User talk:Larry Sanger

Archive, project start through Jan. 2007
Archive, Jan.-Feb. 2007

Constabulary blocking procedure

Currently, one point reads:

Uploading of copyrighted material.

I believe this should read "Unauthorized uploading of copyrighted material" or something to that effect.

For example, if I take a photograph, I am the copyright owner of the photo (automatic since 1976). If I then upload the photo to CZ and license it cc-by-sa (as an example), I am still the copyright owner. The licensing does not transfer or surrender the copyright. The license provides usage rights under the terms of the license. I retain the copyright. In fact, almost all material which is uploaded to CZ is copyrighted. James F. Perry 09:51, 16 February 2007 (CST)

Right you are. --Larry Sanger 09:52, 16 February 2007 (CST)

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.

David, I have sent your complaint to constables@citizendium.org.

OK

I only created those cats that already had members - as I thought the red links looked unprofessional. I wont do anymore, sorry Iva 14:01, 17 February 2007 (CST)

It's not unprofessional to have work to do.  ;-) --Larry Sanger 14:02, 17 February 2007 (CST)

The Big SD

Larry, I added to the page

NOTE 4: don't delete recently created placeholder articles (usually just a title), created to "de-orphan" an article.

Please remove if I am mistaken.

Stephen Ewen 19:13, 17 February 2007 (CST)

No, sounds right to me. --Larry Sanger 19:20, 17 February 2007 (CST)

While I was disconnected (flu!) the article Age (geology) was deleted. Can we recover it? It was few rows indeed, but all original (there is not such article in WP).

Deletion was partly my fault, because I created the article with the comment "made article live". I suppose it now sounds like "just put the live tag", but at that time there was the rule of making articles live only after substantial editing.

If recovery is impossible, I'll rewrite it, as short as it was, it shouldn't be much difficult.

Please reply at my talk page. Ciao, --Nereo Preto 07:56, 21 February 2007 (CST)

1911 Brittanica material

I see in the del log you have encountered a few of these by Ori, too. I have been leaving them alone (e.g., Edmond François Valentin About) when not imported from WP (and hence mixed with WP stuff), even though they were not being actively transformed. Stephen Ewen 22:36, 17 February 2007 (CST)

Template Root

That's what I was afraid of, besides, manually adding new templates would get old after a while. --Paul Derry 16:45, 18 February 2007 (CST)

Sir Michael Hardie Boys

Those categories are in relation to what Sir Michael is. There are other people from New Zealand who are jurists and judges, but there are very few people today that are retired Governors-General of New Zealand. He's the only guy I know who has served as a Judge of the Kiribati Court of Appeal. I know the man personally, as I served under him whenever he needed me (on a part-time basis) from when I was 20 until 3 months after my 24th birthday. - (Aidan Work 19:50, 18 February 2007 (CST))

Well done. But none of this bears on the question whether we should be creating large numbers of arbitrary, contextless categories (i.e., social tagging). I don't think so. --Larry Sanger 19:52, 18 February 2007 (CST)

If we remove CZ Live Tag

If we remove CZ Live tag like proposed here: "The result will be a more honest representation of what we’ve done. Also, if we do a good job with this deletion, we can then remove “CZ Live” tags from our active articles, because all articles that are in our database will be CZ Live!"

Then how will we see a list of all of the articles on CZ? -Tom Kelly (Talk) 00:01, 19 February 2007 (CST)

Just look at "Special:allpages" or that's what I had in mind. I'm not sure, though, because as I've gone through a lot of the articles I've seen that many of these are redirection pages, or whatever. Hand-maintaining a list of "Live articles" might turn out to be a pretty good idea... --Larry Sanger 07:39, 19 February 2007 (CST)

Careful with the Js

Roger that. I've found a couple, too. If there looks like there has been any recent activity, I take off the SD tag and leave a note to let the editors decide. Is there a criteria for keeping that you especially want me to watch for (i.e. snakes)? Matt Innis (Talk) 06:40, 19 February 2007 (CST)

Thanks. Just the ones that are listed under "Important Notes" (and elsewhere on that page maybe). --Larry Sanger 07:37, 19 February 2007 (CST)

I see the ones you caught. I think I would have caught the Jewish one and thank goodness on Justice somebody else got there after you. Matt Innis (Talk) 08:51, 19 February 2007 (CST)

just a heads up

You might want to see this conversation.[1] Matt Innis (Talk) 12:29, 19 February 2007 (CST)

Sandbox move

Thanks, when I went here:

http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Citizendium_Pilot:How_to_get_started_with_the_Citizendium_pilot

the section "How to start a new page!" said click on "sandbox", which I did to take me here:

http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Citizendium_Pilot:Sandbox

However it contained an article there about qigong, which I thought someone might be working on and I didn't want to mess them up.

