CZ Talk:Charter/Definitions

I read in US History encyclopedia about the history and metamorphosis of the encyclopedia. The first thing that caught my attention was that encyclopedias do seem to specialize, ie. "American Encyclopedia of Social Sciences." They started as a storehouse of information - a place to gather all knowledge in one place. However, they took a stance that in the dawn of the information age, the purpose of the encyclopedia may need to change. This source's last sentence said, "The explosion of electronic sources in many ways supplanted the "storehouse of facts" that was one of the major original functions of encyclopedias. The vast quantity of immediately accessible information made the encyclopedia's purpose of providing an authoritative "systematic survey" of knowledge even more essential in the information age." The phraseology "systematic survey" got my attention. D. Matt Innis 02:51, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

On first hearing it, I like "systematic survey" a lot. It doesn't have a generally accepted meaning, but it has the right "feel." Certainly, when Internet-based information systems make browsing like taking a sip of water from a fire hose at full pressure, system is needed. Context is needed. One could reasonably argue, as an example, that a good set of Related Article pages are a starting point on system. Howard C. Berkowitz 02:58, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

I think "systematic" is what felt right, too - along with authoritative. The fire hose is a perfect analogy. We're harnessing that information and putting it in one place - under the watchful eye of the experts in those fields. D. Matt Innis 03:04, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

How about:

• As an encyclopedia, Citizendium strives to be a systematic collection of information provided under the auspices of the authority of experts...

by the way, I looked up auspices just for kicks and one of it's defintions is "kindly endorsement and guidance"!

D. Matt Innis 03:24, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

To avoid the murky clarity of the term "neutrality" that has been an issue before, perhaps we could substitute the word "objectivity". Reference.com gives the following definition for "objective":not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased --Joe Quick 14:34, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Scope of the project

The current version of the Definitions page contains a discussion whether the scope of CZ should be broadened beyond encyclopedic content. This touches upon one of the central points in my position statement: "integration with expert workflows (not just in science)". Together with some fellow scientists, I have recently assembled a list of "features we deem desirable for future scholarly wikis, derived from experience with existing ones", taking the current Citizendium as the basis for discussion. I am pasting the list in below (items numbered to facilitate referencing, but the order is arbitrary), along with some further comments given in that blog post. Please add perspectives from non-science fields as you see fit.

1. Some system of peer review (basically, any wiki allows comments, annotations or formal reviews on talk pages of users or articles but these ratings should be featured more prominently; templates like those visualizing article status at Citizendium may help with that); this may be as simple as disallowing individuals to add information to Citizendium when the only available support is their own non-reviewed research published at OpenWetWare — the real name policy will minimize misuse
   
2. Uploadability of all kinds of media that traditionally (if you can call a habit that barely is a decade old a tradition already) went along with paper-based publications as "supporting online information" (which would be easily integrated in an all-online non-printable article with no sharp space limitations).
   
3. Stable versions for content that has undergone peer review (like the Approved Articles at Citizendium, or the results of the double phase review model at the OA journal ACPD/ACP), along with draft versions for anything else (including improvements to and updates of previous stable versions); like any non-protected page at the Wikipedias, these draft versions can serve as a playground, though a real-name policy would probably make it a more educational one
   
4. Search engines that integrate or otherwise compare favourably with major scholarly search engines on the web (the already mentioned Google Scholar and PubMed as well as, say, the BioText Search Engine that searches Open Access text and images), also in terms of the updating frequency.
   
5. pan-disciplinary scope, with consistent disambiguation of specialist terms (mainly but not fully achieved at Citizendium)
6. Separate namespaces for references (already in use at the Dispersive PDE Wiki and the French Wikipedia, in test at Citizendium); as a side line, this would open up ways for new citation metrics, via the What links here function
   
7. Separate namespaces for original research. Encyclopedic endeavours need expert input. This is most likely to be achievable if the encyclopedic activites can be integrated with the experts' workflow, e.g. via platforms like OpenWetWare.
   
8. Attributability of contributions (automatically realized, though not in the traditional scholarly way, in any wiki with a real name policy like that at Citizendium, via the User contributions function; special arrangements exist at Scholarpedia and WikiGenes; OpenWetWare does allow nicknames but real names prevail; the Wikiversities have basically the same user name policy as the Wikipedias)
9. Easy download of selected sets of pages for local archiving or analysis.
   
10. Licenses that allow unrestricted reuse and derivative work if the original source is properly acknowledged (typically CC-by-SA or the older GFDL, both of which have been made compatible now)
11. Resource-effective design (see also discussions on the energy use of the internet and individual websites). This overview may also help in working out an ecological footprint scheme applicable to research, as described previously.
12. integration with the non-scholarly world (certainly achieved in the Wikipedias and Citizendium), particularly with students (cf. the Eduzendium initiative at Citizendium) and non-English contents
    
13. Automation of the formatting, as already common in non-wiki environments, e.g. with LaTeX templates, for which collaborative editing environments exist too. None of the wikis we know comes close to that, albeit templates are heavily used at the various Wikipedias and, to a lesser extent but in a more consistent manner, at Citizendium; they seem to be rather rarely used on smaller or more specialized wikis. The same applies to references, though automated wikification has already progressed considerably here, despite the lack of wiki export functions at publisher's sites (or of suitable XML-to-wiki converters for those who provide XML)
    
14. Integration with mind maps (which structure knowledge) and databases (which harbour bits of knowledge that are hard to interpret without a broader context).
    

One of the most useful templates in use at Citizendium is that for subpages (open the Biology article in a separate window to see what this is about) :  

1. The article's main page is a stable version, approved by an author with expertise in that field
2. Next comes the Talk tab that leads to the discussion page, as per default in any wiki
   
3. The Draft tab leads to the editable version (this only applies for articles that have already been approved; in others, the main page is editable)
4. The Related Articles tab roughly corresponds to "see also" in the Wikipedias but is more usefully structured for navigation and somewhat replaces the categories which are heavily used in Wikipedia but only to a limited extent at Citizendium
   

It is interesting to see that these and other individual subpages largely complement existing social networking tools and have thus the potential to replace them (or to be replaced by them), at least for scholarly purposes:

1. the Bibliography subpage is a context-based alternative to CiteULike, Zotero, BibSonomy and other reference managers, possibly in conjunction with Open Library, scholarly search engines and tools like Scribd, Mendeley or Papers. One problem wikis cannot solve is that of access to paper-based research publications, but due to the current spread of Green and Gold Open Access initiatives, this is likely to change in the next few years anyway if authors decide to follow suit in a consistent manner and act accordingly for their own contributions.
   
2. the External Links subpage is a context-based alternative to conventional social bookmarking as known from delicious and simpy 
3. Additional subpages could be tailored to meet the needs of individual categories of articles (e.g., properties of chemical elements, genes, stellar constellations etc.) or more general scholarly needs (e.g., peer review, slides, code, protocols, or bot-generated transcripts from video lectures)

--Daniel Mietchen 21:50, 17 October 2009 (UTC)