Copied from Wikipedia: by policy, not encouraging articles describing people who commit atrocities or mass murders
Can topics, themselves, be biased? What does it mean to "promote sympathy towards criminals"?
Way back in September 2005 I had only made about 2000 wikipedia edits. I had never encountered a wikipedia administrator, and I was unaware of the wikipedia's deletion policies and procedures. Over the previous six months I had started stubs on a small handful of the individuals who were being held in Guantanamo. At that time it was US policy to keep their identities a secret - not even telling their families.
Then, all of sudden, four articles I started were nominated for deletion. One nominator's sole justification was the two letters "NN", and he declined to answer my request for an explanation as to what that meant.
Another person asserted that the topic of Guantanamo was "inherently biased", and could only serve for "America-bashing".
I thought about that one all afternoon. I concluded that topics are not, in and of themselves, biased. I concluded the only thing that can be biased was how we covered them.
I concluded that there was no topic so controversial that good faith contributors couldn't agree on the wording of an article about it that everyone agreed measured up to the standards of neutrality, verification, authoritative sources, provided everyone tried hard enough. I committed myself to the extra effort to measure up to those standards, whenever I tackled a controversial topic.
I am really surprised you characterized the articles I wrote on the Steinberg Awards as "promoting sympathy towards criminals". The Steinbergs, like Pullitzer, like Nobel, like the Motion Picture Academy, created a competition that grants awards to promote works of art.
Consider Schindler's List - a highly admired work of art. Yet Oskar Schindler, the protagonist, employed slave labor. He corruptly bribed government officials. The movie doesn't try to be neutral. It portrays him as a hero, because he made sacrifices, in the end, and he saved lives.
But someone else could have made a film that portrayed Schindler as a pure villain, and his saving of lives as motivated purely by cynicism.
You deleted the articles on the Steinberg awards. I am guessing that this is because they awarded Bill Cain an award, and, among his works was his play inspired by the Steven Dale Green case. Well, would you delete an article on the Academy Awards because Oscars were awarded for Schindler's List?
Your deletion log entries refer to a policy. I scanned your revision history, to see if you had drafted policy on when and how articles should or should not cover criminals. I didn't find anything.
Consider Alfred Dreyfus, convicted on innuendo, racism, and forged evidence, he spent decades imprisoned on Devil's Island, prior to his eventual exoneration. If someone tried to write a neutral article about him, during the period between his conviction and his exoneration, would this policy require its deletion? He was officially a criminal, then.
In many wikipedia discussions I argued that an article was neither a punishment or a reward. Sometimes the person arguing for deletion was some variation of "but Joe is basically a good person, they don't deserve to have stuff that makes them look bad talked about like this..." Alternately the deletion proponent would say some variation of "but Joe is basically a bad person, they shouldn't be rewarded with an article..." Articles are neither punishments or rewards. Individuals or topics become candidates for articles when reliable sources write about them. Period. If we are writing neutrally then the article is neither a hagiography or demonization.
What about Richard Jewell, the heroic security guard at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta? FBI director Freer ruined his life, by naming him as the prime suspect in that bombing. Director Freer implied the security guard wanted to be a hero so badly that he planted a bomb that he would later discover. Most press coverage was unfair to him. As I am sure you remember, more than half a decade later he was definitively cleared, when an anti-abortion kook, who mainly bombed abortion clinics, turned out to be the actual bombing. Jewell had been a bona fide hero, who saved dozens of lives.
The extremely unfair demonization of Jewell took place before there was a wikipedia or citizendium. I used to think that, if they had been around, a truly neutral article about Jewell would have helped to cool the hysterical leaping to the conclusion he was guilty. And, if Freer's innuendoes had contained a kernel of truth, a neutrally written article would still have served the public good, in helping to prevent an over-reaction.
Yes, there are ugly things in the world, like mass-murderers. I too am not that interested in supporting detailed coverage of murderers, where there is nothing more to their story than that they were murderers. But while Steven Dale Green seems to have been a simpleton, who couldn't finish high school, and who racked up some misdemeanor crimes, prior to enlisting, he is worth covering because he became central to other issues. I tried to explain this when we discussed him before. Scholars have cited his case in other contexts. I read an academic paper who cited his case when discussing the policy of not allowing the openly gay to serve in the military. The author argued that if the military had not been barring openly gay individuals from serving they would not have had to lower their standards to admit guys like him. Other scholars cited his case when discussing that lowering of standards - admitting dropout and criminals. I suggested then that the other wider issues his case was entagled with made it worthwhile to cover him, when it wouldn't be interesting or worthwhile to cover a murderer who was simply a murderer, and had never been covered as anything more than a murderer.
Wikipedia's COATRACK essay and wikipedia's notion of DUE WEIGHT
The wikipedia has a widely read essay known as COATRACK. It is often treated as if it were a policy, when it is only an essay. And those citing it routinely ignore its actual advice when citing it in deletion discussions.
The essay warns about articles whose first sentence, or first paragraph, says the article is about one thing, generally an actually notable topic, but then quickly shifts to covering something else. One of the colorful examples cited was "wongo juice".
The advice of that essay that is routinely ignored by those who cite it in deletion discussions, is that it never recommended deletion as a solution the problem of a contributor hi-jacking an article to talk about something else. Its advice was that, if the underlying topic of the article was notable the solution would be to trim back, or maybe even entirely trim out, the paragraph(s) that were really talking about something else
I don't have those Steinberg Award articles in front of me. But I am sure I didn't start talking about them, only to shift over to promoting Steven Dale Green. I drafted those in August. I don't remember whether I mentioned Steven Dale Green, by name, in the portion of those articles that mentioned Bill Cain. But, if I had, surely it was only a sentence or two. How could that justify the deletion of two whole articles?
Those who ignored what the COATRACK essay actually advised also ignored WP:DUE, a link to a subsection of the Wikipedia policy on neutrality. What I generally concluded was that the passages I had included in articles that triggered those COATRACK complaints, because they touched on something else, were short enough to comply with the DUE portion of NPOV. Topics are inter-related, and that means articles should mention related topics, and link to them, and, sometimes that requires a brief passage of coverage of that other topic, to provide context.
If you thought I went beyond that, in 9 circles, or the articles on the Steinberg awards, I suggest your choices included: (1) voicing your concern first, possibly on Talk:9 circles, on Talk:Steinberg Award, on User talk:George Swan, or via email; (2) shortening, or maybe even eliminating the specific passage(s) that triggered your concern, and then leaving an explanation on the talk page.
Given that there was no warning how would I know what policy I violated, so I could know how to avoid violating it somewhere else? George Swan (talk) 15:23, 28 November 2022 (CST)
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF RESPONSE: We shouldn't have articles on the lives of people who are *only* known for taking life
Mass murderers do not deserve fame or to have an encyclopedia article. This is known for encouraging more people to commit outrageous crimes in hopes of becoming famous.
There exists on your Talk page this thread in which I discussed with you that I'd like to remove the first mass murderer article you had imported and expressing my distaste for it. Neither article placed any emphasis on victims and did not even name them. You asked for three months to rework the article and change its emphasis. But then as a result, you also created another murderer article stub, which you also failed to improve per my request, and you added articles about the play about the murderer and more articles emphasizing one particular award this play had one. I was frustrated yesterday to find TWO versions of the article about the play (each differing by a single letter in the title), so I couldn't tell which version to delete--and both pointed at the murderer article. And then, I found there were at least three different articles about the minor award, which was little more than a modest monetary grant as near as I can tell, with no one publicizing it except the group which granted it. Duplicating information across multiple articles on a wiki is not a good idea; the versions diverge and then no one can tell which one to edit. So yesterday, assuming you would not object because you seemed to have left the wiki, I removed the entire cluster of articles relating to the murderers. Those peripheral articles should I feel have been included in the stub murderer article anyway, and they pointed back to the now-missing article, inviting someone to create those again in the future. I understand very well how it hurts to have one's work deleted, but I am not willing to restore any of those articles right now. IF you return to the wiki and are active here, I will consider restoring the "9 Circles" article (whichever one you want), but with restrictions: I will not have it name the murderer except once in one footnote, nor will I have that name be an active link inviting for an article to be created about said murderer. Any information about the award can be included in the article about the play. You had included around a dozen excerpts of the play's reviews in the footnotes, and I read those, after which I still wanted that article gone as well, because most reviewers pointed back to the murderer as having been the main model for the play's protagonist. And, should it matter whether an author worked as a priest or a waiter to put food on the table? It seems like an attempt to add moral justification to him writing a play sympathetic to a brutal killer. But he could have set his play in any number of other times and places and still provided a setting for his version of Dante's nine hells as represented by a Kafka-esque bureaucracy. By choosing this sensational case to model, even if his intention was to lambast the lameness of the law, the government, the military, or psychiatry (and I don't KNOW what his intentions were, but even if they were "good" intentions), his results are muddied and weakened by the fact that his play engendered a certain degree of sympathy in reviewers for the murderer. And that's why I deleted that article. I couldn't have gone through the normal process of warnings without proliferating and attracting yet more attention to these murderer's names, so I have made an editorial decision, which is my right to do because I am, right now, personally and almost single-handedly keeping this behemoth of a wiki afloat because I believe deeply that it is still a better place to write than Wikipedia. If you have more objections after this explanation, I urge you to private message me. I will listen sincerely to everything, but I will not have these murderers names in the wiki any more than they already are, because as you know, nothing ever written in a wiki really disappears. George, I sincerely hope you will put up with our disagreement about this and return to The Citizendium, where you have informed and delighted me many times over the years. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:38, 29 November 2022 (CST)
You are of course in charge here & can make policy as you wish, but you might like to think about this. It's certainly true that reports of crimes can cause copycat ones. But should the news be censored? It's not just that. Every time there's a news report of an Islamist terror attack it's followed by a spike in violence against Muslims. Every time there's a news report of Israelis hurtin Palestiisns it's followed by a spike in violence against Jews. In recent years there's been an uptick in violence against Chinese, and in recent months against Russians. We accept all this as part of the price we pay for free press & democracy. Proportionate coverage seems to me reasonable. What application that might have here I'm not expressing any opinion. See also [1]. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:07, 30 November 2022 (CST)
Peter, I welcome your and George's comments, because it's a gray area. Wikipedia (WP) has long articles on all the mass killings. The WP articles have unrelenting detail, though they are not all under the names of the killers. I was unable to sleep for two nights after reading WP about SDG, the killer who got a sympathetic play written about him by a Jesuit priest. Any twelve-year-old might stumble across that article while reading about Iraq, and it would tempt reasonable parents to confiscate their kids' cell phones immediately. Clearly, George tried to do better here, and I appreciate that. *If* these articles get restored, I would like that the murderer's name not the title of the article if at all possible (though in some cases, it may have to be). If there are legal/social aspects making the case of interest, that should be made clear in the introduction. In other words, I am tentatively open to restoring any or all of these articles *if* my editorial requirements are honored.Pat Palmer (talk) 10:22, 30 November 2022 (CST)
It occurred to me afterwards that we already have articles on Osama bin Laden & a number of his associates (nothing to do with George; probably written by Howard). Could it be said they're known for anything other than killing people? Peter Jackson (talk) 05:50, 1 December 2022 (CST)
Bin Laden touched off a war, founded an international terrorist organization that occupied much of the world for decades, and thus is a figure who will for better or worse appear in history books. SDG (and his associates) are soldier criminals who murdered four people on their day off. Crimes of similar horror happen around the world at regular intervals though thankfully not "often" statistically, and we don't cover them usually. This particular crime got lots of press in part because of the play and its publicity, but also because at first there was a question of whether the crime was part of systematic behavior by troops in Iraq while doing their jobs. It turned out not to be, and there was no deliberate attempt by higher-ups in the military to cover anything up. SDG is only one example of a psychotic personality who should never have been allowed into the military--THAT topic might deserve an article. As for mass gun murderers such as NC, at most I think we might list their names in a catalog somewhere, but certainly not giving them a biography and an article of their own, because to do so is inconsistent--are you aware of how MANY of these take place every year? If we covered all of them, we would soon double the size of the wiki--and greatly increase the chance of children stumbling upon the descriptions of their brutal acts. That is what is happening over in Wikipedia right now--they ARE largely covering all of them, and it's a feedback loop creating an ever-expanding set of horrible descriptions of crimes. The more I think about this problem in such terms, the clearer it becomes to me that we ought not to grace every one of these cases with a distinct article. But as I told George last June, if there IS a compelling reason why a certain case is of special interest (and not just to lawyers), detail why that is true in the introduction to the article. That had not been done in the articles I have deleted.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:15, 1 December 2022 (CST)
I'll just add one more about Wikipedia covering almost all the mass shooting cases. I can see why they might choose to do so, but since they ARE doing so, and in such detail, I don't see why we should do it also. It doesn't add anything for us to do it, even if somehow our articles are more nicely done. And frankly as an editor, I am horrified at the specter of being asked to overlook the creation of such articles every time such an incident happens, which in the United States right now is about every two to four days. On the other hand, I am reluctantly open to someone using this wiki to create an alternative version of an existing Wikipedia article, and then going over to Wikipedia and saying, "Let's do it this way instead". But no one has proposed to do that, and it usually doesn't work. Almost all of us have tried replacing some really awful material in Wikipedia with a better version of the topic that we first created here, and what usually happens is that the person(s) in WP who created the thing protect it there because of all the work they already put into it. I'm not going to make a rule that we can never have any articles in Citizendium about mass murderers, psychotic people in the military, or matters pertaining to violence. I'm saying let's have an intelligent, clear-cut reason for having those that we do, and maybe put a blurb on the Talk page explaining the motivation for a particular article to save us from recreating the debate we are having right now.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:32, 1 December 2022 (CST)
Are killers monsters, so there is no point covering them...
Pat, I made several sets of notes in preparation to responding to your note of 2022-11-29, the first comment in this subsection. It is one long paragraph, containing a dozen or so points, rather than a dozen paragraphs, each focussed around a single point. Comments written this way make it impossible for a response to start with something like, "WRT the point in your fifth paragraph".
Rather than try to respond to them all, at once, may I start with your early point, where you wrote that any article on a mass-murderer "... is known for encouraging more people to commit outrageous crimes in hopes of becoming famous."
Pat, did you mean to assert that this is a fact, some kind of unchallengeable, universally accepted fact? But is it a fact? Could it even be described as a hypothesis. I am not a scientist, but I spent years working for scientists, and I challenge whether this could be described as a hypothesis, because I suggest it is untestable. It seems to me that, while anecdotal reports might be used to back this up, these are not evidence.
I think your assertion could be called a premise. The alternate premise, that my edits are based on, is that difficult problems are best dealt with by dispassionately and neutrally trying to understand them.
You didn't actually say this, but other people, who held similar opinions to yours, have implied or explicitly stated, that serial killers, spree killers, are monsters. At least some of those people meant this literally. Killers were so unlike us regular people that they were not really even human beings. No regular human being could ever understand them, and it was a mistake to even try.
