User talk:Larry Sanger/Suggestion Box

This is a special talk page. I've long been of the opinion that good ideas (along with the hard work to put them into effect) are the sine qua non of a successful project. Got an idea for CZ? Please add it to this page. I might say one of at least three things: (1) thanks, interesting, maybe we'll get to that some day; (2) this is something we could do anytime, but requires discussion; (3) I think it's a bad idea.

This is just for my personal use. This isn't a central community suggestion box: the Editorial Council has its own suggestion box, and Constabulary suggestions are better sent to constables@citizendium.org or maybe the Chief Constable, Ruth Ifcher. But--not that I want things to be this way, because as you may know, I frequently calling for leaders of various kinds--often the only way anything gets started around here is if I initiate it. So...

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For down the road, an idea I had a while ago: http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,421.msg3264.html#msg3264 -Tom Kelly (Talk) 01:00, 18 April 2007 (CDT)

Right--it's an essential feature. It's possible we'll change our processes so that this can be done using the software in place now. --Larry Sanger 10:00, 19 April 2007 (CDT)

CZ and Google search: give it some thought...

I noticed this accidentaly, it caught my attention:

If you type "Keynes" into Google, Wikipedia will show up among the first two entries (in the first search page), but not CZ; CZ will not show even down to the 10th page (where I stopped loking for it; most people would have stopped much earlier). For "heterodox" alone Wikipedia is again 1st and 2nd and CZ is 46th, one of the best results I have seen for CZ yet.

But... if you type "Keynesian Revival", CZ is right on top at Google ( 1st and 2nd entries). The same applies for "Heterodox tradition" (2nd and 3rd entries). Yet the same for "Asimakopulos" (5ht and 6th entry - even ahead of McGill's, which is a quite old article).

So what ?

So, if CZ begins to use some names that are different from names already used by Wikipedia, it will flash in the first page at Google.

Give it some thought. Some "special" articles could have the name slightly changed from Wikipedia's norm. This way people will begin to see CZ at Google top search pages.

J. R. Campos 16:00, 28 April 2007 (CDT)

That's interesting. I wonder also if it would be helpful to title articles in the form China, history of as opposed to History of China. Stephen Ewen 21:37, 28 April 2007 (CDT)

Other possible tricks might be to use words in the article that people are likely to use when searching for the topic, and to have lots of other websites give links to Citizendium articles. I don't know what algorithms search engines use so I don't know what's most likely to work. --Catherine Woodgold 17:14, 28 April 2007 (CDT)

I don't see a great benefit of a strategy that aims to do well with obscure search terms/requests. Better we should compete where people are really searching. The best way to do this is by generating outside links and, structurally, to use tags/categories that will be swept into the tag-searching momentum. David Hoffman 12:19, 15 May 2007 (CDT)

Feedback on articles?

Hi Larry. At the moment, I haven't found a way to request feedback on articles. The article I'm working on (MGS), has had all but four of the edits done by me, none of which were major changes. I would like to improve it further, but am unsure how. The CZ:Games Workgroup and Games forum are fairly inactive, and when I asked a question on the workgroup talk page and the article talk page, I didn't get a response. Do you think it would be useful to create some sort of feedback requests page (perhaps CZ:Feedback)? Anyway, thanks for reading my suggestion, Oliver Smith 05:17, 13 May 2007 (CDT)

Oliver, this is a fine idea. Let's do it--won't take long to set up. --Larry Sanger 11:30, 15 May 2007 (CDT)

To those reading this suggestion, the page can be found at CZ:Feedback Requests. Oliver Smith 14:13, 15 May 2007 (CDT)

