CZ Talk:Editorial Council/Pre-2010 Election

Recruiting

So what's the plan for recruiting Editors? CZ:Recruitment_Letter? CZ_Talk:Recruitment_Letter? -Tom Kelly (Talk) 19:34, 20 April 2007 (CDT)

Recruitment for what? the editorial council? I didn't realize you were looking for volunteers. Greg Woodhouse 19:42, 20 April 2007 (CDT)

Edit, added Editors. -Tom Kelly (Talk) 20:38, 20 April 2007 (CDT)

Comments on Editorial Council Resolution 0001

I'm sorry if this is the wrong place (or wrong time) for my comments. This is the third time I've looked at this resolution and I still can't figure out where and when my comments are welcome.

My main comment: Don't restrict debate so much! There can be good reason to terminate debate at some time in order to finalize a decision. But I see no good reason to prevent debate before a specified date. 72 hours is too short. It disenfranchises, for example, people who only have time to do Citizendium on the weekend. It disenfranchises people who concentrate on writing articles for several days at a time rather than constantly checking (deep in the hierarchy of pages accessible from the main page) to see what's going on in Citizendium.

First we have a too-short approval process that doesn't leave time for many corrections to be noticed, pointed out and approved by editors before the article is approved. Now the same thing is proposed to be done with finalizing of fundamental policies.

In a real-life parliament, debate is restricted to certain times because only one person can talk at a time. There is no need to do that for wiki parliaments.

Besides allowing more time for debate, I suggest making the instructions clearer so that people know whether (a) ordinary Citizendium members or (b) Editorial council members are welcome to give comments and where and when to give them. Clear instructions ilke "You (ordinary Citizendium member) will be able to comment on this here starting at (date, time)" -- although, as I said above, I see no reason for such a restriction, and think it should just say "You (ordinary Citizendium member) are welcome to comment here now and until (date,time)". Similar clear instructions should be given for editorial council members. For example, Larry Sanger put a position statement but it is not at all clear who else is allowed to put one up, or when, or why he was free to write a long statement but wasn't free to write a long statement and who else that applies to.

I also think the debate should be at least a week long to allow people who have time on weekends to participate. Also, it would be good to have an easier way to find this debate starting at the main page. --Catherine Woodgold 07:25, 14 May 2007 (CDT)

Catherine, please move your comments to the relevant forum page, here: http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,890.0.html

None of the Editorial Council members will see your comments on this talk page. --Larry Sanger 12:56, 14 May 2007 (CDT)

Comments moved from the old Editorial Council suggestion box page (deleted and replaced)

Before starting to vote about editcouncil matters it seems wise to ask all members of CZ for suggestions. Allowing the members of the editcouncil to get feed back and knowledge about the "world" support for motions. Last vote was 24-0 indicating 24 decide for all of the community - where authors cannot vote. Lets give them influence at least. --Robert Tito

"Last vote was 24-0 indicating 24 decide for all of the community - where authors cannot vote."

• Unless I am misinterpreting what this represents, that is oligarchy, and a horrible direction for an online representative democracy. Authors should have representatives within the voting body that drives the project. This will kill this project unless remedied, and "We Ain't Elitist" needs a formal retraction. Stephen Ewen 14:19, 29 May 2007 (CDT)

I always thought this is what we would do--either that, or have a separate body. Certainly, let's draw up a resolution about how to get author representation in the Council. --Larry Sanger 14:26, 29 May 2007 (CDT)

As to Rob's first sentence, "Before starting to vote about editcouncil matters it seems wise to ask all members of CZ for suggestions," that is precisely what the guidelines on Editorial Council How to Make a Resolution say. --Larry Sanger 14:31, 29 May 2007 (CDT)