Here is a complication of that position... if monstrous killers are born, not made, then steps to purge the historical record of other killers should have no effect on their potential death toll.
Pat, you are about my age, or maybe just a bit older. When I was a teenager I heard about two deeply important psychology experiments. They weren't only deeply important, they were deeply disturbing. What both experiments showed, in different ways, was that it only took the wrong circumstances, and the wrong pressure, to get ordinary people, people who thought of themselves as ordinary decent people, to commit monstrous acts.
I am going to remind you of those experiments. In one of those experiments ordinary decent volunteers were paired up. A flip of a coin would assign one to a booth where they could hear the other experimental subject being asked to answer questions. The experimental subject in the booth would be directed by an experimenter, in a lab coat, to press a button that administered an electric shock, when the other guy gave the wrong answer. During the course of the experiment the experimenter would direct the subject to increase the voltage. During the course of the experiment the subject in the booth could hear the other guy complain, then scream, then shout that a higher voltage would kill them, then go silent, as if they had died.
It was a cruel experiment, as there was never more than one subject. The other experimental subject was an actor, a confederate of the experimenter, and no actual electric shocks were ever administered. The experimental subjects were told it was an experiment into whether pain and the absence of pain, could be used to make people better learners. But it was really an experiment into how much pain an ordinary decent person could be made to administer.
And the experiment showed that almost all ordinary decent people could be pretty easily convinced to administer a lot of pain.
The other experiment took a bunch of college student volunteers. They were split up into two groups, prisoners and guards. Surprisingly early in the experiment the guards started dishing out cruel treatment in order to control the prisoners.
I read that the guy running this experiment was so excited by what he was finding he invited some of his peers to come and observe, even though the experiment hadn't run to completion. One of his colleagues stood up to him, even though he had been her thesis advisor. I'm paraphrasing from memory here... she told him he had to end the experiment, right that moment. She told him that he was so blinded by the results he was getting that he was totally overlooking the traumatizing effect the experiment was sure to be having on his subjects.
He realized she was right, and he did end the experiment.
I suggest this experiment also shows that people who had previously been regarded as ordinary decent people, people who had previously regarded themselves as ordinary decent people, could be induced to commit monstrous cruel acts.
And, therefore, I suggest it is very strongly in the public interest to try to neutrally and rationally understand killers, torturers, and the people who commit other atrocities.
As for whether it is pointless to try to understand any truly monstrous inhuman people. There are scientists who study non-human animal behaviour, and they are capable of drawing meaningful conclusions about that behaviour, even though their subjects are non-human, by defition. George Swan (talk) 13:21, 8 December 2022 (CST)
@Peter Jackson I followed the link you provided me and spent much of Sunday reading about this whole #no-notoriety premise.
I am shocked. I had thought the #no-notoriety premise was a fringe premise. I had no idea that some academics had got behind it. I think I wrote, above, that I am not a scientist, merely someone who used to work for scientists. Having said that, the papers those academics wrote, to support the #no-notoriety premise seemed like bad science. Their papers were based on comments from killers who said they had been influenced by earlier killers.
The very important point they were overlooking is that killers from within the incel community, the gun-enthusiast community, the anti-arbotion community, the MAGA community, they all have their own websites, message boards, mailing lists. They don't need to look to mainstream press, scholarly papers, or online encyclopedias, to read about those previous killers. I think this means the news embargo proposed in the #no-notoriety premise will have the opposite effect of what those proposing it desire. I am afraid the leaders within those movements are more dangerous under a #no-notoriety information embargo, as it allows the leaders within that movement to offer their followers hagiographies of those killers, using their internal websites, that then go without challenge.
I am afraid those potential copycats are going to be MORE LIKELY to follow the examples of earlier killers when the only accounts they get to read of them are hagiographies from within the killer's community. I suggest those potential copycats are going to be LESS LIKELY to follow those examples when they have access to neutrally written accounts of those earlier killers lives. George Swan (talk) 10:41, 13 December 2022 (CST)
I think you may well be right there. I'm thinking mainly in anecdotal evidence. For example, back in 1981 there was a race riot in Brixton. What followed looked like people round the country seeing it on TV, thinking that looked like fun, & organizing their own riots, which were nothing to do with race. But that's not much in the way of scientific. More broadly, the way society works is by people following an instinct to follow the tribal customs, doing what others do, especially successful people. I don't know how scientific that is either. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:10, 14 December 2022 (CST)
I'm considering deleting the article about Onion (dog)
Will anyone argue, now, against deleting the article Onion (dog)? I've put my reasons on its Talk page. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:36, 3 December 2022 (CST)
Although the manner in which the killer turned himself in is slightly bizarrely interesting, overall this is just another crime report. Anyone have a real reason why it should not be deleted? Also, articles of this sort may NOT be titled merely with a person's name; other people bearing an identical name almost certainly exist, and I don't think they should have to tolerate finding their name in an encyclopedia delineated as a murderer of police.Pat Palmer (talk) 09:57, 7 December 2022 (CST)
For the record, third parties, I wrote this article.
I don't agree that "this is just another crime report". Canada is not the US. Police on citizen violence is relatively rare. Citizen on Police violence, also relatively rare. So, in Canada, there are no routine crime reports on Citizen on Police violence. Rational commentators tried to make meaningful suggestions as to the steps that could have prevented this tragic event.
As for what is "routine", back in 2007 I copied a discussion from a talk page to my userspace here. In particular, I direct your attention to the 4th and 5th paragraphs in this section.
With regard to the embarrassment, or actual danger, an individual faces when he or she has a notorious namesake...
Did you know that when the Department of Homeland Security was created, and it compiled and published its first "no-fly list", Ted Kennedy's name was on it? Senator Ted Kennedy, wearing a face that would be known and recognized by every security guard, was prevented from boarding his flights because his name was on this list. Kennedy was able to buttonhole the Director of Homeland Security, and have him personally order his name to be removed from the list - after he had been prevented from boarding five times.
We have all got namesakes. Every notorious person has namesakes. Is there a good reason to protect any non-notable namesakes from the embarrassment of a wiki covering the notorious namesake? Being temporarily mistaken for a notorious namesake is a risk every single human being faces. I suggest there is no effective step a wiki can take that would guarantee non-notable namesakes would be free of the risk of being embarrassed by a notorious namesake. I don't think it makes sense to protect non-notable people from being embarrassed by being a namesake. George Swan (talk) 14:06, 8 December 2022 (CST)
Nothing in the article as written makes the point that "police on citizen" violence is rare in Canada and that this somehow makes this case special. Did you mean citizen on police (the opposite)? The homicide rate in Saskatchewan province is higher than in the neighboring state of Montana. Are you concerned about the shooter's claim that police "started the whole thing"? I'm baffled.Pat Palmer (talk) 11:33, 9 December 2022 (CST)
Nothing about this case has anything to do with Guantanamo captives, so I really don't understand the passages you direct me to here in relation to this article.
With the exception of extraordinarily famous historical figures, articles in The Citizendium should not be titled with a simple name. This is my editorial opinion. I have a list of several such articles in The Citizendium that I intend to rename when I get time. It's common sense that there might be another notable person with the same name someday in the future, and many people with the same name who have *not* become notable, so let's please try to be unambiguous from the beginning if we can.Pat Palmer (talk) 11:33, 9 December 2022 (CST)
I have two concerns: (1) overall article-topic organization; (2) provenance.
I have a topic informant page on the months I spent working under Ted Nelson, in 1979. TI:George Swan/Project Xanadu's computer resources in 1979 I may have been one of the least significant volunteers to work under him, but it is enough I think I get to claim him as a mentor. Does working under the guy who first described a hypertext give me any extra credibility when talking about article organization?
The world of human knowledge is full of topics. Those topics intersect. Sometimes they richly intersect. Wikipedia and Citizendium articles on topics that are richly interconnected with other topics are full of outgoing links, and have lots of incoming links.
Pat, you recently wrote about a concern over duplication of material within multiple articles. That is, in general, a very valid concern, for various reasons, including that, even if the duplicated material started off identical in every article where it occurred, it is likely to diverge, as those articles are edited and updated. The wiki equivalent of genetic drift. That can result in one instance getting an important update, while others don't. It can even result in the two different articles contradicting one another.
There is a solution to this.
When the article on Topic A and the article on Topic B both address another topic, topic C, it may be time to have them both link to an article on Topic C. In this particular instance there is an article Ronald Reagan, so that would be Topic A. The Citizendium also has an article on the U.S. Constitution. It contains a redlink to Article III of the United States Constitution, the article that talks about Impeachment. When the Citizendium has more articles the article on Impeachment should link to an article on Efforts to impeach US Presidents.
19th Century President Johnson was actually impeached; Nixon was almost impeached; Clinton was actually impeached; and Trump was actually impeached. There were efforts to impeach multiple other Presidents, including, most recently, Joe Biden. Marjorie Taylor Greene seems to have been the first Congressional Representative who tried to initiate an impeachment of Biden. Over on the wikipedia someone argued it shouldn't have an article Efforts to impeach Joe Biden because no one had worked on an article on Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan.
That didn't sound right to me. I guessed that, if I looked, I could find enough good valid references to support an article on Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan.
I know there are people who would tell me, "Geo, even if there are enough good valid references to support an article on the topic Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan surely you realize that it would be better to shoehorn all that stuff into the article on Ronald Reagan?" And, no, I strongly disagree with that approach, in general, and in this particular instance.
Why? Because the material you shoehorned into the article on Ronald Reagan could equally well be shoehorned into the article on Impeachment of US Presidents.
We are on a wiki. We should take full advantage of the freedom it offers both authors and readers. The freedom wikis offer authors is they allow the author to go in two different directions. When the topic they are writing about intersects with another topic, they can both continue writing about the original topic, and provide a wikilink to the intersecting topic. People with an urge to merge claim that it is better to have one big article that covers both topics.
I very strongly disagree. I disagree because I think it is a disservice to readers, and because that is not really how the universe of human knowledge should be structured.
Disservice to readers? Writing shorter articles, that are only about a single topic, and are richly wikilinked to related topics provides readers a lot more freedom. When a reader encounters a wikilink, they have a choice. Keep reading the current stream, or jump through the wikilink, because it might be the actual place they can find the information they are looking for. If they follow that wikilink, and after ten seconds, or ten minutes, they decide it didn't have the information they were looking for, returning back to the text where they choice to try something else is trivial... Just hit the back button.
Contrast that with the cognitive burden imposed on the reader when we yield to the urge to merge. They go to some OTHER section of the current article. How? Repeated presses of the arrow keys, or through the use of their browser's find button. And, how do they get back to where they were? More scrolling, or more uses of the find button. Woah. I am generally already using my find button, and every browser I have ever used only remembers the current find search.
It is much more convenient for a reader to follow wikilinks to short articles that are only about a single topic, than to scroll around in big omnibus articles, because returning where you came from is trivial, with the wikilinks, and painful in the omnibus articles. You restore the history, and the talk page, and I will add the provenance subsection, if I initially failed to put it in. George Swan (talk) 14:21, 15 December 2022 (CST)
provenance
Pat, when a smaller article is merged into a larger article, on the wikipedia, the person who squeezed it in is supposed to explicitly say "merging intellectual property from Efforts to Impeach Ronald Reagan", in their edit summary; and, if they think there is no more need for an article on Efforts to Impeach Ronald Reagan, they don't delete it, or call for its deletion. They turn it into a redirect. Not only do they turn it into a redirect, but there is a special template that is left on the redirect that explicitly says something like "do not delete this redirect, because, when this was an article, material was cut from here and pasted into another article, and this page's revision history is required to preserve the chain of provenance."
I was out, when I read the email that told me you deleted the article. I didn't recall whether I had ported the article from the wikipedia, to wikialpha, before I ported it here. Wikialpha contributors put all their contributions into the public domain, so it could be argued that, legally, you did not have to acknowledge re-using public domain material from wikialpha.
However: (1) I ported that article from the wikipedia, without going through wikialpha first; (2) over on the wikipedia someone merged and redirected my original draft there into the wikipedia article List of efforts to impeach presidents of the United States.
I put lots of stuff into the public domain, on wikialpha. So I am prepared to let people re-use material I wrote, without explicitly acknowledging my contribution, but I really do think there are strong reasons to acknowledge the source of material, even if it comes from the public domain, because not doing so can look like plagiarism.
Pat, while I don't generally care if material I wrote is copied without attribution, someone looking at the revision control record of the Ronald Reagan article is very likely to think you wrote those three paragraphs. And, if they compared them to the similar three paragraphs in List of efforts to impeach presidents of the United States it would look like you copied them directly from the wikipedia, without attribution.
As above, I think the article should have remained a stand-alone article, that parallel articles on the efforts to impeach other presidents should also be standalone articles. Why? The duplication issue you addressed a week or two ago.
If material was going to be cut and pasted an edit summary should have said where it came from.
The revision history of the article where the merged material came from should be preserved. I generally tried to leave a "provenance" subsection on the talk pages of any articles I ported from elsewhere. If I thought I was the sole author on the other site, I always wanted to say so. I should have left a Talk:Efforts_to_impeach_Ronald_Reagan#provenance. I don't know if I did, because you deleted the talk page, as well. George Swan (talk) 14:21, 15 December 2022 (CST)
This happened to me here once. I'd written a detailed account of the history of the House of Lords in that article. The late Nick Gardner thought it was out of proportion to the size of the article as a whole. I suggested it might be a separate article, History of the House of Lords. Nick, without thinking about the issues you're talking about here, did that, resulting in an article that looked like he'd written it (I don't know whether he'd have wanted the credit). It took some time to work through the then bureaucracy, who evetually left it to me to add a suitable note. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:52, 16 December 2022 (CST)
George, I did not know the provenance of the deleted stub. Please feel free to put a note on the Talk page saying that you wrote that section and copied it over from wherever, before it got merged into the main article. Nothing was linking to that stub, and there are at present no other articles about attempts to impeach other presidents, or sections in president articles about impeachment (though there is occasional brief mention), nor any article about presidential impeachment generally. If someone wants to write that, they can link directly to the section about impeachment using a bookmark: Ronald_Reagan#Efforts_to_impeach [[Ronald_Reagan#Efforts_to_impeach]]. For now, I propose to leave the information as part of the Ronald Reagan article because it's relevant there and more likely to be found. The wiki search now can find any article even containing the word "impeach" or "impeachment", making it possible for someone in future to pull all this kind of info together. If someone *does* undertake such an article, we can split the information off again and point over to it. Can you live with that?Pat Palmer (talk) 09:16, 16 December 2022 (CST)
WRT the provenance of any material anyone would want to copy? In every simple case isn't the provenance in the revision history? I suggest it should be considered best practice, when copying content from one article to another, to always state, in the edit summary, which article the copied material came from.