So I experimented to try to create my own personal sandbox for doing my drafts. I searched for sandbox and found nothing.

Thanks again for solving my problem.

Perhaps, when someone joins a personal sandbox might be automatically created for them and a link provided on the welcoming email or information provided in the "How to start a new page" section on how to get to it.David Hume 20:25, 19 February 2007 (CST)

I've just noticed how you did this, i.e. by adding sandbox to my user page. Can anyone besides me mess it up? If they can, I don't think that's a good thing. I could work entirely off line but then I would not have the right formatting, unless there's a way to download this wiki format and do it that way - is there? David Hume 20:39, 19 February 2007 (CST)

It's highly unlikely that anyone will edit your copy if it's in your userspace and more over on a page called "sandbox". Do press the "watch" tab and any changes will pop out in Recent Changes, or just monitor the page history. --Larry Sanger 22:48, 19 February 2007 (CST)

Thanks for the welcome

Glad to be back! Nancy Sculerati MD 14:24, 20 February 2007 (CST)

Confused about something

Hi Larry,

When I look at the diffs for the talk page for this article, I see your comment: [Diffs of Locality of Reference Talk Page]

But when I just look at the talk page for this article, your comments (still in the head revision) are invisible: Talk:Locality_of_reference

Is this a bug, or am I using this wrong? --Nick Johnson

It's a known bug. Sometimes the server presents the old cached version of a page instead of the correct newer version. Don't know why...wish they'd fix it. --Larry Sanger 16:25, 21 February 2007 (CST)

Sources category

Why does my article Action T4 appear with the category "Articles needing sources" at the bottom? I didn't put it there, I can't delete it, and it's not true, since the article is exhaustively sourced. Adam Carr 03:15, 22 February 2007 (CST)

I can answer that. It shows up because, when you imported it from WP yesterday, the {{Fact}} tag was and continues to be in the text of the article. The {{Fact}} tag displays as small superscripted text saying [needs cite]. BTW, if any of us intend to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles, we do best to import them just one at a time and not until we are ready to work on them. Stephen Ewen 05:13, 22 February 2007 (CST)

Thanks. Adam Carr 07:05, 22 February 2007 (CST)

Besides, any such self-referential templates need to be either deleted or moved to the talk page. --Larry Sanger 07:49, 22 February 2007 (CST)

Proper names

Larry, please see my reply at Cosmetic Surgery. Can we just figure out a way to pipe things so that capital letters do not become such an issue? Nancy Nancy Sculerati MD 09:14, 22 February 2007 (CST)

Broken Link

Hi Larry,

This link on your website is broken:

"Wikipedia subset proposal" (wikipedia-l, Oct. 2002)

More importantly, the rest are all working and provided enjoyable reading material and elucidation.

I am writing to you here rather than emailing, since I don't have an emailer which understands non-spammable addresses as you have listed on your website (i.e. I am lazy). :-)

Take care,

Larry

lmcelhiney 09:41, 22 February 2007 (CST)

Here's a direct link:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/006387.html

Apparently, the URLs got changed...

--Larry

Bug in system, or database temporarily down?

My userpage reads

The database did not find the text of a page that it should have found, named "(fixme, bug)".

This is usually caused by following an outdated diff or history link to a page that has been deleted.

If this is not the case, you may have found a bug in the software. Please report this to an administrator, making note of the URL.

I'm especially concerned about this one Red blood cells -- it reads

Red blood cells

There is currently no text in this page, you can search for this page title in other pages or edit this page.

I edited this page earlier and added images. The page was there.

Sharon_Mooney

I was doing databse work within the window you did your edits. The missing pages should now reappear.

