CZ:Notice Board/January 2007

This is an archive of all notices added to CZ:Notice Board during January 2007. Please do not edit this page.

See CZ:Notice Board/Archive for archived notices from other dates.

---

January 31, 2007

I have created a template for requesting a quick deletion of an article. It is Template:Speedydelete. You can use it like this: {{Speedydelete|REASON|~~~}} where REASON is why the article needs to be deleted now. Good reasons include accidental page creations, test pages, and vandalism. Constables can track quick deletion requests at Category:Speedy Deletion Requests. -- ZachPruckowski 23:48, 30 January 2007 (CST)

Please place any such template on the Talk page associated with an article, not on the article itself! Also, just to be clear, no process has yet been discussed or decided for "speedy deletion"; right now it is all ad hoc. This will change. --Larry Sanger 13:16, 1 February 2007 (CST)

January 30, 2007

This is a request for ORIGINAL photographs without any copyrights of domestic animals. "Snapshots" are fine! Please upload using the Upload file link over in the toolbox of the bottom of the sidebar on the left. Place in the new page, Image Bank- The Gallery of Domestic Animals. There are some specific requests on the talk page there. Thanks, Nancy Nancy Sculerati MD 05:58, 1 February 2007 (CST)

January 28, 2007

We are told that an article about CZ is underway for Slashdot. This always leads to huge amounts of traffic for the profiled website, called a Slashdotting, and so it is quite likely that we will be flooded with huge numbers of new accounts created by techies. Brace yourselves and please be on hand when this happens (no indication when it will be).

January 27, 2007

Address to "call a constable"

You can now "call a constable" at constables@citizendium.org. One of our friendly neighborhood peace officers will respond.

It is contrary to Citizendium policy to air complaints about the behavior of other users here on the wiki, even if your complaint is perfectly legitimate. Please don't "take the law into your own hands." One of the positive differences between the Citizendium and Wikipedia, we hope, will be a more civil atmosphere.

It was decided today by the Constables that if you do air a complaint about the behavior of another Citizen on the wiki, it will be summarily removed by a Constable and replaced with this template:

A comment here was deleted by The Constabulary on grounds of making complaints about fellow Citizens. If you have a complaint about the behavior of another Citizen, e-mail constables@citizendium.org. It is contrary to Citizendium policy to air your complaints on the wiki. See also CZ:Professionalism.

Please, think of the orphans!

When you create a new article, make sure that it is linked-to from another article, appropriately. If you must create a stub (very short) article to have something that appropriately links to your new article--or even a string of two or three stubs--then please do so.

Also, a yeomanly bit of work would be to find homes for all the orphans listed here (and to find this page again, look to the left, toolbox > Special pages > Orphaned pages).

January 24, 2007

Please make sure that if your article borrows from Wikipedia, you make a note of that down by the bottom if the little Wikipedia notice isn't there. We don't want to get caught accidentally breaking the GFDL. --ZachPruckowski 11:47, 24 January 2007 (CST)

January 23, 2007

Our first downtime/slowtime

We experienced our first server problems since the launch of the pilot project today. This appears to be related to this heise.de article, but the cause is still unknown. The website was very slow for about six hours and as of 8 PM Eastern Time seems to useable, but still slow.

Press release

Press release postponed until tomorrow.

only german native speakers will be able to read and understand the article, but it is pretty positive about citizendium. Since german is one of my languages - if there is a "need" to have a translated version - I can concoct a translation there Robert Tito 19:32, 23 January 2007 (CST)

New self-registration!

We have just started allowing people to self-register. See [1]. This means that (1) we'll be likely to see more vandalism (our very first vandal visited us this morning) and (2) we'll be likely to see a lot more activity.

Find homes for orphans

NOTE to people creating new articles: please do not create "orphans," i.e., make sure that all new articles are linked from at least one existing article. Some enterprising soul would do the project a great deal of good by going through the orphaned pages and giving them homes, i.e., linking to them from some existing article. By the way, you can find the list of orphaned pages via the "Special pages" to the left.

January 21, 2007

We're going to be doing a press release in two days (Jan. 23). This will announce a newer, much easier method for joining the wiki. We expect lots of new contributors. Please be on hand in the next few days to help direct the new traffic!

January 20, 2007

UPDATE 2: "the big delete" happened the evening of Jan. 20.

UPDATE: it might not be until tomorrow that we do "the big delete." --Larry Sanger 15:45, 20 January 2007 (CST)

As you might have noticed, we've been working on the main page, the sidebar, there's a funding drive notice atop every page, etc. Today and possibly tomorrow the server might go down unexpectedly (sorry if so) as we do "the big delete." Don't worry--we're making backups! Also, if you really dislike the Main Page, that's what you get for leaving it in the hands of a philosopher instead of a graphic designer. Unlike Wikipedia, the main page is open to editing by participants! --Larry Sanger 13:08, 20 January 2007 (CST)

January 18, 2007

Important Announcement

We have decided to delete all inactive articles, i.e., we have decided not to fork Wikipedia! See the Citizendium-L post for more info.

The deletion will take place at or soon after this Saturday, noon Eastern time, about 48 hours after I write this.

NOTE TO ACTIVE CONTRIBUTORS: if you have been working on an article, MAKE SURE that it has been marked Category:CZ Live. Otherwise, it will be deleted! [This actually turned out not to be the case. We simply deleted articles that had not been edited at all. This left us with 3000 pages.]

NOTE ALSO: if you compiled a list of "top priority" articles by tagging all such articles (see, for example, http://tinyurl.com/372fto), and those articles aren't also marked "CZ Live" (as many of them *shouldn't* be because no one has in fact worked on them), then you might want to save that list, which will disappear when the inactive articles are deleted. This should not be hard. Simply go to the "Category:_______ Workgroup (Top)" page, copy the list, place and around the items in the list and delete the index letters (or keep them if you want); finally, paste the result onto the "Citizendium Pilot:______ Workgroup" page. I won't do this myself, so hop to it if you care!!!

January 17, 2007

This isn't an administrative notice, but it's a very important question and I want to make sure everyone in the CZ community thinks about it:

Would you contribute more if the wiki were blank?

That is a question I am posing on the CZ forum. I think it is a very interesting question, because if the answers come back, "Yes, I would, because repairing mediocre Wikipedia content isn't nearly as much fun as starting over from scratch would be," then by golly I'm going to suggest that we jettison the idea of forking Wikipedia, delete all the unchanged Wikipedia articles, and have people start from scratch. If you want to reply, do it there on the forum rather than here. Thanks! Larry Sanger 01:09, 17 January 2007 (CST)