Contributors to Citizendium and Wikipedia agree to release most of their intellectual property rights, when they click the Save changes button. But one key right they retain is the right to have their contributions acknowledged. This is, I think, not a mere courtesy, but an actual legal obligation.
WRT me putting a note, on Talk:Ronald Reagan, stating I was the author of those paragraphs... I don't know how to say this more tactfully. The obligation in the licenses we use, to ackowledge earlier contributors, when material is copied, is on the copier.
WRT to incoming links to Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan... well, I should made sure that, at least, the Ronald Reagan article linked to it. Sorry for that. But the fact clicking the what links here button doesn't find incoming Citizendium wikilinks doesn't mean that no one linked to the article. Citizendium's goal was to offer citable articles. Citable articles guarantees incoming links from outside the Citizendium, that won't show up through the what links here button. Consequently, in a case like this, where I do not believe you are asserting that the topic of efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan is not worth covering, if the editorial decision is that it should be merged into a larger article, than it should have been turned into a redirect, not deleted.
You write someone "... can link directly to the section about impeachment ... [[Ronald_Reagan#Efforts_to_impeach]] ..." I wrote that I was a protege of Ted Nelson, the guy who coined the term hypertext. In the theoretical ideal hypertext he described, an author would be able to link to anything, even just an iconic phrase. But, using WMF software, as on Citizendium or Wikipedia, the wikilink to the article is really the only kind of link that works properly. Wikilinks to subsections within articles work, but only halfway.
The Wikipedia makes EXTENSIVE use of wikilinks to subsections within the pages in the Wikipedia namespace. They are rarely used in article space. In my opinion, because wikilinks to subsections within articles is only partially supported, these links should never be used, in article space.
One of the huge advantages wikilinks have over the plain old everyday URLs of the regular internet is that those links are fragile. In the 18 years I have been contributing to wikis I have seen about half of the newspapers we cite re-arrange their directory hierarchies. Universities do it too. All kinds of institutions do it. And, when they do it all the other places that linked to a specific page in the old hierarchy? Broken. Those links don't work anymore. Most of the time the old page IS still accessable, but in a different spot. Sometimes it is merely hard to find. More often the new location of old page is essentially impossible to find. With wikilinks that isn't true. You move a page, and a redirect is left behind. On the wikipedia there a robot that quietly watches for pages that have recently been moved, checks the incoming links to the old name, and the incoming links that were redirects are quietly changed to point to the new location.
So, wikilinks don't break. Regular wikilinks, that is, the unusual wikilink to a subsection within an article does break.
What happens if someone innocently edits the Ronald Reagan article, and they think it would be an innocent improvement to change the name of that subsection heading from "Efforts to impeach" to "Impeachment efforts"?
Early in my wikipedia career I wrote an article on the iconic phrase "There is a sucker born every minute". When I started that article I knew the phrase was widely associated with circus impressario P.T. Barnum. I was delighted to learn he denied ever saying the phrase, and that scholars backed him up. A few months later someone nominated the article for deletion, arguing that the material in the article really belonged in the article on P.T. Barnum. It was suggested that the article I wrote should be pasted into a subsection of the P.T. Barnum article, and the article on the phrase should be turned into a redirect, [[P.T. Barnum#There is a sucker born every minute]].
So, what happens when the subsection's name is changed? Clicking on the wikilink does take the person away from where they were. But, since that exact phrase is no longer the name of a subsection, the reader is left at the top of the Ronald Reagan article, or the P.T. Barnum article, wondering why the heck they were left there. In the case of that phrase, one author could link to the phrase, not realizing it was a redirect, and another author could trim the subsection heading, and the entire subsection, as off-topic. So, a reader clicks on a link to a phrase, looking for an explanation of the phrase, and finds themselves at a completely unrelated article about some boring old impressario.
I am going to restate an important point I made earlier, that you did not respond to. The topics in the Universe of Human Knowledge are deeply interconnected. Projects like Citizendium and Wikipedia work best when the structure of articles reflects the deep interconnectedness of the real world. That is best achieved with small focussed articles, that confine themselves to a single topic, but are richly connected to the other related topics.
I think we both know this would be a bad idea. And one of the reasons why it would be a bad idea was the person who was interested in some branches, Astrophysics, and Stellar classification (astrophysics), can currently put just those two topics on their watchlist, and skip the rest of Physics. If there is just one article on Physics the watchlist holder gets a watchlist hit when there are updates to the coverage of Physics topics they aren't interested in.
I don't know what you meant when you wrote that the information impeaching Reagan would be "more likely to be found" if it were shoehorned into the article on a related topic, than if it remained in its own standalone article.
You wrote: "The wiki search now can find any article even containing the word 'impeach' or 'impeachment'..." Hold on a second. Is searching for an article the only way someone reading a wiki finds the information they are looking for? Absolutely not. I suggest it is not even the most common way people reading a wiki find the information they are looking for. Sure, they START with a google search for a search term, or they start with typing a search term into the wiki's own search box. But, once they have done that, to find their starting place, and started reading, they should be reading text that is chock full of lovely blue-links. They think to themselves, "that blue link looks promising... maybe that is where I will find the information I really want..."
This is why readers are best served reading a richly connected wiki full of smaller articles that confine themselves to one single topic, and not poorly connected wikis where topics are, arbitrarily, shoehorned into articles on related topics.
I don't know how many wikipedia AFD you participated in. AFD is short for "Articles For Deletion". Keep, merge or delete, are the three outcomes people generally argue for there. And one of the most frustrating things I found was to see multiple people state something like: "I (1)think this article is too short; and (2) its topic is not as significant as this other topic, which already has a longer article; (3) therefore I think it is obvious it should be merged into that larger article! That is where that information REALLY belongs." But then the next commenter down would agree on their first two points, only to insist the only possible merge target was a completely different article! So far as I am concerned, any time the people who think a small article should be merged into a larger article on a related topic, but can't agree on the merge target, that is a crystal clear sign there is a need for the information in that smaller article to stay just where it is, in that smaller article -- so all the related articles can link to it there.
If I return to active participation here I do so as a volunteer. You have said you are the editor-in-chief, and what you say goes. If I was an employee I would have to accept that, or lose my job. If I was an employee, and you pulled rank, I would have to say "I agree to do what you say, boss." I am not an employee. I am a volunteer. No, I don't agree that the article on Ronald Reagan is where that information should remain. I think the information was already where it belonged.
My penultimate point, returning to Astronomy. I said Ted Nelson, the guy who first described hypertext, was my mentor. A point I thought he made very convincingly, in his 1974 book Computer Lib, was that hierarchies were arbitrary. Suppose you and I thought we were the too most senior Astronomers on Planet Earth, and we were collaborating on the definitive Astronomy textbook. We could agree that no one should learn about the links between Red dwarf stars, and the Goldilocks Zone, until they had a firm understanding of Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams, stellar classification. A professor can insist on his or her students learning the subject of their course in the precise order and manner they are sure is the right order. But our readers aren't our students. WRT stellar classification they might already know red dwarfs are the really small dim stars. They don't actually have to understand Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams to understand the habitable zone.
Biologists, who study such things, used to have a pretty rigid hierarchy of Species and Genera, of Kingdoms and Phyla. They thought they knew which species shared common ancestors. And now that we can analyze DNA, it turns out their hierarchy was often surprisingly wrong.
My final point...
Pat, back in March and April, I thanked you, and your colleagues, who worked on the migration to the new server. I was grateful the Citizendium had a new server, and maybe a new start. My thanks for that stands.
You are not the only one who made a big time commitment. I know you know that between April and September I either ported, or wrote brand new, from scratch, a bunch of articles. I don't think you were really aware of how many. I don't actually know, myself, over 200, possibly as many as 300. So, about 2-3 percent of the Citizendium's article base.
I am not bringing that up to brag.
Pat, when I discuss an issue with someone, anyone, I try to remember no matter how smart I used to be, I am fallible, and I could be wrong, and the other guy could be right. It doesn't matter to me whether my correspondent has dyslexia, or their English is imperfect because they learned it as a second language, and still haven't masted it. I always do my best to try to understand their points, because, no matter how smart I used to be I am fallible, and they could be right and I could be wrong.
Pat, I know being editor-in-chief is a heavy responsibility. I know most or all of the burden of site maintenance is on your shoulders. Nevertheless, I committed hundreds of hours of my time to the project, since March, and I am afraid you aren't really making an effort to understand the points I am trying to make. George Swan (talk) 15:39, 19 December 2022 (CST)
In the last five days, you have inundated this forum (which is readable by the entire world) with 4,353 words of verbiage complaining about my having merged a short, unlinked stub into the Ronald Reagan article. I have managed to respond, so far, with 396 words. I understand your dislike of bookmarks. I understand that you want things put back the way they were before I deleted the stub. While I am still considering whether to restore the stub, I have questions. Why the hurry for me to render a judgement about a stub that sat untouched for six months, unlinked, unfinished, without provenance, and with no author note attached? Can I not take a few days to think it over before being accused of not making an effort? Why is this request to restore it being made HERE in a public forum where even non-contributors can see it, instead of on the Ronald Reagan article's Talk page? And finally, why are you ignoring my request that you make complaints "off the record" before trying to resolve them "on the record"? In future, please first post on my Talk page, or on the article's Talk page, or better yet, make use of a private message. None of this needed to be in the public forum. Please don't use the forum in this way.Pat Palmer (talk) 07:15, 20 December 2022 (CST)
Regardless of George's attitude in this instance, you still need to develop a practice of compliance with the legal requirements of the licence (or else change to another, but even then you'd have lots of legacy material). Readers should be able to ascertain authorship by taking obvious steps. This usually means analysing the history. If the information isn't there, there needs to be a notice on the article itself saying where the information can be found (whether the talk page or anywhere else). Peter Jackson (talk) 04:32, 19 December 2022 (CST)
I have placed a notice in Ronald_Reagan#Efforts_to_impeach to clarify this a little, because indeed I was careless in failing to give George credit in the comment when merging the stub. However, George failed to label the stub as being from Wikipedia, so that's on him. Also, I would genuinely appreciate it if you would both consider private messaging me first before issuing a public correction when I make a mistake about something. There is no policy debate going on here that I can see, and I don't want us to become adversarial. Having worked in corporations for decades, I will say that going "on the record" to demand a course correction without having first exhausted private communications can make a lot of enemies. That happened with various people in this wiki in the past, and it's one of the reasons that Larry's inspiring "expert model" approach failed. People got into fights, got their feelings hurt, and lost face. Don't let's do that. It's a management style thing. I've been thinking about wiki communications since I first joined Wikipedia in 2006, and I feel that this is one way in which the wiki way really would benefit from change.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:55, 19 December 2022 (CST)
Funny related story
Decades ago there was a guy who posted about losing a job because a plagiarism detection robot falsely accused him of plagiarism.
Here is what happened:
Early in his career he had published one of the first key papers in a practically brand new field. He had published it so early and so long ago that it appeared on a small circulation mimeographed journal, that was never digitized, and put online.
However, his early paper was so important to the field that people who came after him, found those mimeographed editions, and quoted him.
Fast forward years or a decade or more... he hadn't been active in that field, or maybe any field... I can't remember the details, but he is applying for an academic job, after a gap from being an academic
He is asked to submit a sample of his work.
He decides to get out his old floppy of that early paper that was so seminal in a field that is now well developed.
As a standard practice his potential employers tell a plagiarism detection robot to check the machine readable paper he submitted against a big database of online papers.
The robot finds all kinds of papers that quoted his original paper. The robot concluded that he had plagiarized the later authors who thought his seminal paper was worth quoting.
Actually, it was so long ago, I am not sure whether he was able to get his potential employers to recognize the plagiarism detection robots report was unreliable. George Swan (talk) 14:25, 15 December 2022 (CST)
Sports subgroups
I propose a reduction in these from the current 105 to a more manageable five, with perhaps four others under review.
The five I would retain are Baseball, Cricket, Football, Olympic Games and Tennis. I think Football should be the generic one, however, to house all recognised football variants including association, American, Gaelic, rugby, etc.
Of the other existing subgroups, it may be worth retaining Aquatics and Chess under review. Again under review, we could create two additional generics for Motor Sport and Winter Sports. I think everything else should just go under the Sports Workgroup, although many will also have a place under Olympic Games.
Of all those, I think the only ones with a definite claim to retention are cricket (74 articles and counting) and Olympic Games (only 8 so far but has huge potential). The biggest problem is association football (still only 7) which could easily take off.
I have an open mind on this, I should point out, and if consensus is to delete all the sports subgroups, that will be fine by me. Thanks. John (talk) 18:53, 30 May 2023 (CDT)
Status
I've reduced the number of currently usable groups from 109 to 19 and so there are now 90 empty ones. I would say the 90 can all go. The nineteen have some potential for growth and it's possible we may eventually need to split a few subjects out again. I think we have a basis for the immediate future. I've made sure that the rpl problems at Sport/Related Articles have not resurfaced and the page is presently displaying all icons and definitions. John (talk) 10:10, 24 June 2023 (CDT)
Arg, 105 subgroups seems like way too many. Five seems reasonable. Subgroups can be useful when working intensely within a topic area, but at present, they are all over the place. Kudos to you for the reductioning! Yes, let's delete unused subgroups. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:05, 20 January 2024 (CST)
For example, Accidental release source terms has a citable version and, as it has metadata, is also in CZ Live. Aardvark is an undeveloped article, but is in CZ Live because it has metadata; it also has a definition and a related articles (RA) subpage. 10 Downing Street, however, despite being quite a significant topic, is a lemma article that is not in CZ Live – it has three subpages including a definition, but it lacks metadata.
Although the lemma articles do not need subpages other than a definition, there are 868 subpages in Category:Lemma Subpage which excludes definitions. There are 768 pages in Category:Lemma Related Articles Subpage and all of those are in Lemma Subpage too. The difference of 100 subpages is made up by various Approval, Bibliography, Catalogs, External Links and Video subpages.
Lemma definitions are in Category:Lemma Definition Subpages – there are 7,866 including 10 Downing Street/Definition so there is a shortfall of lemma articles vis-à-vis lemma definitions. There are 1,505 lemma definitions without lemma articles. Whether that matters is a moot point because the typical lemma article does nothing more than repeat the definition. 1976 Winter Olympics/Definition is an example of a lemma definition page without a lemma article – creation of the latter is very easy just by clicking on the article link which precedes the definition. Some lemma articles have additional text and should probably be promoted to main article status with metadata.
At present, I don't know if there are any lemma articles without a lemma definition but that can easily be established so I'll come back with that one.