-Jtp, Sysadmin

Philosophy WG

I re-posted your Jan 10 letter on Philosophy WG to the discussion page of same. Hey, you said be bold. Part of it seemed outdated following the BSD. No hard feelings if you just revert! James F. Perry 10:06, 24 February 2007 (CST)

Images and copyright

In case you have not already been there, please go to User talk:Sharon Mooney and read the discussion on "intellectual property" regarding hte carbon life image. I will not be having anything more to say on the issue, but you will continually be dealing with such matters as fair use, derivative works, et al. You are going to need to find out what it's all about. James F. Perry 09:00, 25 February 2007 (CST)

Reason for me to add to big write intellectual property, for international Law, and have that as our internal reference so to speak. Robert Tito | Talk 09:12, 25 February 2007 (CST)

Actually, more than that, Rob, we need a draft of CZ policy that covers practical questions about what is and what is not permissible for uploading--something clear enough that we can enforce it. I would try my hand at this, except that I am extremely busy with everything and quite frankly I'm not familiar enough with copyright law to trust myself with this stuff. --Larry Sanger 10:07, 25 February 2007 (CST)

Since I am no lawyer, I will not even try to write anything. But as CZ is worldwide, it needs the international law's approach. Let that be the start kleading to either good practises, or a set of rules adopted by CZ. Better start somewhere than afterwards imply new rules nobody knew about. But the ease with which people misconduct and misinterpret copyrights might be a sign of bittorrent time. cheers Robert Tito | Talk 10:27, 25 February 2007 (CST)

Healing arts

Larry, when you get a chance can you look at this and give us some feedback on whether this is a viable option? -Matt Innis (Talk) 12:59, 26 February 2007 (CST)

Jesus

Hey, I just heard on the news tonight that somebody thinks they found Jesus's body and it is buried beside his wife and child. Hmmm. Matt Innis (Talk) 21:58, 26 February 2007 (CST)

To be broadcasted on Discovery channel on March 4.: the jesus tomb - the episode on discovery is named. Robert Tito | Talk 22:01, 26 February 2007 (CST)

Online Identity Verification for Collaborative Communities

I figured this was like a "sandbox" project "with a message". Perhaps a move to User:Grant Sparks/Sandbox? Stephen Ewen 11:41, 27 February 2007 (CST)

No--CZ is not the place for personal essays, even within user spaces. --Larry Sanger 11:45, 27 February 2007 (CST)

Well, it's very relevant to our purposes, which is why I wouldn't mind keeping it. -- ZachPruckowski (Talk) 13:12, 27 February 2007 (CST)

Yes, let's keep it--on the forums. It isn't an encyclopedia article, unless I'm much mistaken. --Larry Sanger 13:15, 27 February 2007 (CST)

I will contact the author, give him a day or two to salvage the contents and move it to the forums, and then delete it. Stephen Ewen 14:13, 27 February 2007 (CST)

Hi, I'm the originating author. I don't want to use the forums because its not the best way to present the information. An encyclopedia article is actually closer to my intention, but I'm happy to move it to another wiki if you prefer. My reasoning is that the issues involved are highly technical, yet a large number of people are going to need to understand it before any software-solutions can be selected or brought into play to assist with the real-names policy.

Additionally, I don't think that I have to be the sole author. Surely you haven't got this far and still don't have anyone else on board yet who can contribute to the body of knowledge in this area? A sticky post in the forums just wouldn't be the easiest way for this information to be gathered and then presented.

I'm still a noob around here, so tell me where you'd like me to move the article to and I'm happy to comply - but I'd prefer to keep it in a wiki instead of forums and there is a real scarcity of 'meta' discussion areas of this type around here. --Grant Sparks 14:31, 27 February 2007 (CST)

I would not be opposed. Stephen Ewen 14:39, 27 February 2007 (CST)

Follow-up discussions and polemics can be moved to my user talk page if you like. I have extended my argument for why this information is important reference material for the community, and thus should be assisted in construction as an article, rather than deleted off the wiki as suggested. --Grant Sparks 14:46, 27 February 2007 (CST)

Diplomacy and war

I was thinking of the aphorism that "politics is just war by another means". But I suppose by that same token, diplomacy would go in the Politics Workgroup, so there it is (or will be) James F. Perry 17:09, 27 February 2007 (CST)

