CZ:How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles

Should you upload the Wikipedia article to the Citizendium?

Maybe, maybe not. Your answers to the following questions should all be "Yes":

• Is the Wikipedia article reasonably good? In other words, to create an expert-approvable article, in your judgment, it would be more efficient to edit the article than start over from scratch. If the Wikipedia article is mediocre, we would prefer that you start over from scratch.

• Do you actually intend to do significant work on the article sometime in the next hour? If not, don't upload it, or not until you actually want to start working on it. We are not creating a mirror of Wikipedia here. If you merely want your brilliant work on Wikipedia to be reprinted in another, more credible source, then you must make up your mind: are you really going to maintain the article here on the Citizendium or not? If not, stick with Wikipedia.

• Have you actually bought into this Citizendium thing at all? If not, leave well alone, please, and stick with Wikipedia until you're actually convinced. This means, among other things, that you are committed to working in a collegial, mature atmosphere, guided gently by expert editors. It also means that you are actually using your own real name; we do take that policy seriously here. More generally it means you accept our Statement of Fundamental Policies.

Improving Wikipedia articles stylistically

Many Wikipedia articles have certain stylistic problems. When you rewrite them:

• Make sure that the articles are well-written and unified, following a coherent, well-organized narrative, not grab-bags of unintegrated facts. The purpose of an encyclopedia article is not just to list out information about a topic, but to contextualize general information about a topic in a single readable "story," as it were.

• Craft your sentences using interesting language, not the typical vague, unadventurous, and soporific prose that some people seem to think is required for encyclopedia articles.

• Generally, keep your audience in mind. Bear in mind that articles on the Citizendium are written first and foremost for the educated person who needs an introduction to the topic--and not for the person writing the article to catalog very impressively everything he knows on the topic. More particularly, bear in mind that your audience is university-level, unless your topic itself absolutely requires a higher-level treatment (cannot be understood "at the undergraduate level"). You might have to rewrite completely those articles that appear to be written by people more concerned with showing off what they learned in their graduate seminars than actually introducing a topic to people who need an article about the topic.

Improving Wikipedia article mechanics

• Templates should "pay their own way" by actually helping the user rather than distracting the user from important information.

Stuff to delete

Note, while we should delete this stuff in CZ Live articles, basically, many of these things can be deleted by a script.

Delete many template messages--particularly the ones that are for contributors and are self-referential. This includes timing-related messages, expansion requests, and all Wikimedia sister projects.

Other templates to delete can, perhaps, be usefully moved to talk pages, including: requesting sources, deletion, disputes and warnings, maintenance, cleanup, and lists

Many infobox templates and navigational templates need to be completely revisited. Many are useful, but many are not.

All self-referential material, including all instructions to contributors that are placed either at the top of articles or inline, should either be deleted or moved to the talk page--preferably the former, as more information is usually required to be useful.

Categories: delete? This is to debate.

Interwiki links: delete

Delete links to missing images (after images have been uploaded and we've deleted the ones with questionable licensing).