I'm posting findings to date because I would like to know what others think about how to resolve the lemma scenario. For example, should there be a drive to identify those for which we have no use or which are contrary to our objectives? Should there be a drive to create metadata for significant topics like 10 Downing Street or should we just be content with definition only lemma pages whose topics meet our requirements? Thanks for your time. John (talk) 05:04, 28 July 2023 (CDT)
A bit of time and effort needed to do a deskcheck but there are no lemma articles without a definition, which is probably good. John (talk) 06:28, 28 July 2023 (CDT)
As a rule of thumb, such definitions that are pointed to by 1 or 0 articles can probably be deleted. But definitions pointed to by 3 or more substantial articles probably should NOT be deleted. Just my two cents worth. I guess we have to look at each case individually, but rules of thumb can also be helpful. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:08, 20 January 2024 (CST)
Is this a problem with Related Articles?
I noticed a lot of Fireboat/Related Articles didn't have definitions. I started adding missing definitions, starting at the top.
By my count the first 26 entries show up, but the definitions for the lower entries don't... at least not for me...
On November 29th I added more definitions, and some of those don't show up... Plus I know some of the other entries already had definitions, which aren't showing up...
As bugs go this doesn't seem very serious. But I thought I would record it... George Swan (talk) 18:50, 30 November 2023 (CST)
Hi George. This seems to be a problem with the {{rpl|Article name}} template (and other similar templates). When a long list of them are displayed on one page, as on Fireboat/Related Articles, only the first dozen or so show up, and subsequent ones do not. I think it is some kind of software buffering problem in Mediawiki having to do with templates, and I have no idea how to fix it. Just for example, if you moved Eldon Trinity to the top of the list on that page, its definition would then show up (but the bottom definition now showing would probably drop off). The best we can do for now is live with it. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:50, 20 January 2024 (CST)
And to clarify, the rpl (and similar) templates that grab a definition can also fail if the article's Metadata page has a syntax glitch anywhere in it. But that is a different issue than we are seeing there on the Fireboat/Related Articles page.Pat Palmer (talk) 09:51, 20 January 2024 (CST)
Missing topics
While we should not take too much notice of RationalWiki, they are right about one thing.
One of my beefs about CZ is that far too many of our articles concern obscure topics including individual members of the Taliban, individual nuclear missiles, individual US government administrators and the like. The counterpoint to such excess is the omission of topics that readers would expect to find. RW have listed many of our omissions and, to be fair, the redlinks predominate and the bluelinks are stubs.
I think we should build our own list of missing topics, and the RW ones below can serve as our starter for ten:
That's quite a bundle. We don't need comprehensive articles to clear the redlinks but we do need some good starts to get all these up and running. Thanks. John (talk) 09:04, 14 January 2024 (CST)
I like your list ! And, we are in agreement that this will never be the sort of "complete" encyclopedia that, say, Wikipedia or its recent forks are. But if I were picking the most needed articles, my list would be quite different from your list. For example, on my list (which actually exists in my sandbox), there are all the missing U.S. state capitals. These of course have articles in Wikipedia, but those tend to be very long and confusing, and many read like they are trolled by the local Chamber of Commerce. So in Citizendium, I'm starting created smaller writeups for the capitals that hit on just the main things a visitor from away might need to know about a city if visiting for the first time. Every contributor here would have their own list too. So I think it important that our contributors pick an area they love best and know how to write about, and especially, that they ENJOY writing about. Because working in here needs to be fun and satisfying, or we won't do it. My method of dealing with longer articles with too many redlinks is to remove some of the redlinks and replace them with references pointing out to Wikipedia or another site, so that if anyone isn't sure what that is, they have a pointer for where to go. And of course, having a few redlinks is normal in a wiki anyway. What we do urgently need is consistency in naming within topic areas; so for example, I renamed all the U.S. state articles to be following by (U.S. state), and they now all have dismbig pages too. So I'm arguing for us to focus on quality, rather than quantity. We'll never be able to claim usefulness based on completeness, but we can already claim it for quite a few articles in terms of quality writing, simple and readable introductions that contain the most important points, and objectivity of viewpoint as compared with Wikipedia. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:39, 20 January 2024 (CST)
I agree. I have my own list (nowhere near complete) at redlinks. It would be good if we all kept something like that which is visible as it might generate ideas. John (talk) 00:13, 21 January 2024 (CST)
Proposals for deletion
Unless there is an obvious need to delete an article immediately (e.g., duplication, hoax), a request must be made in compliance with CZ:Article Deletion Policy and CZ:Proposed for deletion. This is essentially achieved by placing {{PropDel}} at the top of the article, above {{subpages}}. The article will not then be deleted for at least one month to allow reasonable time for discussion, consensus or withdrawal. Discussion should be opened on the article's talk page.
A list of proposals is held on Category:Articles for deletion which is automatically populated by the PropDel template. The manual tabulated list in CZ:Proposed for deletion has been terminated because it was tiresome and tedious (who on Earth would build such a thing?).
If you have any ideas about we can improve this process, please let us know.
Thanks very much. John (talk) 05:24, 20 January 2024 (CST)
John, I have comments on some of the proposed deletions. Where do we make comments? On each article's Talk page? Pat Palmer (talk) 09:26, 20 January 2024 (CST)
And one other comment--how can we tell how long a given article has been proposed for deletion already, and for what reasons? Might it be useful to place a section about this on each article's Talk page? I don't know the answer either, just asking. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:28, 20 January 2024 (CST)
Hi, Pat. The discussion should always be on the article's talk page, as per the policy and PFD pages.
The dating process is one I really needed to think about because we can't justify anything so complex as WP:AFD. As we had already gone down the category route and, given that we are never going to have huge numbers of nominations, I thought about using some kind of monthly procedure.
Anyway, I've gone ahead with generation of the month in the name of the sub-category, so that everything nominated this month goes into Category:Articles for deletion January, and I propose that nothing in that category may be deleted until 16 March earliest which leaves six to ten weeks for a discussion to commence. February nominations will stay until 16 April, and so on.
I realise this is all a bit rough-and-ready but, unless we really need something sophisticated, it should do the job adequately.
I've updated the policy and instruction pages and also placed some notes on each of the monthly categories (have only created three so far), but you may wish to amend or expand those depending on how they comply with CZ policies overall. John (talk) 00:10, 21 January 2024 (CST)
Actually, I've had second thoughts because I've missed a trick here. I used the current month function for categorisation but I forgot that any changes to an article in the next month will cause its recategorisation into that month. That being so, anything proposed will keep moving forward, so to speak, if and while someone is working on it. On the other hand, a proposal with no interest will remain in its original month and, that being the case, I don't think we should retain it for two months and more. So, I think anything posted in January should now be deleted on or after 16 February if no one has objected or tried to improve the article. I'll take the initiative and go with that for the time being. John (talk) 10:24, 7 February 2024 (CST)
John, Please be sure to check "What Links Here" and also look at who originally wrote the article. I just removed the {{PropDel}} template from Agricultural Adjustment Administration and created Metadata and added some details to that stub. It is being linked from three legitimate articles and is in a cluster originally written by historian Richard Jensen about the U.S. Great Depression, so even though it's sparse, I see no reason to remove it altogether. I may or may not have time to check out all the rest of the January deletions, but please examine this with this rule of thumb in mind: if linked to by three legitimate articles, maybe do not delete but instead categorize it as needing fleshing out. Thanks for you efforts. Most of the stubs you marked do indeed need zapping. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:12, 8 February 2024 (CST)
Could people please take a look at the comments I just wrote on Talk:American Center for Law and Justice? Is it reasonable to zap a whole cluster of messy, out of date, possibly inaccurate or at least unobjective, articles and stubs? I doubt whether it is helpful just to delete a single stub of such a cluster, because it makes the remaining parts of the gnarly mess even less noticeable. Could I get some other opinions, please? Pat Palmer (talk) 10:07, 8 February 2024 (CST)
John, you initially started a central list of articles that you thought should be deleted. Then you changed your mind, and asked that the discussion as to whether articles be kept or deleted should take place on their talk pages.
I am going to suggest something different. I started subpages, off the talk pages of some of those articles.
This subpage is just for the rationale(s) for keep or delete.
I am going to suggest that, if it is possible to add a new class of subpage to every article that every article could usefully have a specific place to discuss whether it should be kept or deleted, distinct from its talk page.
This page can be transcluded. That is what I did with these. I transcluded them on the usual talk page. And I also transcluded them to User:George Swan/propdel discussions, so the discussions can all be seen, at once.
If other people think this is a good approach, the central discussion should probably be in the CZ namespace, like CZ:Keep or delete discussions/2004-02.
If other people think this is a good approach, and we can integrate the Rationale page into the who subpage hierarchy, I think the Rationale page should be preserved, even if the decision is made to delete the article, as the discussion there will be relevant when similar articles are considered for deletion.
Maybe "rationale" is not the best title... George Swan (talk) 13:13, 10 February 2024 (CST)
I've begun working through this list to make corrections and remove any redundancies. There is a real problem with some 40-plus HCB pages which concern the Pinnacle nuclear program and its offshoots. We already have several of these in PropDel but the situation is far worse than that would suggest because the pages are not so much double redirects as tangled ones.
There are a number of what seem to be useful definitions and I've hard-copied them into United States nuclear surety/Related Articles under Incident reporting. Having saved those, there is no reason to keep the stubs but, because of the mess, I'm taking unilateral action and deleting them all now instead of using PropDel. It all looks as if HCB changed his mind about titles several times and didn't bother to clean up the leftovers. A complete shambles. John (talk) 02:39, 9 February 2024 (CST)
Thank you, John. Much appreciated. Pat Palmer (talk) 11:47, 9 February 2024 (CST)
Which articles are going to draw new readers to the Citizendium...
In a recent comment John suggested that if the Wikipedia didn't have an article on a topic the Citizendium should take the hint, and not cover that topic.
In my opinion, the wikipedia has a kind of auto-immune disorder. That is why excellent policy-compliant contributors end up being permanently blocked. And, another symptom is that good valid articles on topics that should be covered, get deleted due to someone's prejudice against the topic.
I started articles on Bernie Madoff's two sons, Andrew Madoff and Mark Madoff, and two of his daughters-in-law, Stephanie Mack and Catherine Hooper. No one has challenged whether his sons were notable, in their own right. But both articles on his daughters-in-law were deleted.
The arguments to delete the article on Stephanie Mack were very brief instances of IDONTLIKEIT, based on the claim "she is just Bernie Madoff's daughter-in-law," ignoring the fact that her memoir made the NYTimes bestseller list. The wikipedia has a tool that keeps track of how many times a page is opened. Mack's article was opened about 700,000 times -- that was about 1000 times a day.
A day or two ago I did a google search on Catherine Hooper. In the last decade or so google offers a short paragraph about the subject of the search. And, almost all of the time, if the topic has a wikipedia article google shows readers the first several sentences of the first paragraph of the wikipedia article.
I was very pleasantly surprised when I googled Catherine Hooper. Google showed readers the first several sentences of the Citizendium article.
I like that.
I suggest that opics that are notable, and apt to attract a lot of readers, that have never been covered by the wikipedia, or where the wikipedia has erased the article for some stupid reason, are very good topics for the Citizendium to cover. George Swan (talk) 13:40, 10 February 2024 (CST)
Dangerous nonsense
According to the former military historian: "While westerners may think of Pakistan principally in terms of terrorism in Central Asia...." before banging on about the dangers of nuclear war between India and Pakistan.
That sort of stuff is irresponsible editing. The article in question was called Pakistani policy towards India and it was appallingly bad when it was written, even more so when you read it now some fifteen years later. You may think I am being over-zealous in deleting a lot of the sensitive stuff but it is because of statements like that which are based not on military or historical or political expertise, but on ignorance. John (talk) 13:55, 14 February 2024 (CST)
I agree, and I'm finding a shocking amount of it. The fact is, in the past, the large community in here often were able to write with no oversight whatsoever, because the numbers overwhelmed the editorial staff at the time. Anyway, cleanup in the present time seems like a good idea to me, especially of articles that are now many years old but are written as if they are in the present tense. If no one has the energy to improve those, let's nominate them for deletion. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:16, 16 February 2024 (CST)
There are an unbelievable number of articles whose context is "here and now". I have picked up a few on Afghan and Pakistani provinces, for example, converting them into geographical mainly. Others are hopeless cases and all we can do is get rid. John (talk) 14:06, 16 February 2024 (CST)
Biographies of living persons
I have copied the following from my Talk page because this discussion may result in some eventual revision of CZ:Content_Policy as well as, possibly, other documentation. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:20, 16 February 2024 (CST)
Hi, Pat. I've not a lot of time for the next three days because family are visiting but we've just been chatting about CZ and one of my daughters has made a useful suggestion.
She is puzzled by the Topic Informant classification and thinks we should simplify how we categorise living person biographies (BLP) by having a Biographies category with a Living Persons sub-category. On the face of it, this seems a good idea to me. I think we'd have to augment it by insisting that all BLPs must have a metadata completed and that no BLP can be a lemma. Also, of course, anyone creating a BLP must be able to demonstrate the subject's significance. For example, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are significant, but is Jeff Zients (whose name I plucked out of a list)? I would add that everything we write in a BLP article must be verified by citation of a reliable source, especially if the person is controversial in some way.
Just one for us to think about as it might be a way towards better control of BLP creation and content. John (talk) 04:22, 16 February 2024 (CST)
I had never heard of Jeff Zients, either. 15 seconds with google taught me he is Joe Biden's Chief of Staff. That is a very important position.