using that same aphorism, you had better place it in Category:Military Workgroup

Priorities

Larry, could I ask you to clarify what is the timeline for this project? My original understanding was that you intended to make a complete copy of Wikipedia as it was at the start of this year, and then we would all work on rewriting the bad articles and creating a better encyclopaedia. This would be launched sometime early this year. Now I see that all the Wikipedia articles which no-one is working on here have been deleted, and editors and authors are working on whatever interests them, and are being encouraged to write new articles in place of the Wikipedia ones. In effect we are starting Wikipedia over again from scratch, which is not what I understood to be the idea when I signed on. As a result we have only a tiny fragment of Wikipedia's total content. That would be fine with me, if it was a fragment selected on some rational criterion, and a fragment whose quality we could guarantee. But what we have is a fragment of Wikipedia chosen at random, consisting of articles whose quality cannot be guaranteed to be any higher than Wikipedia's. Thus we have an article on Echis carinatus multisquamatus but none on George Washington. This is not a product we can put before the public. Why not draw up a list of, say, 10,000 key articles that must be got to an acceptable standard, and launch them as a "small but high quality online encyclopaedia," and then invite the world to work on getting the next 10,000 articles written, and so on. Adam Carr 03:15, 3 March 2007 (CST)

Adam, I hope to write something about this for Citizendium-L and the blog, and in the mean time, the appropriate place to discuss this is not my talk page, but the Forums. Suffice it to say, for now, that this obviously is not an encyclopedia, or a "product," but an as-yet still small, community project. --Larry Sanger 08:46, 3 March 2007 (CST)

Please advise when you have written what you intend writing. I would like these issues clarified before I make any further commitment of time and energy to this project. In the meantime, I note your quote marks around "product." I hope these do not denote intellectual disdain for the need to market CZ as a product when it is ready to be launched. In the field of online encyclopaedias, WP is the market leader: indeed the concept "online encyclopaedia" and the WP brand are synonymous in the public mind. If CZ is ever to have any readers, it will have to challenge that brand dominance. Adam Carr 19:28, 3 March 2007 (CST)

Adam, I'm thinking that you might be better off sticking with Wikipedia, and just coming back when we've convinced you. I am not going to go out of my way to prove anything to you; if what I do have to say makes you want to stay on board, and if you can stay on board and be civil, I'll be happy. --Larry Sanger 19:46, 3 March 2007 (CST)

Having become convinced that the WP model is unworkable, and announced my withdrawal from the project, I certainly won't be going back there. I'm not asking you to prove anything to me, I'm asking you to tell me (and no doubt others) how you intend CZ to proceed. I think you have the basics right: no anonymous editing, a hierarchy of editors, a process for completing articles. But there is obviously a real issue of how you intend proceeding from where you are to where you want to be. I am happy to wait until you are ready to make a statement about this. Adam Carr 21:36, 3 March 2007 (CST)

page moves

Hi, it seems to me that the newly created articles point, plane, line would better go to point (geometry), plane (geometry) and line (geometry). It looks like only constables have the right to move pages. Could you help me with moving this? TIA. BTW, blocking the move option was for a reason that I believe belongs to the past. Now, when we have unprotected the main page, maybe we can rethink also page moving.

--Alex S. 12:39, 3 March 2007 (CST)

well, Robert spotted my request and handled it on sight. --AleksanderS 13:26, 3 March 2007 (CST)

Looks like my work here is done. :-) --Larry Sanger 15:29, 3 March 2007 (CST)

Collaboration and editors

Larry and others,

When I came here to CZ, I was happy because it was planed that there will be editors, who decide things, when there is no consensus. I thought that the bigest problem of WP is that there is no hierarchy, i.e. nobody takes responsibility for decisions, and nobody can decide in a revert-war.

Because collaboration does not always work. There are cases, when the most intelligent people can not agree with each other. There were disputes without any agreement in the history of science, philosophy, so this is self evident for me.

If two people can not agree with each other then somebody has to decide and take also the responsibility. I liked the idea in CZ that somebody, the editors will do this. Decide, and take responsibiliy. So if their decision is wrong, then everybody can see it: "he is the editor: this is his work of area, this is the result. This is what he made with his leadership and the work of others." It can be good then it is the good of all contributors and the editors, it can be bad, and then it is the fault of the editor. This is the repsonsibility of the chief.

So there are cases, when two people cannot agree, voting is not always practical, and a decision is needed.

Despite of this, what I experienced is:

1) If I can not agree with soembody then I am an idiot (told Larry.)

2) There is nobody to take the decision.

3) Especially there is nobody to take responsibility openly.

4) Work, arguments, expertice is not valued here more then in Wikipedia.

5) Things just remain the same, arguments are not listened, change is a priori excluded. Things just remain the same as they started.

