CZ:Proposals/Citing CZ article by authors
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Complete explanation
As those of you have been hanging around here for a while know, there has been some considerable discussion around whether or not to allow authors to take “credit” in some form for their contributions to CZ. The discussion arose largely from academics such as myself who feel that if an academic or graduate student were able to cite their contributions on CZ as an authored, refereed encyclopaedia article, then it would boost the number of contributors to CZ as they would be able to take some credit for this contribution and add it to their CV – probably under “additional contributions to the field” or “other academic contributions” or some such heading. Without going through the long discussions that occurred on the forums, the “camps” of opinions seem to fall into three broad categories:
1) Those that feel citation or recognition is completely unnecessary or they simply don’t care. 2) Those that strongly feel that a method of citation is necessary but may not know how to do it effectively and fairly. 3) Those that are worried that citation or recognition of authorship would create a sense of “ownership” over articles and thus reduce the effectiveness of the “wiki” experience in reducing collaboration. (This last group was largely led by Larry).
After much discussion, it was clear that no one in any of these three groups were really against the concept of “taking credit”, the concerns were largely around how to do this in a wiki environment, how should authorship be awarded, how should citations occur and how do we prevent a negative sense of “ownership” and corresponding negative wiki behaviour.
Reasoning
In discussions with Larry over the past month, I would like to put forward a possible proposal for a solution that might solve this issue. In order to do this, I would like to briefly discuss the way in which normal citation occurs in the academic world.
Basically, when a paper is authored, authors will typically appear in the order of the significance of their contribution (with some exceptions to this rule). Thus, if Larry wrote an article on CZ that was intended to appear in an academic journal the citation in his CV might appear as:
Sanger, L. (2008) Citizendium – the way forward. Modern Encyclopedias 5, 12-21.
If there happened to be co-authors on this article then they would logically follow in the order of the significance of their contribution to the research. Thus if there were four authors the citation would appear as:
Sanger, L., Berger, L.R., Quick, J. and Smith, B.D. (2008) Citizendium – the way forward. Modern Encyclopedias 5, 12-21.
When such an article is cited, it is very often cited as:
Sanger et al. (2008) Citizendium – the way forward. Modern Encyclopedias 5, 12-21.
“et al.” is simply an abbreviation of “et alii”, Latin for “and others”.
So, here is the proposal. With CZ being a driving force in creating a new way of looking at information exchange and with us introducing new concepts and ideas into the now established wiki model, what if we turn the way in which citations are done on their head? Quite simply, what if we put the collaborative process first (as it is the most important aspect of a wiki) and the author second?
Implementation
How do we do this? I propose that simply by turning the way in which we cite articles on the wiki around.
Here is an example. Lets take a large multi authored article like “Life” and lets say I had contributed to it significantly as an author and wanted to put it in my CV or cite it in a journal article I was writing because I wanted to quote content from this article. Here is how I would do it under this proposal:
Authors and Berger, L.R. (2008) Life. In Citizendium the Online Encyclopedia. http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Life 05.03.08
The last numbers reflect the date of citation of the article. Now, following convention, we could translate “Authors and Berger, L.R.” into Latin and it would appear as:
“Scriptor et Berger, L.R.” or “Auctor et Berger, L.R.” or even “Civitas et Berger, L.R.” - (if we wanted to express the concept of Citizens contributing to CZ).
In this way of citing, we put the collaborative efforts first, followed by the contribution of the author wishing to cite the work.
Now, how to solve the problem of what level of contribution is required to use such a citation in ones CV? I would propose two concepts:
1) We don’t monitor it and leave it up to the ethics of the individual. If you feel that you have contributed substantively to an article then you are free to cite it in your CV as above – remember – anyone can simply check the history of an article on a specific date to see if its true and if an individual is “taking a chance” by adding their name to something that they in fact have not contributed significantly too. In other words, we let the academic world self-regulate this. 2) We come up with a automated scheme that list people who have contributed above a certain level and this appears somewhere in the history page and is simply there to be checked on any specific date to verify the level of contribution.
Now, if you broadly accept the above, how does someone else who is not an author cite an article on a given date? Simply as the following: Scriptor et Civitas (2008) Life. In Citizendium the Online Encyclopedia. http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Life 05.03.08 or just "Scri.ptor" or "Civitas"
How would we implement such a scheme? I think quite simply by putting a small link on the front page that says “How to cite a CZ article” which simply links to a page that explains our convention for citation.
Discussion
A discussion section, to which anyone may contribute.
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