His wikipedia article has been read something like 316,000 times. George Swan (talk) 11:42, 16 February 2024 (CST)
Wikipedia:Jeff_Zients is important for the moment, yes, but Wikipedia already has an extensive article about him, and it's actually not bad, so I'm reluctant to leave the one we have unless someone is going to invest the time to make it better than WP's. Thus, his name and function might well appear in CZ's Joe Biden article, but instead of linking to a CZ stub article on Zients, we can just add a Footnote/Reference pointing to WP, or one is actually able to link directly to Wikipedia like this: [[Wikipedia:Jeff_Zients]]. That would be my preference in cases of minor figures like this. Oddly, WP's Notability policy gets anyone mentioned in the press a lot an article, but makes it damned difficult to add articles about people who, in life, are probably important to many people but are being ignored by the press, such as (just for example) Paul Prestopino, a man who played on tracks from dozens of leading rock musicians in the 60's through 80's and was well-known across the music industry. After he passed away, it took me six months to get the article about him approved in Wikipedia (because Paul never sought the limelight), even though 70 articles in Wikipedia were already pointing off to a non-existent article about him. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:07, 16 February 2024 (CST)
BTW I agree that Topic Informants is not a helpful Workgroup at this point, but we need some method of grouping together all the articles about living people, and reengineering Topic Informants is beyond my capacity at the moment. The code implementing Workgroups is tough to deal with. I like the idea of a Living Persons Biography category, but if we're going to create that, we need to decide what the criterion is for it. I think it's important not to keep adding mid-level professionals to the wiki, confining ourselves to people with tangible accomplishments: books, recordings, films, other works of art, writing plays that have had a long successful run (not necessarily beginners who have won a single award but whose work has not withstood the test of time), holding high office (senator, congressperson, member of parliament, head of state, cabinet member, etc.). This is an incomplete list; being the top general in a war, state or federal judge, etc. should also count. Being White House chief of staff is a very powerful position in that this person can to some extent gate who has personal access to the president, but the position is temporary, and that person is, at least in theory, not really the one "driving the bus", so to speak. After his/her president leaves office, that person becomes (once again) just another party loyalist available for hire by others, unless they decide to run for office on their own (as did, for example, Rahm Emanuel who became mayor of Chicago, which probably does warrant having a bio in here. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:07, 16 February 2024 (CST)
I would like to explain my priorities about Citizendium, which are very different than those which Larry Sanger likely had when he created this wiki. I think we should delete the Citizendium article about Slawko Klymkiw. Citizendium is not in the business of cataloging every person who gets a job. Any info about this guy should probably be under an article about the Canadian Film Centre, if someone wants to create that, but this person does not warrant an article just because his name was mentioned in the press. I would like us to stop thinking of normal professionals, mid-grade military people, and people with minor YouTube channels as if they deserve encyclopedia articles about them. This wiki is not a media outlet, and it is not its purpose to preserve the myriad of details that the media publishes. Mid-grade bureaucrats, however interesting aspects of their lives may be because they were alleged to have given Colin Powell false information or whatever, are already documented in the press whose editions now remain online in perpetuity. Most of them are also documented more thoroughly in Wikipedia. In my view, the only reason for duplicating any article from WP in CZ is if we think CZ can somehow substantially improve it with better writing, additional information, or a complete shift of emphasis. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:45, 16 February 2024 (CST)
I think you have hit the nail on the head with "test of time". That should be a key qualifier for all BLPs except a newcomer who suddenly leaps into the spotlight, and then we would have to decide if that particular spotlight is bright enough. So, I would definitely support Paul Prestopino on test of time. There will be a lot of grey areas, and the newcomer will be especially difficult. For example, if the director of a potential Hollywood blockbuster should cast a hitherto unknown actor in the lead role (think of Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind), I don't think that actor should get an article until, say, they have been cast as the lead in a second film. No doubt the actor will quickly gain a WP article and I think we should then fall back on the rule that, if someone here can write a better article than WP (not actually difficult!), then go for it.
But, I do think we should have a rule that if an article about a relatively unknown or unimportant person is started, it must be quickly developed to substantial coverage and not just left here as a stub. If a person is deemed to be important enough for a BLP, they are important enough for the article to be substantial.
Btw, I don't think Mr Zients should have an article now but, if his career goes onwards and upwards in the course of time, maybe someday. John (talk) 14:02, 16 February 2024 (CST)
Here is an example of why I am urging writers to disambiguate article names about living persons: See the comment I left on Talk:Charlotte_Martin, which is proposed for deletion. That short article is getting lots of hits every month from Google, but it is pretty clear that the searchers are hoping to find info about a contemporary singer of the exact same name rather than a groupie from the 1960's. Pat Palmer (talk) 08:51, 17 February 2024 (CST)
Topic Informant Workgroup - do we need a category "Living Persons" instead?
I've been taking a look at the Topic Informant Workgroup. I believe that over the years, contributors started just using it as a bucket place to deposit biographies of living persons. I don't know of a single case that actually meets the definition given in the Workgroup itself of a famous person who has given this wiki explicit permission to quote them. Also, there are companies and things in there that are not even people. We definitely need a place to group our articles which are about living persons so that we can review them from time to time and so we can look at the collection of them and decide whether we need specific policies in how to name the, how much longer than a mere definition or stub they need to be, what kind of intro they need to have, that they not be written in the present tense as though nothing is ever going to change, and possibly, whether there is another source elsewhere online (such as Wikipedia or other online encyclopedias) that have a much better article about these persons that CZ does.
It there exists an obviously better external article about the person that seems to be stable, and if there are only a very few links to the CZ article on this person, it might make sense to convert the links to the person article into a reference pointing out to the other article.
The question is, should we continue using this workgroup wrongly, or should be break down and start a category of "Living Persons"? (I do not prefer "Biographies of Living Persons", as most CZ articles will not be anywhere near what I would call a biography.) There are not so very many articles in the workgroup and it should be possible to clean it up and apply the new Category, if we decide to, to any articles of living people that we can find. What do others think? Pat Palmer (talk) 13:45, 17 February 2024 (CST)
I've given this some thought, Pat, but I'm afraid this is a flying visit. I'll come back to you tomorrow or on Monday. Busy, busy, busy today. John (talk) 14:26, 17 February 2024 (CST)
I can enlarge on this but I think two words to be kept in mind are noteworthy and affiliation. Is a person really noteworthy or merely newsworthy? Is a person noteworthy in his or her own right or only through affiliation with a noteworthy person or organisation? Members of a famous team or club may not be noteworthy except by affiliation with that team or club. The same applies to family members, business associates, political/administrative appointees, cast members and the like.
If affiliation stands a test of time, however, then there is a strong case for inclusion. A good example would be a footballer who has played for a top-class team for umpteen years without becoming a star performer but has created a most appearances record. He has been there so long that people automatically associate him with that team. It's something of a syndrome but I think long-term value is relevant. John (talk) 03:23, 18 February 2024 (CST)
The TIW is certainly a bucket and, as you say, is not fit for its stated purpose. I see we have people called IBM and Someone College in there too. Of the 316 articles it contains, many should undoubtedly be in PropDel. I'll be happy to work through them and make sure they are all in other workgroups such as Politics, Sports and Theater which between them will probably account for the majority.
As for classifiying them as both people and living persons, I suggest a new People Workgroup and affiliated to it a Living Persons Subgroup, which will probably be co-affiliated to the other main workgroups. We could have a Historic Persons Subgroup too. I don't think we should use Biographies anywhere because we only have a handful that qualify. Most people articles are pen pictures or profiles only.
It will be easy enough to edit the metadatas of all these so if you give me the go-ahead, I'll make a start tomorrow when I'll have more time.
Sitewide, I really like the WP reference link which is neat, and we should make liberal use of it. John (talk) 05:04, 18 February 2024 (CST)
I have mixed feeling about providing a link that goes directly over to Wikipedia, so when I'm patient enough to bother, instead of linking, I provide a footnote directing off to Wikipedia instead. It's more work, but it's also less likely that the reader will leave this site and end up "over there". Pat Palmer (talk) 15:49, 18 February 2024 (CST)
That's a good point. We need to keep them here. Maybe we should go into WP and set up CZ links in their articles :-) John (talk) 16:23, 18 February 2024 (CST)
Alternative medicine, homeopathy, and pseudoscience
Hi, Pat. Working through the double redirects, I came across a submission for editorial by Hayford, with whom I used to enjoy some very interesting chats about sport. In that, Hayford said what he thought about the editorial presence of certain persons who were noted for their serious advocation of subjects like alternative medicine, homeopathy, and pseudoscience. I'm sure you know who he was talking about. Within Category:Pseudoscience Subgroup and Category:Complementary and alternative medicine Subgroup, there are a total of 68 articles, many of which are common to both groups.
I strongly recommend that all of these are summarily deleted, plus any others which have escaped the two nets.
Rightly or wrongly, people who take such subjects seriously are generally dismissed as "cranks" or conspiracy theorists. I remember the arguments that went on about this stuff in the 2000s and the flak which CZ received for granting the "certain persons" free reign in promoting it, especially as anyone who objected was told to shut up or be banned. CZ has moved on from the 2000s and we are looking to attract new editors and a wider circulation. That means we must present coverage which is authentic and based on fact, so that we establish a reputation for credibility.
We cannot achieve those aims if critics can point to FIVE articles about homeopathy when we have only one about American football, for example, and heaps of redlinks. We are doing the right thing in deleting Howard's depressingly negative minutiae about terrorism, bureaucracy, and nuclear destruction. That stuff deters new readers because it's bad news they don't want to be reminded of, but crackpot theories like homeopathy generate derision.
It's your decision, of course, but I really do think we need to make a statement of positive intent by removing these articles. John (talk) 00:13, 1 March 2024 (CST)
Please don't do anything to these categories until I have a chance to take a look. I'm crazy busy (tax season and sick friends) so it might be a few days. But thanks for a heads up. I don't know about Britain, but in the U.S., both acupuncture and chiropractic are regulated and licensed, are widely accepted, and even insurance usually pays for them in certain circumstances, so those at least are not fringe topics. Functional doctors are also common these days in the U.S.; they work with patients on preventive measures, are expensive, and insurance generally does not pay for them--but, they are licensed M.D.'s and not quacks. And generally, I feel that for what might be fringe topics, CZ might have an article on them as long as it is written with some objecticity and is not advocacy. So, I'll take a look--and again, it may take me a while. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:01, 1 March 2024 (CST)
No problem, Pat. As you say, it was just a heads up. I hope your friends will be well again soon. All the best. John (talk) 11:28, 1 March 2024 (CST)
seeking community feedback on policy revisions regarding articles about living persons, naming conventions, and stubs/definitions
I am a big believer in having few rules, and for four years, I resisted any serious revision of content policy in this wiki. However, I have now found it necessary to lay out some guidelines for naming conventions (regarding especially disambiguation of place and person names) and content policy (regarding especially articles about living persons and little-linked stubs/definitions). If you have time and interest, please look at recent revisions to CZ:Content_Policy and CZ:Naming_conventions and leave your reactions either here or on the article Talk pages. I will seriously consider your feedback. Pat Palmer (talk) 12:28, 9 March 2024 (CST)
Discussion area for all technical issues, including non-content templates, server issues and extensions (bug reports/outages: send an email to manager A T citizendium.org)
It is not yet possible to create a new article with subpages automatically. It requires code from an ancient extension that no longer works with the upgraded software. If we cannot get that going in the near future, we could look into a new way of grouping the subpages for articles in the future. For now, please just wait until we figure out what to do. Sorry for the inconvenience. And it is possible to create new articles now without subpages, or create the subpages structure manually (see below). Pat Palmer (talk) 11:09, 18 March 2022 (CDT)
I like the new software. Keep up the good work. David MacQuigg (talk) 11:42, 20 March 2022 (CDT)
Thank you, David! Sergei Chekanov led the effort, and John Stephenson helped with testing. I'm so grateful to them both. Pat Palmer (talk) 15:29, 20 March 2022 (CDT)
Logging in: underscores required in username
When I log in, I cannot use a space character but must use an underscore in my username: "Mark_Widmer" The old site used to allow the space character. Mark Widmer (talk) 15:43, 19 March 2022 (CDT)
This is probably fixable by someone more expert than I but we'll need to live with it for now, sorry. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:06, 24 March 2022 (CDT)
images from the wikimedia commons
I found, recently, that the Citizendium will directly use images from the wikimedia commons. They don't have to be downloaded and then uploaded here.
Has this always worked, or is this an improvement coming from the recent software upgrade?
Should I worry about images I did import?
Cheers! George Swan (talk) 07:02, 23 March 2022 (CDT)
Until now I hadn't been aware that this was possible. It turns out to be a default setting on more recent versions of the wiki software. It's called 'InstantCommons' and you can read more here. We have no rule for or against this. See also this thread. John Stephenson (talk) 07:29, 23 March 2022 (CDT)
To do it, add code like this to a page: [[File:Wikimedia-Commons-filename.jpg|thumb|Caption of a picture from Wikimedia Commons embedded in this Wiki]]Pat Palmer (talk) 09:33, 25 March 2022 (CDT)
Here is an argument in favour of porting images... I believe instances of File usage, like the following, will only point to citizendium-local uses of the image when the image has been explicitly ported.
Currently, if I am not mistaken, the Citizendium has a more modest cap to the maximum size of images than the commons. This would be an advantage when accessing a large image, still hosted on the commons, over accessing a modest sized copy, hosted here.... I think this changes my mind to favouring keeping the instant commons feature turned on. Cheers! George Swan (talk) 16:45, 3 April 2022 (CDT)
George, the size cap was raised a bit on the new server.Pat Palmer (talk) 12:10, 17 April 2022 (CDT)
Issues with existing subpages articles
Much of the code from the old wiki for subpages is kaput. If you want create a subpage which is currently empty, DO NOT click on the subpages header to open it. Instead, explicitly put the subpage title onto the end of the browser's the URL, like this (a link to a Related Articles subpage): https://citizendium.org/wiki/FC-MSR_nuclear_reactor/Related_Articles . I hope we'll eventually get this fixed, but please be careful in the meantime. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:04, 24 March 2022 (CDT)
We have found it is possible to add subpages to an article manually, but it's cumbersome. Unless you know all about that, just ask me to do it for you in the meantime. Pat Palmer (talk) 11:23, 25 March 2022 (CDT)
save your User Contributions (offline) from the old server
In case people haven't noticed, User contributions from before the software upgrade in Mar 2022 are now lost. This was unavoidable since we had to re-create user accounts. See the item below for how to save your User Contributions list offline for future reference. Pat Palmer (talk) 14:20, 24 March 2022 (CDT)
old server available for a limited time
The old server is up and running again, and will be available for you to look back in for a limited time at https://czold.org/. It will die on May 20 of this year. Note that the certificate is wrong, so you will need to click past the browser warnings and tell the browser to accept the risk and continue. The one thing you might want to look at in the old server is your past user contributions. To do that, go to your User page and then look in menus at the lower left for "User Contributions". Set it to show 500 items, then save each page on your desktop. For those articles you are interested in, to get them back on your watchlist, you'll need to make a tiny edit on each article here in the new server. The old server will only be up for a few more weeks. Also, watch out--certain links on the old server will send you to this new server. Pat Palmer (talk) 07:44, 25 March 2022 (CDT)
I've been going through my contribution history on the old server, to verify and complete a list of all the articles I started. One of the articles I started Huzaifa Parhat, was deleted, when an editor claimed he was adequately covered in other articles. George Swan (talk) 12:15, 25 March 2022 (CDT)
Well, the Detainee Treatment Act closed off habeas corpus appeals for guantanamo captives. It substituted a narrow and complicated alternate appeal process. Nevertheless, some captives, including Parhat, started to have their cases reviewed under this process. Parhat was the only individual to complete this process, and so I don't think he can be adequately covered in Uighur detainees in Guantanamo as that editor claimed. George Swan (talk) 12:15, 25 March 2022 (CDT)
Am I correct that deleted material, like this page, can only be restored by using the old server? George Swan (talk) 12:15, 25 March 2022 (CDT)
George, we did bring over the article histories, so I think you can find old article versions via that. But you can't find old User Contributions from the User's page that occurred from before the migration. Pat Palmer (talk) 12:57, 25 March 2022 (CDT)
I think this will mean that no articles deleted, prior to the upgrade, can be restored once the old server is retired. Have I got that right? George Swan (talk) 13:58, 25 March 2022 (CDT)
Seems like. This is the kind of thing leading us to pay for the old server for a few weeks. You can restore it on the old server and copy it over--up until May 20. I hated losing anything but the software was so outdated, we are lucky to be able to upgrade at all. Pat Palmer (talk) 15:06, 25 March 2022 (CDT)
I know the upgrade cost people - you, John, and some other people, two or three weeks of late nights, and, I imagine, a bunch of unpredictable, stressful, problems. So, thanks for all that hard work. I know I said that before.