As I told, in my opinion, if 2 people can not agree then both of them may be intelligent, and an editor is needed. And the editor shall be nominated, whoever is the best. We can not wait until Mr./Mrs. Nobellauratewinner comes. S(h)e may never come.

I think that if two people can not agree and the system does not solve the problem in a democratic or well organized hierarchial way, then not the 2 people, but the SYSTEM is idiot.

So this is my answer for Larry, who called me an idiot. I am very disappointed that CZ was promising in theory, but actually is badly organized.

--Matthias Brendel 13:06, 6 March 2007 (CST)

Matthias, first, I do sincerely apologize for insulting you in our private Skype chat. That was very poor judgment on my part. I promise you, and everyone, that I will not insult contributors, publicly or privately, again; and feel free to quote this sentence back to me, and shame me, if I break this promise--really! You have the right to demand a higher standard of behavior from me. Second, if you want to propose a change to our still-developing system, the place to do it is on Forums. Please bear in mind that in public discussions, despite my behavior in private, we do expect a high level of politeness. --Larry Sanger 14:18, 6 March 2007 (CST)

Apology accepted. I was actually considering to quit CZ. I have worked a lot, and I made a lot of suggestions in the last half year in CZ and in Textop. My problem is that you NEVER EVER accepted any suggestions. You listened and onswered some arguments, and then did not answer any more, and made always what you intended to make in the first place. I always accepted this, until now. You should once really be collaborative.

I am sorry to be harsh, but it did not work in the polite way. I could not achieve anything.

One of my not so important suggestion was that I do not like the separated forum. But I accepted this.

--Matthias Brendel 03:43, 7 March 2007 (CST)

Matthias, indeed I have accepted many, many suggestions. Often, maybe usually, important innovations and changes are suggested by others. We could not possibly use even half of all the suggestions that people make, because whenever there is some change, usually someone objects. Also, there just are not enough motivated people to make all suggestions into realities. There are many more ideas than there are people available to implement them--there are always far more captains than soldiers, more chiefs than braves. That's always the case.

One thing I can virtually guarantee, however, is that in a project as committed as we are to collegiality, suggestions that take the form of blunt demands, or accompanied by disrespectful dismissals of other people's work, won't be examined carefully by others--which is, of course, understandable. Anyway, enough said, I hope. --Larry Sanger 08:29, 7 March 2007 (CST)

"We could not possibly use even half of all the suggestions that people make, because whenever there is some change, usually someone objects. Also, there just are not enough motivated people to make all suggestions into realities. "

I know how to solve this. I suggested solutions for this. CZ needs a weel defined and organized hierarchycal-democratic model and not a loosely defined. You do not want this, you like a looselly defined system, but then there is a lot of work, and you have no resources for this. So you have to eat what you have cooked:).

--Matthias Brendel 08:48, 7 March 2007 (CST)

such an organization usually is called a dictatorship. Robert Tito | Talk

This is not the place to discuss such issues: the Forums are. Matthias, you are not really well informed about what's happening or what our plans are. I am going to be starting our Editorial Council within a few days. In time, as the need an interest become clear, we will set up various workgroups, such as a Copyediting Workgroup. Furthermore, we will, I hope by this fall, adopt a Citizendium Charter, which will solidify the outlines of a republic, not a "hierarchical-democratic model," whatever that could possibly mean. --Larry Sanger 11:23, 7 March 2007 (CST)

Please conduct any further discussion of these issues on the forum. Thanks. --Larry Sanger 12:01, 7 March 2007 (CST)

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.

checklist

Hi Larry, don't freak out when you see the current checklist. I prettyfied it since the table looked butt ugly, excuse the phrase. What i have done is just an experiment to see what is possible. Clearly the background can be anything. Or we can revert back to a tabulated version.

Note also I have included the archive box template in the check list too. Not sure if you liek that idea but it might help centralise all the data. See biology draft for an example of the template box incorporated into the checklist template. I will need to trouble shoot this, to get it right, but i want to hear your thoughts before getting it finalised. Chris Day (Talk) 01:12, 9 March 2007 (CST)

Hi Chris, looks nice, but the problem is that the table overlaps with text on the talk page. See Talk:Citizendium for an example. The other problem is that, at least in my opinion, it is faster to get standardized information from a table. Of course the table I created was butt ugly...but maybe it could be improved aesthetically. --Larry Sanger 08:23, 9 March 2007 (CST)

I reverted it until you can fix that overlap problem at least... --Larry Sanger 08:40, 9 March 2007 (CST)