The *name* of this project

Hi, Larry, I've only recently joined the project and feel a little diffident about making suggestions so soon afterwards but I feel strongly that the very name of the project, Citizendium, is a tremendous handicap and will mitigate against its future success. I realize that you probably spent uncounted hours trying to find just the right name for this project and that you didn't choose Citizendium lightly. Nevertheless, as a long-time lover of the English language, an English major, and a professional writer of fiction whose major (and perhaps only) strength is the quality of my writing, my eye and my mind both recoil when confronted with Citizendium. It doesn't seem to mean anything on the surface of it (I realize that "Wikipedia" isn't much better), and even after one knows what it means, it still doesn't seem intuitive or useful. And it's a terrible mouthful to try to pronounce. I've run it by a couple of my friends who are also professional writers and they both agree with me. I *urge* you to change the name to something more memorable and more accessible before it's too late. Leonard Slye became Roy Rogers, Marion Morrison became John Wayne, and sphairistike became tennis: I seriously doubt if sphairistike would be an Olympic sport today, or even played, if that original name had stubbornly been retained. In any case, whatever the name, I'll do my best to make some modest contributions, and I hope that you'll consider my suggestion -- I certainly have only the best wishes for the project! Hayford Peirce 16:48, 13 May 2007 (CDT)

To be fair, I suppose that I ought to make some suggestions of my own. One of my writer friends suggested "Netpedia" and "Infopedia". My own suggestions are "CZpedia" and "CZinfo". Hayford Peirce 16:51, 13 May 2007 (CDT)

WebInsight, IllumiNet, EnlightNet and NetExpert. This is fun! :-D I'm very fond of IllumiNet and EnlightNet. Yuval Langer 01:09, 14 May 2007 (CDT)

Some interesting ideas. I understand that "Wikipedia", also coined by Larry, sounded like "Citizendium" at the first; that "Wikipedia" only "sounds normal" to people because it has had time to be socialized into common usage. I suspect, I hope at least, that Citizendium will do the same in time, as has Yahoo!, Google, Mozilla, Skype, and the like. But encyclopedia.org would be best, I think. Yet someone has it parked, unused. ---Stephen Ewen 03:50, 14 May 2007 (CDT)

How about "EncycloNet"? That one is pretty easy to pronounce, plus it tells you what is it, and should be easy to remember. And, I think, sounds good to the ear. As for "Wikipedia" and "Yahoo", sure, they're accepted now, but one reason for that it is that they are *simple* names, easy to pronounce. Even now, after a week or so, I still find "Citizendium" to be a daunting mouthful, something that I have to stop and think about. That should *not* be the case! Hayford Peirce 10:05, 14 May 2007 (CDT)

Even better: "EncycloNetica"? Hayford Peirce 14:22, 14 May 2007 (CDT)

They're all great suggestions, but my personal favourite is Illuminet. Oliver Smith 14:27, 14 May 2007 (CDT)

Not bad but, unfortunately, already a going business.... Hayford Peirce 14:35, 14 May 2007 (CDT)

I happen to like the name, and I also count myself as a long-time lover of the English language. You're in good company in disliking it, however--but there was a similar dislike, then acceptance, of another of my coinages, "Wikipedia." I assure you it grows on you. I had my doubts, after some early reactions, but now it connotes for me a certain kind of solidity and has a "cutting edge" feel to it. I rather like it now.

The meaning of the name is--as I think people will discover the longer we are in existence--absolutely perfect for the project. That's why I insisted on it in the beginning. "Citizen" is important for two central reasons. (1) One important thing that distinguishes CZ from Wikipedia and other Web 2.0 projects is precisely the idea that we regard ourselves as a "republic" of which it is possible to be a "citizen," if you agree to our social contract; citizenship is an honor and a responsibility. (2) This is a project for all of the "citizens of the world," not just experts. It is by and for all everyone capable of responsible citizenship. So it is not just a Wikipedia clone, and it is not by and for experts.

"Compendium" is also important because we do not want to launch calling ourselves an encyclopedia: we want to reclaim the epithet "encyclopedia" as a reliable resource, and make a big deal of announcing that we are now an encyclopedia, and no longer just a project. At the same time, "compendium" allows us to expand the limits of what we're doing slightly, to include such things as "catalogs" (in a sense discussed on the forums).