Because it was deleted I need to ask if someone who has administrator authority on the old server could restore it, there. I am probably the sole contributor, so if I cut and paste it to the new server there should be no attribution worries.
Restored on the old server. John Stephenson (talk) 18:17, 25 March 2022 (CDT)
John the email I got telling me the old server would be available said to look for it at. http://208.100.31.41/ That URL brings me to the new server. Is the old serve available, on 2022-03-28? Should I try a different IP address?
As stated in the original post, the OLD server is at https://czold.org/ until May 20 of this year. Note that the old server has a pink SiteNotice on every page. The IP address you had is for the new server, and that is a bad way to go it. Go in to the new server at https://citizendium.org/. Pat Palmer (talk) 16:30, 28 March 2022 (CDT)
session timeout while editting
I am repeatedly encountering an annoying timing problem when I edit pages. If it takes more than maybe 1 minute for me to compose my edit while the Editor is open, saving the edit fails with the following error message: Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. You might have been logged out. Please verify that you're still logged in and try again. If it still does not work, try logging out and logging back in, and check that your browser allows cookies from this site. And then when I save the page again after this message (because the Editor is still open), the changes are lost. This is happening to me numerous times in an hour. Has anyone else experienced this? Pat Palmer (talk) 08:57, 28 March 2022 (CDT)
Yes, much the same. Fortunately, experience on Wikipedia long ago got me into the habit of copying the text onto the computer before trying to save it on the wiki. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:27, 1 April 2022 (CDT)
Actually, the same only in effect. I don't get the message. Instead it just logs me out. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:30, 1 April 2022 (CDT)
Well, I should say I didn't notice any such message. The system also seems to log me out if I don't do anything for a while, and/or go to another window. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:37, 2 April 2022 (CDT)
Or maybe sometimes if I just go to a different page here. It's hard to say without a lot of tedious controlled experiments what the actual determining factor(s) is/are. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:42, 2 April 2022 (CDT)
I remember we had this problem on Wikinfo. Maybe User:Fred Bauder would remember how it was solved. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:46, 4 April 2022 (CDT)
Now it's happened again I can confirm there's no message as above, just one saying restricted to Users. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:15, 5 April 2022 (CDT)
Peter, I will work on this when I can. Pat Palmer (talk) 11:56, 7 April 2022 (CDT)
For now, I am just living with this. It means I sometimes have to try to save my changes more than once. A bit of a nuisance but not a critical problem, nor one easy to track down. Still hoping to solve it eventually. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:10, 17 May 2022 (CDT)
Hope I'm not speaking too soon, but this seems to have been much better in the last few days. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:56, 15 June 2022 (CDT)
Seems to have got worse again. I've had to log in 4 times this morning. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:51, 14 October 2022 (CDT)
I made a stab at working on this today. Let me know if you see a change, for better or worse. Thanks! Pat Palmer (talk) 08:07, 14 October 2022 (CDT)
Hope I'm not speaking too soon, but the upgrade seems to have solved this. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:58, 21 June 2023 (CDT)
The awful session timeout issue does seem to be gone! Relieved! Pat Palmer (talk) 10:23, 21 June 2023 (CDT)
Seems to have started again. I'm often having to log in twice recently. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:48, 1 September 2023 (CDT)
Just noticed a comment I thought I'd made here some time ago hasn't gone through. Basically, it seems I can be logged in on some pages here but not others. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:02, 19 January 2024 (CST)
Because we've lost the automatic creation of articles with subpages, at least for now, I've tried to document how to do it manually. For those who try it out, please comment or improve this article: CZ:Creating_an_article_with_subpages
For the last couple of months I have been (1) copying; (2) pasting; and (3) modifying working Metadata subpages. I opened a new blank Metadata subpage by manually editing the URL in the address bar, adding a "Template:" prefix and "/Metadata" suffix to the actual articles name.
Today I was porting a bunch of related articles, that were all going to have identical "Related Articles" subpages. I created the identical Related Articles before I stated the Metadata subpages.
I noticed the warning this generated had a link to create a Metadata subpage. I clicked on that link, and it brought up a blank Metadata subpage, more of less like it was supposed to. Yeah!
However, it was missing one thing... <noinclude>{{subpages}}</noinclude>
That needs to be there. Maybe it needs to be the last line. George Swan (talk) 08:44, 14 July 2022 (CDT)
Template transclusion
At General election (UK) there's a table of parties headed as of 2017, but in fact I've been keeping the transcluded template pretty well up to date. I went to the source text to try to change the heading but can't find it there. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:24, 1 April 2022 (CDT)
Do you meant this page? Template:UKHouseofCommonsStateoftheParties-tablerows I needed to follow a couple of template calls to find it. I fixed the missing footnote link in it, and it looks like the headers can also be changed there. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:33, 2 April 2022 (CDT)
As it happens, it later occurred to me that that particular template is inappropriate to that article: we want a table of results for a general election, preferably the most recent one (figures at United Kingdom exit from the European Union/Timelines, but need formatting), not the state of the parties now. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:45, 4 April 2022 (CDT)
(Mostly) New Feature list
Here are some (mostly new) features available since the upgrade of the wiki in March 2022:
Help:Cite is a Help file for creating references on article pages.
Cite This Page shows you exactly all the ways to cite an article from this wiki.
Popups shows summaries or /Definition page when you mouse over live links.
SubPage List 3 will list all the subpages of an article.
Syntax High Light will add syntax coloring and line numbers to code snippets of most programming languages.
ZWI Export lets you submit your best articles to The Encyclosphere's experimental database of encyclopedia articles, which can be searched using either EncycloReader or EncycloSearch.
I've had a quick look at the last, which is interesting. A thought: nothing immediately visible about subpage clusters; as our subpage system will sometimes result in main articles that aren't self-contained, we might like to sit down and think about this once you've sorted out all these technical glitches. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:44, 6 April 2022 (CDT)
That's a content issue, to go in that forum in due course. But there are some technical questions here, which can be answered when someone's got time.
What is it that's exported:
a static copy of the page as it was at that moment
or a dynamic transcluded mirror which will follow subsequent changes here?
My previous experience of "export" suggests 1.
If we export 2 pages, one of which has a wikilink to the other, does the link in the resulting Encyclosphere go to
the 2nd page in ES,
the 2nd page here,
an ES search or disambiguation page,
or nowhere?
There's mention of passwords. Does each of us who wants to use this need their own, or will we have a collective one. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:18, 11 April 2022 (CDT)
Similarly, what does the system do with subpages templates? Peter Jackson (talk) 04:54, 12 April 2022 (CDT)
As far as I am aware, a one-time copy of the page contents gets sucked into the Encyclosphere experimental database (which is served by two experimental clients right now, EncycloReader and EncycloSearch). Any author who has made an edit on an article can submit that article, and it remains unchanged over on Encyclosphere until resubmitted. A later planned version of the extension will enable site administrators to export all articles, or all that meet certain conditions, in this way. There will likely also be an option to export articles automatically whenever they're updated. Note that Sergei Chekanov, the admin who did the bulk of the migration work, did the upgrade work for Citizendium in return for allowing us to test his ZWI plugin for Encyclosphere (so Larry helped set this collaboration up). For more details, please message Sergie directly (or leave a query on his Discussion page). Pat Palmer (talk) 11:59, 12 April 2022 (CDT)
There is a password for all of Citizendium which is embedded in its setup files on the server, and authors don't need to know that password to use the extension. It would be ideal to submit some articles, wait a few minutes, then look in the EncycloReader and EncycloSearch clients and report issues to Sergei. I know it grabs some text off the article to display in search results, and this was not being done in an ideal way a few weeks ago (i.e., they were reaching a few characters into the article, I guess to avoid any busywork we have at the top of articles, to grab text, and so the starting text displayed by searches was sometimes odd and not that helpful, as it mostly missed the opening sentence of the article itself. I report this once; but that's the KIND of thing they need to hear about so it can be improved. Pat Palmer (talk) 12:03, 12 April 2022 (CDT)
As for your other questions, I don't know the answers. Sergei would know. But he is not an active contributor on the wiki so it will be necessary to go to his user page and (probably) email him to get details. PS - Encyclosphere is Larry Sanger's current project. Pat Palmer (talk) 12:06, 12 April 2022 (CDT)
If they want us to contribute, they should come to a public forum and explain without needing to be asked privately.
I've just tried samples on the 2 search engines mentioned above. My impression without a thorough exploration is that they already have our articles without our having exported them. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:46, 14 April 2022 (CDT)
Just want to clarify that you can always RE-submit any article already submitted, and that will update the contents over on Encyclosphere within some reasonable period of time (allowing for caching to subside).Pat Palmer (talk) 12:13, 17 April 2022 (CDT)
That would seem to imply that, if WP signs up, only one version of their article can be on ES at a time. If there's feuding over there between different factions for control of an article, that might seem to defeat the objective of ES. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:43, 19 April 2022 (CDT)
EditTools
Are currently not displaying in clickable form (copy-paste?). Peter Jackson (talk) 04:14, 5 April 2022 (CDT)
This, however, has not been corrected by upgrade. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:59, 21 June 2023 (CDT)
I am going to repeat myself
I am going to repeat myself... Thanks to everyone who worked hard on the server upgrade! George Swan (talk) 19:54, 5 April 2022 (CDT)
the problem we had with "no information available" on Google Search seems to have been solved. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:20, 11 April 2022 (CDT)
Traffic to the wiki has also improved, no doubt as a result of the better searchability of the newer software. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:40, 11 April 2022 (CDT)
how to restore image file detailed descriptions, and what licenses are available
We recently noticed that all the images, while present on the new server, are missing their descriptive and license data. We are trying very hard to mass-retrieve this information, but in case we cannot, please take a look at images on articles that you care about and manually update the descriptions as per the following instructions. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:40, 11 April 2022 (CDT)
We have discovered that the old information IS present on the new server and can be retrieved with a copy-and-paste operation to re-insert the original license and description into the File: page for images where it's needed. Click on View history and click to view the first item listed (upon import in Mar 2022). If you go into Edit mode on the original page, its contains text looking something like this:
It will be necessary to copy and paste this original text back into the latest File: page in order to restore the original description and license info for the image. Pat Palmer (talk) 12:04, 17 April 2022 (CDT)
We have been lax in enforcing image licensing due to lack of staff, but be aware that images lacking appropriate license information are subject to removal from the server. Also, not all available licenses are shown in the drop-down list during Upload. Authors can manually edit in (after upload) any one of the PD licenses from MediaWiki:Licenses by placing the license string in curly braces underneath the "Licensing" section. If permission was obtained from the copyright holder, it can be attached by putting a copy of the email or permission letter in a /Permission subpage of the File: page.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:46, 20 April 2022 (CDT)
the archiveurl field of the cite templates
I'm used to filling out an archiveurl field in {{cite}} templates. That didn't seem to be working here, so I fell back to putting the bare-url to the archive between the {{cite}} template and the closing </ref>.
But then, today, when I worked on Solomon_Islands#References, I saw some archive links were being rendered. Can someone explain this?
Old server dying on 5/20; go save your User Contributions
The old server is at https://czold.org/ but will die on May 20. If you have not yet saved your User Contributions from the old server, consider doing so. Just go to the old server, then your User page, and click on User Contributions. Save each page as a web page. User contributions did not make it to the new server because we had to start all the accounts over again. This is because the old server used PostGreSQL and the new one uses MariaDB (MySQL), which is more standard, but over the years, those two databases diverged in how user accounts were stored. Anyway, last call to save your User Contributions off-line. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:41, 11 May 2022 (CDT)
rpl template weird behavior
I am in the process of converting the r templates on Constellation/Related Articles to the rpl template so that we can see the status of each article. However, I notice that status on four of the articles near the end if not showing up as it should. I suspect that something is wrong with the Metadata page for those articles, such as, maybe it isn't in the Template namespace. I'm not sure yet. Just mentioning here that I'm investiaging that. If anyone has ideas, I'd like to hear them. I haven't seen this behavior before now. Pat Palmer (talk) 07:00, 14 June 2022 (CDT)
Changing the article's Metadata status from 2 (Developing, 3 red dots) to 3 (Stub, 2 red dots) seems to clear up the issue. But I don't understand why. Can the wiki tell that an article is a stub? Pat Palmer (talk) 07:05, 14 June 2022 (CDT)
"last updated"
I've just updated one of these: [2]. If we're going to have these at all, shouldn't they be automated? Peter Jackson (talk) 04:49, 30 June 2022 (CDT)
It seems that the last edit date for every article is now available in the fine print of the page footer. Thus, I suggest removing these manually added lines when possible.Pat Palmer (talk) 15:54, 20 December 2022 (CST)
Watchlist notifications
The automated email notice to me of [3] linked to the wrong page, Talk:Bug, which doesn't even exist. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:55, 7 July 2022 (CDT)
I know little about these technical matters, but I'm wondering whether the system might not be programmed to replace spaces with underscores. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:37, 8 July 2022 (CDT)
Peter, I noticed that the comment you left was on a Talk page for a definition. Since definitions don't usually *have* Talk pages, I am not too concerned, as I assume that is why the wiki software got a little confused. If someone creates the main article later, we can move these comments there and everything will act as it should.Pat Palmer (talk) 09:45, 9 July 2022 (CDT)
provenance
I had been putting a section named "provenance" on the talk page of articles I first drafted elsewhere. When elsewhere was the wikipedia, and I think I was the sole author of the intellectual content of the wikipedia version, I should have been using Template:WPauthor2. I am going to go back and fix that.
I figure that template is still appropriate if I copy over a version where later wikipedia contributors have merely edited or added metadata - like references. My understand of the SCOTUS ruling in Fiest v Rural is that metadata is not intellectual content and only intellectual content merits copyright protection, and so doesn't require attribution.
Similarly, in my opinion, trivial changes to spelling, punctuation, capitalization, do not require attribution. And, minor corrections to word order do not require attribution.
In my opinion the addition of at least one new sentence of intellectual content would require attribution of other wikipedia contributors. When there is a wikipedia article I copied, for which I was the primary author of its intellectual content, I have copied the last version for which I think I was the sole author of its intellectual content, when I didn't think the subsequent additions by others were of particular value.
On those occasions I port a wikipedia article for which I am not the sole author of its intellectual content I know there is another template I should use. I can't remember what it was, and I would appreciate a reminder.