Is optional listening enough? I think if you'd ask authors, who are likely to make up 90% of all contributors, they'd disagree. What is very worrisome is that the EC has such broad powers: "including, but not limited to". Already, among these suggestions, there are some issues I'd argue that the council has no business whatsoever deciding alone for the entirety of the project--licensing--and for specific workgroups--Biology scientific names question. The EC must not be The Project Governing Council, but must have a much stricter purvey. Otherwise, I think some serious 50/50 representation is needed. Yep, democracy can be messy. Stephen Ewen 17:44, 29 May 2007 (CDT)

E.g., a sort of House of Commons to go along with a sort of House of Lords, is one way. Stephen Ewen 01:56, 30 May 2007 (CDT)

Maybe a suggestion is to use citizendium-l mail to send a mail to everybody about whats going on in the editcouncil. The delete button is close enough for those not interested, the interested might get a stimulus to read and post. Robert Tito |  Talk  16:55, 18 October 2007 (CDT)

"under construction" or "scholarly work in progress"

I added this to the suggestion box as both a way to 1)let the general public know that the article is not finished and in fact may be in total disarray at times as we are still working through it and 2)to motivate editors to get their articles approved. Articles such as Intelligent design and Global warming are the reason I thought them necessary initially. I am totally open to feedback however. --Matt Innis (Talk) 14:38, 29 May 2007 (CDT)

This seems like an excellent suggestion to me. There are several reasons beginning with "silence implies consent". If an article isn't explicitly marked as anything other than a completed article, then the public is likely to consider it as final. Another reason is that the whole point (at least according to my understanding) of Citizendium is to be reliable. In the case of articles that are not yet approved, we have not yet done our job. Finally, I agree that it is important to have an incentive for moving articles through the approval process. Several people I've spoken to take the opposite point of view, arguing (not unreasonably) that it would be unwise to approve articles prematurely. But at this point, I think the greater danger is that articlew will remain undeveloped, or that debates will go on and on, while the articles themselve remain in limbo. To the extent that we fail to develop articles to the point where they may be approved and approve them, we are failing. Greg Woodhouse 16:02, 29 May 2007 (CDT)

We used to have such a notice. The trouble was that it was put on all articles, and there was no technically easy way to remove it for approved articles. As a stopgap measure, we have "All unapproved articles are subject to a disclaimer; please read." That's at the top of every page, just beneath "The world needs a better free encyclopedia..."

Theoretically, we could place a template by hand on every single unapproved article (!). --Larry Sanger 16:09, 29 May 2007 (CDT)

Why not a single template that picks up the status of the article? After all, won't an article be approved if and only if its status is 0? Greg Woodhouse 16:16, 29 May 2007 (CDT)

Hmmm. I sure don't want to hand tag again;-) I know this can get dangerously close to wikipedia's template crazy environment, so we have to be sure we don't go there. But something along that line would motivate editors to approve as well as warn readers that we have not *yet* endorsed this article, so even student's won't use it as a reference. --Matt Innis (Talk) 17:03, 29 May 2007 (CDT)

Well, if Jason and Greg aren't up to it, and someone wants to make a bot........ --Larry Sanger 17:23, 29 May 2007 (CDT)

Recognizing authors

Develop a system for recognizing authors for their experience and expertise. One very simple way absent something more complex is to develop a method for awarding an Author Award of Excellence. Three editors agree and they get it, or something like that. It'd have to be a template placed on the userpage, however. ---Stephen Ewen 04:11, 30 May 2007 (CDT)

Require Edit Summary for all edits?

Absolutely not. Require it on all major ones, perhaps. But there is just no way that I am going to make an edit summary every time I catch something I could phrase slightly better on a page I am authoring, particularly if doing so alone at the moment. I don't typically make edit summaries in that instance and don't want to be bothered with doing so. On the other hand, I give a detailed edit summary every time it really matters, and whenever other contributors have clearly been working before me. Stephen Ewen 01:39, 2 June 2007 (CDT)

Improve attribution to outside sources

Right now, we have a "content is from Wikipedia" checkbox, and a couple of templates for authors to assert that content they have contributed here is their work, and therefore the same content on Wikipedia is not subject to WP licensing restrictions.