I have recently been suspecting that maybe the reason for the dislike of the name has to do with the word "citizen"; it seems old-fashioned and smacks too much of sober civic duty. But if that's why people dislike it, that's great. The people who dislike the concept of citizenship should be put off not just by our name, but what we are: a project that brings the virtues of civic responsibility to online communities. In other words, the Citizendium is "Wikipedia for grown-ups," as people have called it. If you hate the idea of "Wikipedia for grown-ups," then you'll dislike the Citizendium--and probably its name, too. --Larry Sanger 11:23, 15 May 2007 (CDT)

Thanks for taking the time to explicate your feelings on this matter so fully. I understand all of your reasoning, and happen to agree with it, particularly the "citizen" concept and most especially the "Wikipedia for grownups" - I just can't get my tongue (or mind) around that dratted collection of syllables. Maybe I will in time. But there are still fairly common English words that I certainly use in writing, and occasionally in speech, that are tongue-twisters that I have *great* difficulty in getting out on the spur of the moment: "anonymity", for one; "equivocal" for another; I hope that "Citizendium" isn't another of them...." In any case, I'm going to write up Ellsworth Vines in just a moment, a part of my long-term project to get a lot of the great old-time, and now completely forgotten, tennis players into a forum where their biographies won't be turned to trash.... Thanks again for giving the "grownups" the opportunity! Hayford Peirce 11:48, 15 May 2007 (CDT)

Larry, for the record, I'm just fine with the name, and in fact am partial too it because of the meaning. I still think it might be a practical consideration in certain press situations, such as when giving out a URL, for one to have something easy-peasy that'll re-direct. Too bad cz.org is taken. :( ---Stephen Ewen 12:14, 15 May 2007 (CDT)

I'm in agreement that the name is difficult. I don't consider myself to be an academic in the least. I've never heard of a compendium before joining here and I will honestly say that I don't know what it means. The combination doesn't roll of the tongue well. When people see me doing work, I'm more likely to tell them that I'm working on an article entry for a website then to use the name Citizendium because it's very awkward to say. Part of the success of a project like this is word of mouth but if the name isn't easy, it will hinder that word of mouth. I think it'd be more accessible to the masses if it was changed a bit but still kept the meaning. David Martin 10:35, 16 May 2007 (CDT)

Buying Images

Hi Larry,

I specialize in photographs and I can certainly say you usually need to pay for the best images; there is only so much you can do with free public domain images. I strongly recommend allocating a percentage of Citizendium funds for images monthly or annually. Citizendium can establish an image request forum and a citizen can nominate a photograph for an article and post the price. The appropriate workgroup (editors, authors, constables) can vote on the photograph. If the vote passes a constable such as you will approve the purchase. This will greatly enrich the content of many articles. Britannica and professional publications all purchase photographs and there is no doubt in my mind this will help Citizendium establish itself as a more reputable encyclopedia.

Eric Pokorny 16:57, 7 June 2007 (CDT)

I hope to be announcing another proposal soon... Thanks for the suggestion, anyway. --Larry Sanger 00:46, 8 June 2007 (CDT)

Oh ok, I look forward to reading about it. I was wondering if you can establish a relationship with the Associated Press and Corbis to get a discount on photos? If Citizendium can get a deal setup with the associated press, corbis, art galleries and museums we can have a continual stream of photos for current events. It would certainly be a big help for citizens looking to improve articles. You can usually negotiate with museums to waive fees if you tell them you are non-profit and I think negotiating discounts is not terribly unrealistic. It would be great if we can get them to have a special policy towards organizations like Citizendium.

Eric Pokorny 14:41, 8 June 2007 (CDT)

This isn't likely since we don't have money for images at this time. --Larry Sanger 12:50, 10 June 2007 (CDT)

I figured. I just wanted to make the suggestion for something Citizendium could do in the future. Thank you very much for your time Larry.

Eric Pokorny 22:15, 10 June 2007 (CDT)

"You can usually negotiate with museums to waive fees if you tell them you are non-profit" - this, however, is definitely possible, not requiring money. Stephen Ewen 14:02, 10 June 2007 (CDT)

Sure, but I feel that a lot of the pictures that are negotiable are not quite first rate. You always can get lucky but in my experience if you want very good photos the copyrights are often held by the Associated Press and Corbis. Many organizations are very receptive to working with non-profit educational establishments. I think the Associated Press and Corbis would be willing to give Citizendium a discount if Larry talked with them. A discount for associated press photos should make the prices tolerable; we will never know unless we try. I would be willing to contribute to Citizendium by purchasing professional photos but at this point they are way too expensive because the policies are geared towards publishers, editors etc.

