User talk:Scott Thompson

Tasks: start a new article • add basic, wanted or requested articles • add definitions • add metadata • edit new pages

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start, and see Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, our help system and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forum is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any user or the editors for help, too. Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun! John Stephenson (talk) 10:07, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Christian Science

Hi. Feel free to completely rewrite Christian Science, which currently reads like an advert. We have no rule against a member of an organisation writing about it as long as it's not one-sided or promotional, since it is clear who the author is. Thanks! John Stephenson (talk) 13:59, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi, John. Thank you for the invitation. We may well take you up on that. I appreciate the need for entries to be neutrally written and am mindful of the need for balance and intellectual integrity. Scott Thompson (talk) 14:08, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

welcome

Hi Scott, Welcome to Citizendium.Pat Palmer (talk) 18:17, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, Pat! Scott Thompson (talk) 18:20, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

Write-a-thon this weekend

This Sunday, we're getting together on the wiki for the first time in a decade to create and edit articles loosely themed on planets, stars, galaxies and cosmic entities - or anything that involves words like those! For more information, see What's a Write-a-thon? etc. Hope to see you there! John Stephenson (talk) 18:09, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

Learning to add references

Hi Scott. Some help with the <ref></ref> tags is at CZ:How_to_edit_an_article#References_and_citations. Another good thing is to go to an article that has good references and go into edit mode and look at the markdown for the references. For web references, for example, we like to end the reference with a "last access date". An example article to look at might be Coal mining; find a reference that looks good and click on it to see which part of the article it's in, then go into edit mode on that section of the article and see how the reference is coded. It's a chore for sure, but worth it. Hope this helps! I will read your article when I get a chance. Thanks for writing here.Pat Palmer (talk) 13:58, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Many thanks, Pat! Scott Thompson (talk)

Encyclopedia comparisons on Christian Science topics

I have asked my printer to print out, in hard-copy for me, three encyclopedia articles from Wikipedia, and also from the online Britannica, on three topics: Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Those are the benchmarks against which we have to measure articles in Citizendium. Can we write those articles better, here? That is the challenge. We all know the problems with Wikipedia--people "controlling" an article, and you have no idea who they actually are. They defeat people by providing a million rules and references, and on complex topics such as these, no good results from the crowd-sourced authorship. Britannica, on the other hand, signs their articles, so they are typically the output of one or two people and we can at least see who they are, and they tend to have some useful qualifications for scholarship. Here in Citizendium, we can get (hopefully) a collaboration leading to better balance than either of those platforms. These topics could be a critical test case of that idea. I'm willing to help with these articles. I hope it won't drive you crazy.Pat Palmer (talk) 15:24, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Alternatively, if you wish to control the article with little collaboration, you can sign on as its "lead author" and we can add your article to a disambiguation page which would allow other authors to make their own efforts. In that case, it *could* contain more of an advocate's tone. John S. mentioned that option at the top of this page.Pat Palmer (talk) 15:49, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

I appreciate the standards you are aiming for and am very friendly to a collaborative approach. From my perspective, the Britannica articles on Christian Science and Mary Baker Eddy are strong examples of what's possible.Scott Thompson (talk) 13:15, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

How to link to external sites

The general format is [URL Display text]. If you want the external site to open in a new tab (I prefer this one), you have to put span tabs around it like this: [URL Display text] There are two ways:

• About The Christian Science Monitor online, last access 3/25/2021 -- this link takes your browser window to the external site
• About The Christian Science Monitor online, last access 3/25/2021 -- this link opens a new tab in the browser for the external site

I asked our IT guy to provide the "span" tags for opening sites in a new tab. It is a recent customization to The Citizendium and not too many people know about it yet.Pat Palmer (talk) 16:33, 26 March 2021 (UTC)