Just out of interest, what browser are you using? i cannot replicate this overlap on PC or MAC and i've tried several browsers too. Chris Day (Talk) 11:51, 10 March 2007 (CST)

PC with IE. I can send a screen shot if you insist. I have no trouble replicating it myself.  :-) But, now that you mention it, I see the problem doesn't come up in Firefox. --Larry Sanger 11:58, 10 March 2007 (CST)

I believe you saw the problem, but since I could not replicate it i didn't know how to attempt to trouble shoot. I admit I have not looked at IE, must be my MAC mentality ;) I'll check that next. By the way, I incorporated a table structure back into the page header. See an example at Talk:Biology/Draft, I made the lines a bit smaller so it is less clunky. Chris Day (Talk) 17:07, 10 March 2007 (CST)

Chris, it looks great--I'd like to adopt it ASAP, but since a large portion of people will be using IE with PC, I expect they'll see that bug. --Larry Sanger 17:12, 10 March 2007 (CST)

I agree it can't go live with a bug in IE. I expect it will be easy to solve though. I just need to get onto a PC, unfortunately i don't have access to one at home. Chris Day (Talk) 23:48, 10 March 2007 (CST)

Miracle

I couldn't work out why you had to add the Wikipedia tag to Miracle, as I'd labelled it as such when I created it. I've only just worked out that one has to tick the "Wikipedia" box every time one edits. Could the default for that box be made to follow the previous edit (so that it's ticked/not ticked if it was ticked/not ticked last time? --Peter J. King  Talk  05:59, 11 March 2007 (CDT)

I didn't realize that that is the case at all. Surely that isn't right? Let me test. Ugh, you are right. That must explain a lot of the problems we've seen. I'll have them fix this right away. --Larry Sanger 09:30, 11 March 2007 (CDT)

I went to the technical discussion forum, and this has been raised by someone else recently; I added my "me too". --Peter J. King  Talk  09:50, 11 March 2007 (CDT)

the bios I added

The pattern is simply: these are the only pages I ever had occasion to create on WP, and since I'm not likely work on WP anymore, it irked me to leave out these pages from CZ since I had a kind of loyalty to them. I understand they're minorly noteworthy people, but figured they'd eventually fit more logically into the context of CZ, so I chose that way to get my feet wet quickly. If you think they don't belong, please delete because I feel like my getting wet ritual is done in any case, and I have no more minor items to port from WP. Nathaniel Dektor 22:25, 11 March 2007 (CDT)

I see--that's perfectly clear. Thanks for the explanation. And don't worry about deletion--I don't know whether or not they're part of a maintainable set (see Maintainability), but that isn't a decision I would make. What I would like to do, eventually, is forward the set of them to czinternal-topic@citizendium.org (the Topic Informant Workgroup), which looks at articles about living persons. You could do that yourself...perhaps you might help interview the subjects of the articles, just an idea. --Larry Sanger 23:29, 11 March 2007 (CDT)

Best Practices

Hi Larry - got your note about the list of languages deletion. I started a couple of articles from red links right after I signed up. The ones without sufficient content have been flagged for removal or inclusion elsewhere. Just curious if this is the best place to respond to notes such as the one you left for me (the user talk page).

I'm assuming a page like Robotics is more what we're looking for? --Will Bickford 08:30, 13 March 2007

Where to reply--my user talk page or yours, I don't care. Robotics is obviously a better start! --Larry Sanger 09:06, 13 March 2007 (CDT)

can't see edits

Larry, I know we have had some cache problems with some edits taht don't show up for awhile, but on [[2]] nothing has shown up past nancy's first edit this morning. Any suggestions? -Matt Innis (Talk) 13:25, 13 March 2007 (CDT)

I mailed bugs@citizendium.org about it. Bizarre, particularly because other pages do update (evidently). --Larry Sanger 14:51, 13 March 2007 (CDT)

I've bungled a template

Larry: My apologies if you're the wrong one to ask this question to. Please direct me to the right person or process to follow.

My question:

I was trying to create a biography for:

Alfred J. Eggers

I've fouled up the template and the article is a mess. How do I fix this? Thanks! Terence Quilpie 01:09, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

My advice is to remove the template.  :-) Work on it on the talk page. --Larry Sanger 09:00, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

Concerning transcription of information from Wikipedia

Larry: Before I dive in. What's the proper protocol for responding to comments made on my "User talk"? Should I respond on my user talk or your user talk? For this case I'm responding on your user talk.