Eric Pokorny 22:15, 10 June 2007 (CDT)

I have not had very good results with Corbis lately. In the old days, use of a medium-res image on my .edu pages required only a $5 fee and a credit line for (presumably) perpetual use. Now, any decent resolution image can only be licensed through a series of questions (nature of use, duration of use) which ends up only granting you a license for, say, one, or two years, at enormous cost (one recent request I typed in asked for $70 a year for two years!).

For any articles other than the most current, I would say we should start with public-domain sources such as the Library of Congress. If we end up having to license older materials, stuff which really is out of copyright anyway, we'd be better off spending $500 to but a stack of old copies of Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, The Graphic, and other late 19th/early 20th century illustrated newspapers and books, and scanning them en masse withID tags for the results. That way, at least, we'd get thousands of entries, and the use would once more be perpetual. Russell Potter 22:21, 10 June 2007 (CDT)

Hi Russell :)

I registered with Corbis and some of their photos to use for three years are 170 dollars! However, they don't even have a policy towards organizations like Citizendium and I have been able to convince institutions to waive photo fees in excess of 70 and even 150 dollars. It's really amazing what you can do if you try. I would love to try to convince Corbis to strike a deal with Citizendium but I obviously do not have the authority to do so. So I would just encourage Larry to do it as it would certainly help us out. As for the Library of Congress, some of their photos are pretty good but a lot of their photos are thumbnails and you have to pay for them to give you a decent size. Another thing is a lot of the photos in their catalogue are not even digitalized and you have to pay for them to do it. Not only that many of the library of congress photos are old and I wouldn't say they are of professional quality. It's still a terrific resource but I know that Citizendium would be much better serviced if we had access to Corbis for political and history articles. I know it may not be realistic at this point but it is just a dream of mine. We will never know unless we try.

Eric Pokorny 01:23, 13 June 2007 (CDT)

Larry, I completely agree with Eric that it is worth approaching entities like museums and Corbis to work out deals, Memorandums of Understanding, and so forth. This is part of what I envision the Media Assets Workgroup will do. I cannot promise anything, of course, but I do not think it unreasonable that various entities will waive fess for CZ. Ironically, this might even be more likely with entities like Corbis than museums, since each image they allow CZ to use without fee will mean a link to themselves and thus potential revenue. Of course, such photos would be used only when substantially equivalent free ones are unavailable. Also, given Eric's interest in this matter backed up by some experience, he is precisely the sort of fellow whose energy might be tapped as a Workgroup member, and perhaps as an Assistant after a while, see this part of the proposal. There exists a group of wiki users who have the provision of media into articles as a particular contribution goal. CZ needs to organize that into a workgroup for the benefit of the project as a whole. ---Stephen Ewen 02:21, 13 June 2007 (CDT)

Eric, Steve, sounds good to me. Don't let me brief reactions stop you from doing something that will help out the project.

Steve, I do hope I'll be able to make the time to get you up and running officially soon. For now, please carry on as you have so admirably been doing.  :-) --Larry Sanger 17:08, 13 June 2007 (CDT)

Catalog nomenclature

Sorry, if I'm putting this comment on the wrong page -- for some reason I can't find the original article by you about Catalogs in general. A while ago, after writing various new articles, I then created an article called Prominent Tennis Players, which originally was just a list of names with links to articles about those names. At Stephen Ewen's suggestion to first look at Catalog of religions and then apply it to my own projets, I then renamed it to Catalog of prominent tennis players. Now Stephen has changed the name of the article (into which I have been putting information on the individual players) to Famous tennis players, with the appropriate redirects. I myself am perfectly at ease with any of the names that this article has gone through. I wonder, though, if there is any particular stricture or rule to govern the naming of catalogs? In other words, if I had the energy to create a Catalog of famous baseball players, is *that* what we want, or do we want Famous baseball players? Even though redirects presently exist for my two catalogs (Catalog of prominent mystery writers is the other), at some point I'd like to go to the individual articles (Pancho Gonzales, for instance) and change the See also entry to the correct name of the catalog. Any help would be appreciated! Hayford Peirce 12:48, 13 June 2007 (CDT)