I'd like to see something better, which would probably require developer intervention to implement. Instead of a simple checkbox, which automatically assumes that the content is from the Wikipedia article of the same name, I'd like to see a way to specify one of several open-content/public-domain sources, an article title (which could default to the CZ article title), and a URL for the source, with instructions to link to a specific article version in the case of Wiki-derived content. I also think the mechanism could be used to automate authorship claims.

We already have something similar for image uploading, so I suspect that the difficult part of implementing this will be to persuade authors to use it properly, rather than writing the code for it. The reason I think we need this is that the current checkbox method has a number of flaws:

1. The current method only works for content derived from the english Wikipedia. There are plenty of other sources where quality GFDL, CC-licensed, or public-domain content can be obtained.
2. The current method assumes that the source of the content is the Wikipedia article of the same name. This is often correct, but given Wikipedia's naming disputes, our naming conventions, and the fact that we may divide subjects in a different way than Wikipedia, it's likely to be incorrect at least some of the time.
3. The current method links to the current Wikipedia page, which potentially creates false attributions. Our attribution should show accurately at what point our content forked from theirs. (It may be useful to figure out a way to scrape the version URL for the current version of a Wikipedia article, for people who aren't working from older versions.)

I tihnk we need to make this semi-automatic, as we already have some attribution issues which could bite us, and maintaining them properly will take a lot of manual labor. It doesn't have to be done the way I suggested, but *something* would be useful. Anthony Argyriou 14:52, 18 October 2007 (CDT)

The MediaWiki wiki has the perfect system, in my view, dealing with much of this. You can view an example here of their alternatively licensed (non-GFDL) pages. As soon as I get the CZ:Upload-Wizard wizzing along, I plan to turn my attention to figuring out what needs doing to implement that. What do you think of this, Anthony? Stephen Ewen 16:42, 18 October 2007 (CDT)

I'm not sure what I think of the MediaWiki page just yet. I do like the setup of the upload wizard, though I think it is better suited for images and other media, than for article text. I have considerable faith that you or others working on the guts of the wiki here can implement my suggestion. The question remains whether others think this is worth doing, and if anyone has any specific details or changes to the design, before implementation. Anthony Argyriou 01:21, 19 October 2007 (CDT)

Old suggestions

Feel free to convert any of these into Proposals. --Larry Sanger 12:32, 12 February 2008 (CST)

• The license (already decided)
• Possible procedural improvements to enable and encourage the community to approve more articles
• Policy on "fair use" media (I think this is already decided?)
• The "history of" question (A proposal now)
• Start a Workgroup Committee
• And/or make a bunch of new workgroups (We have a lot of workgroups now; don't know if this meant more)
• Begin labelling articles "AmE" or "BrE" for the dialect of English (Done in the metadata template)
• Develop a method of identifying and flagging "in-depth" articles.
• Consider survey articles as a means of assisting the reader in understanding how the different facets of a field fit together.
• Biology scientific names question
• Including the contents of old, public domain encyclopedias
• Eduzendium (Already done!)
• Require Edit Summary for all edits?
• Subpages and sidebar proposal (Already done)
• It seems wise to ask all members of CZ for suggestions, or seats on the Council for authors.
• Consider some sort of "under construction" or "scholarly work in progress" notice for the tops of articles not approved. See Template:Construction for an example.
• Develop a system for recognizing authors for their experience and expertise.
• Find a way to tabulate editor work, for academic credit.
• Make a system to inform all the authors/editors who may be interested in a particular topic to collaboratively expedite the approval process of that.
• Clarify policy and procedures about article deletion by editors
• Improve attribution to outside sources (detailed on talk page)

I crossed some out that have already been completed, but did not delete them to keep the record. --Robert W King 12:36, 12 February 2008 (CST)