Some of the content I ported over was first published not on the wikipedia, but on wikialpha, which is not a WMF project. I don't think a separate template is required there, because, in those cases, I was always, unambiguously, the sole author. George Swan (talk) 08:04, 12 July 2022 (CDT)
Your opinion on the legal position agrees with what I remember reading somewhere in WP itself. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:41, 13 July 2022 (CDT)
There are two commonly used templates: Template:WPAttribution for partial WP content (see Acupuncture point or how it looks), and Template:WPExternalAttribution if fully from WP. You can also go to Special:SpecialPages and look at Lists of Pages and see templates starting with WP under "All Pages starting with Prefix". I have trouble remembering these also, so I go to the special page and look them up with I need them. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:05, 14 July 2022 (CDT)
to include or noinclude...
I've caught myself being inconsistent. Should subpages start with:
<noinclude>{{subpages}}</noinclude>? Or is a mere {{subpages}} okay? George Swan (talk) 08:48, 14 July 2022 (CDT)
The subpages template (surrounded only by curly braces and no tags) is needed in main articles and any pages that appear in the tabs, such as the standard ones Discussion (Talk:), Related_Articles, Bibliography, and External_Links. It is NOT needed on /Definition pages, and I believe it is also NOT needed in /Metadata pages. But neither does it hurt anything as long as it's surrounded by tags such as <nowiki> or <noinclude>. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:57, 14 July 2022 (CDT)
Tweet widget now working
Not that I'm a huge fan of Twitter, but if you want to include a Tweet in an article, the widget for that is now working. An older "tweet" template does not work. An example of an article using this template is Hilary_Davidson_(historian). The code, and link to the documentation for how to use the widget, is at Widget:Tweet, or you can go directly to the documentation at https://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/Tweet . Pat Palmer (talk) 09:39, 8 October 2022 (CDT)
And now I'm finding that it intermittently fails to work, probably due to something going on over at Twitter. I recommend not relying solely on the widget for now. Either quote (and reference) the Tweet, or maybe post a screen shot of it (if you really need to display it) with Fair Use as the rationale.Pat Palmer (talk) 14:05, 27 January 2023 (CST)
YouTube widget also now available
With code like this: {{#widget:YouTube|id=Ukytqe9pwDM}} you can also display a YouTube video's link. Pat Palmer (talk) 11:19, 8 October 2022 (CDT)
the server *should* be able to send to Gmail users now
Some people have had trouble getting Citizendium to send them emails. This was especially true with authors using Gmail. Recently, we updated the DNS records so that Gmail should now accept messages from citizendium.org. If you use Gmail and the server still cannot message you, please drop a note on my Talk page so that I can look into it. Or if you have any other issues with the server not sending messages when it should. Before yesterday, the DNS record was definitely not set up correctly so that some services might see the Citizendium email messages as suspected spam. Pat Palmer (talk) 12:16, 11 November 2022 (CST)
software version upgrade as of 12/6/2022
This morning, the wiki has been upgraded to MediaWiki 1.38 (from 1.37). Please be sure to log out and then in again, and report any *new* issues here. If things really go South, you can communicate with me via manager A T citizendium.org Pat Palmer (talk) 08:12, 6 December 2022 (CST)
Does your emphasis on the word "new" imply you're aware that the 2 problems discussed above (logout & non-clickable EditTools) have not been fixed by the upgrade? Peter Jackson (talk) 04:47, 9 December 2022 (CST)
Peter, yes, exactly. I have a list of nuisances we've already been living with. The upgrade seems to have changed the skins; I may try adding some more options for skins soon. If you encounter a problem we didn't already know about, please let us know. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:49, 9 December 2022 (CST)
Some gadgets now available in User Preferences
In your preferences, there are now a few gadgets which might be useful to you. Click on Preferences, then select the Gadgets tab, then select any of the options you want.Pat Palmer (talk) 09:08, 24 January 2023 (CST)
ISBN category
I see we have the redlinked Category:Pages using ISBN magic links with 4,289 entries. I'll be happy to create the category, as its page requests, but I'm not at all sure how it should be categorised itself. Can anyone help? Are there similar categories I could use as a guideline? John (talk) 05:11, 20 April 2023 (CDT)
The fact that the category shows up red is some sort of technical glitch, because it's actually live and if you click on it, you'll see the list of all articles that have an ISBN anywhere in them. You don't need to do anything; just include ISBNs where you can because they live-link now to external search databases, which can be useful. Pat Palmer (talk) 08:52, 20 April 2023 (CDT)
And, you're reminding me that I need to dig around in the (probably) subpages template code to try and fix that red category link. It's opening the list of ISBN articles in Edit mode, and maybe I can find the code that does that and fix it. I'll add it to my endless to-do list. Pat Palmer (talk) 08:55, 20 April 2023 (CDT)
Thanks, Pat. Let me know if I can help. John (talk) 09:17, 20 April 2023 (CDT)
Solved it! How stupid--no one had ever actually created the page for that Category, so it always showed up as needing to be edited. Creating the page now makes it not show up red! Thanks for nudging me on this, John. Pat Palmer (talk) 11:15, 20 April 2023 (CDT)
Thanks, Pat. Looks fine now. John (talk) 16:43, 28 April 2023 (CDT)
Template loops
I came across Category:Pages with template loops, which had not been fully created, after I found a loop issue in one of the talk pages I'm working on. I realised that talk pages with the problem need to have the subpage tags in their definitions wrapped between noinclude tags, so I've fixed most of the talk pages impacted. There are several other pages, mostly incomplete templates, in the category but these need further investigation and I would guess some should be deleted but I can't offer more than that at present. John (talk) 05:54, 30 April 2023 (CDT)
Thanks, John! Working on them. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:14, 30 April 2023 (CDT)
Magnocellular seems to be a very brief summary of Magnocellular neurosecretory cell and may have been created without knowing the main article was already there. I'm not sure if it will be useful as a standalone. John (talk) 17:49, 13 May 2023 (CDT)
Thanks, John. I zapped it. You can put this kind of thing on my Talk page in the future. Pat Palmer (talk) 12:35, 14 May 2023 (CDT)
Okay, Pat. Will do. I enjoy housekeeping so I'll probably spot more in future. Thanks and all the best. John (talk) 15:26, 14 May 2023 (CDT)
Need help reporting issues after upgrade
Sometime possible as early as tomorrow or Friday, my developer hopes to start upgrading the server software. We're going to try to go from PHP 7.x to 8.x (always a crap shoot) and also upgrade the MediaWiki software from 1.38.x to 1.39.x. I'll need people to report any "new" issues here after the upgrade--and there may be a period of a few hours where access will be locked or not work. The SiteNotice will indicate when the upgrade is about to start. Pat Palmer (talk) 14:18, 7 June 2023 (CDT)
Hi, Pat. Sounds good. I intend to introduce two new history articles in the next few days so I'll see if anything arises while I'm working on those. This probably won't be today, though. John (talk) 02:31, 8 June 2023 (CDT)
And it's done as of 2 pm EDT on June 8--both PHP and Mediawiki on the latest versions. Please report any new issues here. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:08, 8 June 2023 (CDT)
I've created a large new article plus subpages and had no problems at all. Looking good. John (talk) 01:22, 10 June 2023 (CDT)
This contains a long list of individual sports but only the first 18 display definitions. Having moved one or two around and then temporarily removed the top 18, I found that it then displays definitions of the next 17. These definitions appear to be longer than those in the 18 so it would seem that we have a section size limit (Kb) on pages of this type.
As far as the Sport page goes, I don't think a long list is needed so I'll reduce it to generics and the major sports. John (talk) 00:21, 21 June 2023 (CDT)
I've noticed this issue before, and unfortunately, I don't know a quick fix for it. That rpl template is complicated! And templates and their size limits in general are complicated, and I don't know nearly enough right now to improve it. Sorry !Pat Palmer (talk) 08:00, 21 June 2023 (CDT)
I'd leave it be, Pat. I've replaced the individual sports with generics and it's displaying all their definitions. Thanks. John (talk) 10:47, 21 June 2023 (CDT)
I found this template in Category:Articles with Ambiguous Status. It looks like something that was started and aborted. I can't see any use for it so should we delete it? Thanks. John (talk) 01:53, 12 July 2023 (CDT)
In a similar vein, I found Template:Checklist in the External Articles category. It was deprecated years ago and carries a warning notice, so I think it should definitely go.
Software upgrades on Oct 12, 2023
Please post in this forum if you find and new behavioral issues with wiki software since yesterday, when we performed a variety of minor version upgrades. Updated were all system packages, PHP, MariaDB, MediaWiki, and these MediaWiki extensions: CheckUser, Widgets, HeadScript, Popups, and SubPageList3. Pat Palmer (talk) 08:51, 13 October 2023 (CDT)
Metadata awk program...
I wrote a quick and dirty awk program, that generates metadata templates... User:Pat Palmer, User:John Leach Please confirm this is a correct template...
It is invoked as follows...
awk -f metadata.awk pagename="Jackson Creek (Toronto)" variant=CE abc="Jackson Creek (Toronto)" cat_check=yes status=2 underlinked=no cleanup=yes cat1=cat cat2=cat cat3=cat > outputfile
Yes, awkward, but workable with the latest shell's history mechanism.
{{#switch: {{{info}}}
<!--general article properties-->
| pagename = Jackson Creek (Toronto)
| variant = CE
<!--required for checklist-->
| abc = Jackson Creek (Toronto)
| cat_check = yes <!--yes if someone should check the categories-->
| status = 3 <!--1 developed, 2 developing, 3 stub, 4 external-->
| underlinked = no <!--yes if orphan-->
| cleanup = no <!--yes if basic cleanup has been done-->
| by =
| cat1 = Geography
| cat2 = History
| cat3 =
| sub1 =
| sub2 =
| sub3 =
| tab1 =
| tab2 =
| tab3 =
<!--required for ToApprove template-->
| article url =
| subpage url =
| cluster =
| now =
| ToA editor =
| ToA editor2 =
| ToA editor3 =
| date =
<!--required for Approved template-->
| A editor =
| A editor2 =
| A editor3 =
<!--End: do NOT use a break after the closing braces-->
}}<noinclude>{{subpages}}</noinclude>
Something in the code messes up the line ends, even with the insertion of a couple of nowikis... George Swan (talk) 14:49, 17 January 2024 (CST)
metadata.awk
function CheckArgs( )
{
status_good ["0"] = status_good ["1"] = status_good ["2"] = status_good ["3"] = status_good ["4"] = 1
yesnogood ["yes"] = yesnogood ["no"] = 1
variant_good ["AE"] = variant_good ["CE"] = variant_good ["BE"] = 1
if (pagename == "") {
printf "pagename='%s' -- Have to set a pagename value\n", pagename
return 0
} else if (variant == "") {
printf "Have to set a variant value\n"
return 0
} else if (!(variant in variant_good)) {
printf "variant has to be one of AE, CE or BE"
return 0
} else if (abc == "") {
printf "Have to set a abc value\n"
return 0
} else if (cat_check == "") {
printf "Have to set a cat_check value\n"
return 0
} else if (!(cat_check in yesnogood)) {
printf "cat_check has to be either 'yes' or 'no'\n"
return 0
} else if (status == "") {
printf "Have to set a status value\n"
return 0
} else if (!(status in status_good)) {
printf "status has to be either '0', '1', '2', '3' or '4'..\n"
return 0
} else if (underlinked == "") {
printf "Have to set a underlinked value\n"
return 0
} else if (!(underlinked in yesnogood)) {
printf "underlinked has to be either 'yes' or 'no'\n"
return 0
} else if (cleanup == "") {
printf "Have to set a cleanup value\n"
return 0
} else if (!(cleanup in yesnogood)) {
printf "cleanup has to be either 'yes' or 'no'\n"
return 0
} else if (cat1 == "") {
printf "Have to set a cat1 value\n"
return 0
} else if (cat2 == "") {
printf "Have to set a cat2 value\n"
return 0
} else
return 1
}
BEGIN {{
if (CheckArgs() == 0) {
printf "metadata.awk: '%s -v pagename=foo -v variant=AE -v abc=foo -v cat_check=yes -v status=2 -v underlinked=no -v cleanup=yes -v cat1=cat -v cat2=cat -v cat3=cat\n", ARGV [0]
exit( 0 )
}
printf "{{#switch: {{{info}}}\n"
printf "<!--general article properties--> \n"
printf "| pagename = %s\n", pagename
printf "| variant = %s\n", variant
printf "<!--required for checklist--> \n"
printf "| abc = %s\n", abc
printf "| cat_check = %s <!--yes if someone should check the categories-->\n", cat_check
printf "| status = %s <!--1 developed, 2 developing, 3 stub, 4 external-->\n", status
printf "| underlinked = %s <!--yes if orphan-->\n", underlinked
printf "| cleanup = %s <!--yes if basic cleanup has been done-->\n", cleanup
printf "| by = \n"
printf "| cat1 = %s \n", cat1
printf "| cat2 = %s \n", cat2
printf "| cat3 = %s \n", cat3
printf "| sub1 = \n"
printf "| sub2 = \n"
printf "| sub3 = \n"
printf "| tab1 = \n"
printf "| tab2 = \n"
printf "| tab3 = \n"
printf "<!--required for ToApprove template--> \n"
printf "| article url = \n"
printf "| subpage url = \n"
printf "| cluster = \n"
printf "| now = \n"
printf "| ToA editor = \n"
printf "| ToA editor2 = \n"
printf "| ToA editor3 = \n"
printf "| date = \n"
printf "<!--required for Approved template--> \n"
printf "| A editor = \n"
printf "| A editor2 = \n"
printf "| A editor3 = \n"
printf "<!--End: do NOT use a break after the closing braces-->\n"
printf "}}<noinclude>{{subpages}}</noinclude>\n"
}}
If the other two dozen fields in the metadata template could usefully be set at when the template is first instantiated this program could be set up to fill those fields, as well. George Swan (talk) 17:45, 17 January 2024 (CST)
It could also be set to fill fields like cat4, through catN, when the template is instatiated.
I don't know which categories are supposed to be chosen for cat1 through cat3. Back when the setup script still worked I was routinely frustrated as the categories I thought should be cat1 were not included in the list of recommended top level templates. Am I correct that existing categories, that are not on that list of recommended top level categories, would still be accepted? George Swan (talk) 17:52, 17 January 2024 (CST)
Hi, George. The metadata for Jackson Creek seems to be fine. It successfully links to article and discussion, which tends to fail if the template is in any way incorrect. As for new workgroups (cats), I don't know but I expect it would redlink them somehow as it does with new subcats. Creating a new subcat is easy but I suspect a new workgroup might be problematic. Do you have any in mind?
