boost Citizendium's web presence. If I search for "sulcer" and "wikipedia", my old wikipedia user page comes up in a jiffy, top spot. If I search for "sulcer" and "citizendium" nothing comes up; nor does it come up for any other CZ users I tried (I checked about five names). Obviously this is something that community users would have to approve of. But I have nothing to hide.

• More redirects with sauce, please. Adding redirects helps build our wikilink infrastructure. The more, the better. Misspellings, acronyms, other choices -- link these with redirects to our articles.