The discussion is at http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,849.0.html and examples are at Talk:Main Page. Hayford, it matters not to me the name. I renamed it because I thought you might like the name better, given your comments at Talk:Famous tennis players. ---Stephen Ewen 14:11, 13 June 2007 (CDT)

With subpages, this is going to be water under the bridge: famous tennis players will probably live at Tennis/Tables/Famous players. --Larry Sanger 02:28, 27 July 2007 (CDT)

I'm not wedded to "tables," by the way, any more than I was "catalogs," before. "Catalogs" might be better. Even "Almanac". --Larry Sanger 02:29, 27 July 2007 (CDT)

Accreditation

I am, of course, very new here (one day to be precise!)and this has probably been brought up before nevertheless... I moved over from Wikipedia - which I had found via my 10 year old daughter a couple of months ago - noticed the errors in what she was citing and started wading in by writing articles etc. I quickly found the problems you are most aware of in having my article edited by almost anybody, referenced facts changed etc. Nevertheless, I am a big proponent of free access to scientific data having written on the topic in relation to our early hominid fossils here is South Africa(which is a rather contentious area as you might imagine). I then found you a week ago by fluke while going through a search on wikipedia looking at ways to protect some pages. After "moving over" here today one thing that strikes me is the sheer amount of linkages and pages that need to be done and the very limited number of editors etc. It would clearly be nice to have more expert amatuers, academics and grad students on board. One way to attract academics and particularly grad students who have a wealth of information of great use here is to have the citizendium accredited as a referencable encyclopedia contribution (it may be already but as I said - I'm new here). Thus if an academic or graduate student contributed an original article it could be citable as a paper - in my experience, nothing motivates an academic or grad student more than a citation in this publish or perish world. One way to get around the problem of this being at its core a growing "wiki" is that on the date of submission of a citation the originating author could cite themselves as first author with first date of publication and major contributors (you'd have to figure out what "major" meant here but I don't think that would be too hard) would be listed as subsequent authors (et al's effectively). You would also have to set a word and quality minimum - possibly via your accreditation thats already in place. I think that you would have a BIG jump in contributions if this were citable and academics could recieve credit. I presume its also in the spirit of the endeavour?? I certainly have about a dozen grad students who would spend that extra bit of time to be either authors or co-authors. You've probably already thought through all of this anyway but I just thought I'd add my two cents in as a newbie...

Lee R. Berger 07:58, 10 August 2007 (CDT)

This is an idea that we've considered before, but I'm not sure ever in quite this form. As long as we don't change CZ's policies of leaving articles unsigned, and as long as we're convinced that this will not make CZ less collaborative, I think I might be able to get behind this. I think you're right that this could help us get new people on board.

The way I would proceed with this is not by allowing people to assert that an article is their article, or signing their name to the article on the talk page, but instead by creating a master list of article originators. On this page, we would list author names and link not directly to the article but instead to versions of the article in the history that contain the article as it was when started by its originating author. I think it might help to secure against people claiming ownership and special rights over an article if we label this role as "first collaborator" or "original co-contributor" or something like that.

Let's continue this on the Forums, shall we? http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,1134.0.html --Larry Sanger 08:18, 10 August 2007 (CDT)

Something related here: I sit on the honors program advisory committee at the community college I work at. I can envision an option for a student's honors project in a course be that they write a solid article, say for an American history course, on Jane Addams or Frederick Douglass, etc. The article would have to be closed to editing by anyone except the student, and only editors in the subject matter would be able to post on talk pages to give "gentle expert guidance". If a policy were set, I'd consider proposing it to the committee as an option for students.  —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 00:09, 11 August 2007 (CDT)