You said the following:

"Dr. Quilpie, if I may--I have no doubt that there are some really excellent articles on Wikipedia, and that you are right that it would be pointless to regenerate them here. Our experience is that the Wikipedia versions of most of the articles we've been working on have been very poor"

My reply:

I completely agree. I realized too late that there is no point contributing to Wikipedia because eventually any contribution will dissolve into noise. However I have observed an interesting phenomena about Wikipedia that while the popular articles almost instantly dissolve away the more specialized articles tend to dissolve more slowly. My favorite example is the George W. Bush article which is being vandalized about every five minutes. The much more obscure articles like mine tend to be vandalized about once every three months.

You said:

"There is another set of articles someone imported from Wikipedia here, about adders, and his idea is that he would like to maintain them here. What I've told him is that we don't simply want to mirror Wikipedia, and that, while I wouldn't delete the articles he's uploaded as long as he's committed to "watching over" them here on the Citizendium, I would actually prefer that he improve them in some way so that there is a significant difference between the CZ articles and the WP articles."

My reply:

It is my intent to import the high quality aerospace articles and take "ownership" of them as I have with my own article on "atmospheric reentry". I would remove errors-of-fact where I can see them, smooth out problems in the article's style and make enhancement where I can find them. My contributed articles would definitely not remain static. However many of the aerospace articles on Wikipedia are very good so improving them would take lower priority (bigger fish to fry). There are a bunch of things that I wanted to do with my "atmospheric reentry" article on Wikipedia but I couldn't because people were coming in behind me and micro-editing. One guy dump this big hunk of excrement right in the middle of the article (it had almost nothing to do with spacecraft reentry). I had to leave it there because I knew that deleting it would trigger an endless revision war and flaming match (I don't have time for this!). In summary it was clear that I had gone as far as I could go with Wikipedia.

You said:

"If you simply put the question, "Would you feel comfortable if we were to import a few hundred Wikipedia aerospace articles?" my answer would be "Yes, if you feel that you can maintain them and improve them here." Eventually, we will have many more engineers on board--we already have quite a few. We can probably "wake them up" by an effort such as this."

My reply:

We are on the same wavelength! Here is my proposal. Citizendium needs a critical mass of high quality aerospace articles to make it interesting to aerospace engineers. I intend to import those articles from Wikipedia and spice them up with information from "Encyclopedia Astronautica", refer to http://www.astronautix.com/ . "Encyclopedia Astronautica" and NOT Wikipedia is considered by many aerospace engineers to be the better source for aerospace information on the Internet. However "Encyclopedia Astronautica" is under copyright to Mark Wade so it can not be freely copied like Wikipedia. I also have full access to NASA's database (much of this is under userid/password protection). Despite being protected, almost all of that information is in the public domain (there are ITAR and dual use issues involved). One of the most important spacecraft in my specific line of work was Fire-II. Mark Wade's commentary on Fire-II is very limited, see http://www.astronautix.com/craft/fire.htm . From the NASA database, I can download lots of cool pictures and information about Fire-II thus providing an important addition to Citizendium (Fire-II is just the tip of the iceberg). However we're not going to hook aerospace engineers into Citizendium with cool pictures of Fire-II (that's what keeps them here). To hook them in we'd need excellent articles about the Apollo program, the SR-71, the XB-70 Valkyrie, the Soviet N-1 rocket, etc. That's why it is vital to bring those articles into Citizendium as soon as possible so we can get new engineers on board.

You said:

"If there were some way to automatically import WP articles to CZ--if someone were to write a script to do that--it would be great. Unfortunately, no one has done so yet. As to why we decided to "unfork," the original discussion was long..."

My reply:

I might(?) be able to write that software but it would take too long. For my specific task it would take less time to manually bring the information in than write the software. However you should eventually task someone to do this, i.e. designate an article and the software downloads the text and images then strips off the obvious dross. I respect your decision to unfork Citizendium from Wikipedia. The copyright issue on Wikipedia is a ticking time bomb. Probably the only reason why Wikipeida hasn't been shutdown is because Wikipedia has no assets worth litigating for (there's a lesson there). You might consider setting up a password protected read-only image of Wikipedia with the markup software still running (set it up so only editors can access it). Wikipedia could disappear suddenly if someone decides to play hardball and begin litigation.