Archive:Maintainability

Maintainability is the CZ policy that an article be of a class whereby all of the articles of the class have the possibility of being written.

Certain articles, we say, are not maintainable. This means that there are certain classes of articles that will probably never be completely filled out, high-quality, and well-maintained. If an article is a member of such a class, it does not belong in the Citizendium at all. Obviously, common sense is needed to determine what the relevant class is.

The reason for this is simply that the Citizendium will never have an adequate number of contributors to do the work. The "class" of article here depends on certain types that are in many cases fairly easy to spot. For example, we should not write an article about an undistinguished, perfectly ordinary school unless we can write articles about all such schools; we should not write an article about a county in Connecticut unless we can write articles about all counties in the United States; and so forth. An example of a class of article that it seems we will never have the contributors to maintain is: all named roads. What the future has in store could surprise us, however, so it is important not to be dogmatic here.

Only editors may mark articles for deletion on grounds of non-maintainability.

Reducing redundancy by merging several small articles that treat more or less the same subject may increase maintainability.

The Citizendium does not have a "notability" policy.