It is easiest to keep a model of the metadata template which has everything in place except for the pagename, abc, catx, and subx parameters. You just need to type those in each time, plus any changes to variant or status. My advice would always be to keep things as simple as possible. The big problem with the template has always been that it expects everything to be absolutely in place, especially at the end where it will not allow you to place a line break after printf "}}. Also, from memory, I think it insists on a space immediately before and after = in each parameter line. It really is that touchy! Anyway, well done, Jackson Creek is up and running. John (talk) 01:18, 18 January 2024 (CST)
Thanks for the prompt reply.
As for adding new workgroup cats... Well, it has been years since the script that used to generate the metadata templates, so I don't remember which specific categories I wanted to add, but which were not on that scripts list. IIRC, I hadn't wanted to add brand new categories, merely existing categories that weren't on the recommended list. From what you haven't written above there is a distinction between regular categories, and "workgroup categories". In don't know what a "workgroup category" is and how it differs from a regular category. Is there a document that clarifies this? Is there a list of the "workgroup categories" that are currently recommended?
Yes, cutting and pasting from an earlier metadata template, that was known to work properly, and modifying a few of its fields would be more convenient. But, apparently, the minor modifications I was making rendered the new metadata templates I was creating broken in some way I did not understand. So, if when I run this awk program, on my computer, if it generates properly working templates, I'll continue to use it, even though it requires multiple sets of cutting and pasting, to get its output from my computer to Citizendium.
Would a template that had fields for cat4, cat5, etc, be broken, so it actually didn't work?
Would a template that had fields for cat4, cat5, work, in that it wouldn't break anything, but those new fields being ignored? Or would cat4, cat5, be rendered onto the article?
Are the two dozen fields we aren't using now superceded? Would metadata template where those fields were left out be broken? I only ask because I would like to understand what distinguishes a working metadata template from a broken one.
Are there documents, discussions, that explain more fully how the metadata templates are supposed to work?
Wow, George, that awk program is an impressive feat. CZ:Metadata explains what all the fields are in a Metadata file. The basic Metadata you are created has unneeded comments, but it is syntactically correct and parseable. Here's the method I use to create the Metadata for a New Article. The actual page would be named "Template:New Article/Metadata":Pat Palmer (talk) 14:18, 18 January 2024 (CST)
Copy its contents into the new Metadata page; this is the basic pattern to use when creating a new Metadata page.
For each new article, change the following fields: (1) pagename (must be identical to New Article title); (2) abc (same as page name); (3) adjust the cat1, cat2 and cat3 fields (use 1-3 existing Workgroup names as listed on the wiki landing page, and blank the cat2 and cat3 fields if only one Workgroup)
that's the minimum to make subpages work; save the Metadata file and include {{subpages}} in the top of the article
What is missing? I don't know, except I notice there is no Maritime or Nautical workgroup. There is no workgroup devoted to transportation. I've worked on a lot of articles that would fit in one or both of these workgroups, if they existed.
I don't know if the first workgroup I am suggesting should be Maritime or Nautical...
What preparation, if any, is required, prior to adding a new workgroup?
redirects, redlinks, and the strange case of boatnerd and boat nerd
Pat, you and John have been deleting redirects. You seem to think that there exist mechanisms with the WMF software that make them pointless. I won't claim to fully understand the software changes that make them less useful now.
But I just had an experience that reminded me how useful they remain.
I did some work on MV Hiawatha today, and noticed it had a redlink to Boatnerd. That was odd and annoying, because I cite this important resource, all the time, and I was surprised I hadn't already ported it.
It would have been extremely useful if Boatnerd had already redirected to Boat nerd. Now there are two articles, identical, but with slightly different subpages. I like the Provenance and Definition I created today a bit more than those I created on 2022-12-22.
So, yes, I do see redirects as quite useful.
I don't think I fully understand the new innovations you guys think make redirects. Is this feature where the editor starts to guess at the eventual link I intend, when I type in two opening brackets, and some text? Is this the only feature? I find this feature helpful, but not on every occasion. I mentioned the VPOTUS redirect somewhere recently. VPOTUS is widely used by Washington insiders, along with POTUS, FLOTUS and SCOTUS, where FLOTUS is the First Lady and SCOTUS is the Supreme Court. The name completion feature isn't really useful here, because its guessess are only useful when you start right. The article on the USA's Vice President could be at
I would much rather only have to remember POTUS, VPOTUS, FLOTUS and SCOTUS, rather than the much longer names, which have undergone unpredictable name changes. George Swan (talk) 12:13, 21 January 2024 (CST)
I am not against all Redirects. Some make sense, such as from "Great Lakes" to "North American Great Lakes", because people are not used to saying the longer name. Complaining about a specific redirect being deleted is okay. Complaining in general that I am deleting unused, double and obviously unhelpful Redirects is a waste of your time and mine, in my opinion. George, you need to learn how the Autosearch works. Please try typing Boat into the Search box and PAUSE FOR A SECOND to let the drop-down list of suggestions populate. If you do, you'll see that there is no reason for you not to have seen that "Boat nerd" existed already. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:34, 21 January 2024 (CST)
I tend to delete only Redirects that nothing points at, and especially, Redirects that point to another Redirect. That's what I was doing yesterday, and unless I deleted a specific Redirect that causes you concern, this post was not justified and ended up wasting a bunch of my time and energy. Please give me a little credit for common sense. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:34, 21 January 2024 (CST)
In the past, you also created these duplicates: Bright Leaves and Bright Leaves (documentary); could you merge those alsoj, while you are cleaning up the "Boat nerd" and "Boatnerd" conflict? Please do not just leave those lying around for someone like me to deal with in the future. You did it; you get to merge them and delete the one you like least. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:34, 21 January 2024 (CST)
Please do not create redirects to articles that do not exist yet. There may be some reason to do so, but I don't know what it is right now, and since we're obviously trying to clean up Redirects, your creating these seems like some kind of in your face challenge. Maybe not what you intended, but that how it looks right now. Please discuss on my Talk page if you wish, not here. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:34, 21 January 2024 (CST)
Some new articles, containing only material I wrote, nevertheless assert they are brand new ports of material from the wikipedia
Some new articles, like the stub I created for Alan Greenspan, which only contain material I wrote, nevertheless assert they are brand new ports of material from the wikipedia. What is up with that? I thought it might be just articles that bear a {{PropDel}} template. But some other new articles also incorrectly bear this claim.
It is not the end of the world, but it is annoying. The last thing I want is wikipedians incorrectly accusing me of plagiarism, for not including the list of wikipedia contributors, on material I ported, when that material was written here, or was written entirely by me. George Swan (talk) 04:54, 5 February 2024 (CST)
Known problem, annoying, to be worked around for the time being. Sorry! Pat Palmer (talk) 14:03, 1 March 2024 (CST)
technical issues being actively worked on
FYI everyone, there are three different software developers/sysadmins working in the wiki at present. Their testing efforts *may* be seamless, but there is always the possibility of brief service disruptions. Please save your work often. The issues being worked on are:
the Session Timeout problem; possibly, the fix may involve upgrading portions of the software, leading to brief disruptions
the automation of /Metadata template subpages when creating new articles; the old extension died years ago and I'm paying someone to try to get it working again
"Suggestion Bot" that leaves a list of suggested topics at the bottom of each article's /Related Articles subpage (we had an old one that died years ago, and I thought it worth resurrecting if possible)
I am now guardedly hopeful that the Session Timeout issue has been solved. Please let me know if you experience an improvement. The developer also may have helped us fix DNS so that server emails less likely to end up in Spam. This means if we message each other via the server now, it is more likely to succeed. Again, try it by messaging me if you'd like to test this. I will let you know if the message reached me. Pat Palmer (talk) 15:17, 1 March 2024 (CST)
Hi, Pat. I just deliberately took a good ninety seconds or so adding a new row to one of my tables and the save was effective immediately without a timeout. It works!! That is great. The developer can have a virtual drink on me. John (talk) 15:57, 1 March 2024 (CST)
And I've just done a very slow text replace with an even slower delete. Result? No problems at all. Brilliant. John (talk) 16:06, 1 March 2024 (CST)
Copied from Wikipedia: by policy, not encouraging articles describing people who commit atrocities or mass murders
Can topics, themselves, be biased? What does it mean to "promote sympathy towards criminals"?
Way back in September 2005 I had only made about 2000 wikipedia edits. I had never encountered a wikipedia administrator, and I was unaware of the wikipedia's deletion policies and procedures. Over the previous six months I had started stubs on a small handful of the individuals who were being held in Guantanamo. At that time it was US policy to keep their identities a secret - not even telling their families.
Then, all of sudden, four articles I started were nominated for deletion. One nominator's sole justification was the two letters "NN", and he declined to answer my request for an explanation as to what that meant.
Another person asserted that the topic of Guantanamo was "inherently biased", and could only serve for "America-bashing".
I thought about that one all afternoon. I concluded that topics are not, in and of themselves, biased. I concluded the only thing that can be biased was how we covered them.
I concluded that there was no topic so controversial that good faith contributors couldn't agree on the wording of an article about it that everyone agreed measured up to the standards of neutrality, verification, authoritative sources, provided everyone tried hard enough. I committed myself to the extra effort to measure up to those standards, whenever I tackled a controversial topic.
I am really surprised you characterized the articles I wrote on the Steinberg Awards as "promoting sympathy towards criminals". The Steinbergs, like Pullitzer, like Nobel, like the Motion Picture Academy, created a competition that grants awards to promote works of art.
Consider Schindler's List - a highly admired work of art. Yet Oskar Schindler, the protagonist, employed slave labor. He corruptly bribed government officials. The movie doesn't try to be neutral. It portrays him as a hero, because he made sacrifices, in the end, and he saved lives.
But someone else could have made a film that portrayed Schindler as a pure villain, and his saving of lives as motivated purely by cynicism.
You deleted the articles on the Steinberg awards. I am guessing that this is because they awarded Bill Cain an award, and, among his works was his play inspired by the Steven Dale Green case. Well, would you delete an article on the Academy Awards because Oscars were awarded for Schindler's List?
Your deletion log entries refer to a policy. I scanned your revision history, to see if you had drafted policy on when and how articles should or should not cover criminals. I didn't find anything.
Consider Alfred Dreyfus, convicted on innuendo, racism, and forged evidence, he spent decades imprisoned on Devil's Island, prior to his eventual exoneration. If someone tried to write a neutral article about him, during the period between his conviction and his exoneration, would this policy require its deletion? He was officially a criminal, then.
In many wikipedia discussions I argued that an article was neither a punishment or a reward. Sometimes the person arguing for deletion was some variation of "but Joe is basically a good person, they don't deserve to have stuff that makes them look bad talked about like this..." Alternately the deletion proponent would say some variation of "but Joe is basically a bad person, they shouldn't be rewarded with an article..." Articles are neither punishments or rewards. Individuals or topics become candidates for articles when reliable sources write about them. Period. If we are writing neutrally then the article is neither a hagiography or demonization.
What about Richard Jewell, the heroic security guard at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta? FBI director Freer ruined his life, by naming him as the prime suspect in that bombing. Director Freer implied the security guard wanted to be a hero so badly that he planted a bomb that he would later discover. Most press coverage was unfair to him. As I am sure you remember, more than half a decade later he was definitively cleared, when an anti-abortion kook, who mainly bombed abortion clinics, turned out to be the actual bombing. Jewell had been a bona fide hero, who saved dozens of lives.
The extremely unfair demonization of Jewell took place before there was a wikipedia or citizendium. I used to think that, if they had been around, a truly neutral article about Jewell would have helped to cool the hysterical leaping to the conclusion he was guilty. And, if Freer's innuendoes had contained a kernel of truth, a neutrally written article would still have served the public good, in helping to prevent an over-reaction.
Yes, there are ugly things in the world, like mass-murderers. I too am not that interested in supporting detailed coverage of murderers, where there is nothing more to their story than that they were murderers. But while Steven Dale Green seems to have been a simpleton, who couldn't finish high school, and who racked up some misdemeanor crimes, prior to enlisting, he is worth covering because he became central to other issues. I tried to explain this when we discussed him before. Scholars have cited his case in other contexts. I read an academic paper who cited his case when discussing the policy of not allowing the openly gay to serve in the military. The author argued that if the military had not been barring openly gay individuals from serving they would not have had to lower their standards to admit guys like him. Other scholars cited his case when discussing that lowering of standards - admitting dropout and criminals. I suggested then that the other wider issues his case was entagled with made it worthwhile to cover him, when it wouldn't be interesting or worthwhile to cover a murderer who was simply a murderer, and had never been covered as anything more than a murderer.
Wikipedia's COATRACK essay and wikipedia's notion of DUE WEIGHT
The wikipedia has a widely read essay known as COATRACK. It is often treated as if it were a policy, when it is only an essay. And those citing it routinely ignore its actual advice when citing it in deletion discussions.
The essay warns about articles whose first sentence, or first paragraph, says the article is about one thing, generally an actually notable topic, but then quickly shifts to covering something else. One of the colorful examples cited was "wongo juice".
The advice of that essay that is routinely ignored by those who cite it in deletion discussions, is that it never recommended deletion as a solution the problem of a contributor hi-jacking an article to talk about something else. Its advice was that, if the underlying topic of the article was notable the solution would be to trim back, or maybe even entirely trim out, the paragraph(s) that were really talking about something else
I don't have those Steinberg Award articles in front of me. But I am sure I didn't start talking about them, only to shift over to promoting Steven Dale Green. I drafted those in August. I don't remember whether I mentioned Steven Dale Green, by name, in the portion of those articles that mentioned Bill Cain. But, if I had, surely it was only a sentence or two. How could that justify the deletion of two whole articles?
Those who ignored what the COATRACK essay actually advised also ignored WP:DUE, a link to a subsection of the Wikipedia policy on neutrality. What I generally concluded was that the passages I had included in articles that triggered those COATRACK complaints, because they touched on something else, were short enough to comply with the DUE portion of NPOV. Topics are inter-related, and that means articles should mention related topics, and link to them, and, sometimes that requires a brief passage of coverage of that other topic, to provide context.
If you thought I went beyond that, in 9 circles, or the articles on the Steinberg awards, I suggest your choices included: (1) voicing your concern first, possibly on Talk:9 circles, on Talk:Steinberg Award, on User talk:George Swan, or via email; (2) shortening, or maybe even eliminating the specific passage(s) that triggered your concern, and then leaving an explanation on the talk page.
Given that there was no warning how would I know what policy I violated, so I could know how to avoid violating it somewhere else? George Swan (talk) 15:23, 28 November 2022 (CST)
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF RESPONSE: We shouldn't have articles on the lives of people who are *only* known for taking life
Mass murderers do not deserve fame or to have an encyclopedia article. This is known for encouraging more people to commit outrageous crimes in hopes of becoming famous.
There exists on your Talk page this thread in which I discussed with you that I'd like to remove the first mass murderer article you had imported and expressing my distaste for it. Neither article placed any emphasis on victims and did not even name them. You asked for three months to rework the article and change its emphasis. But then as a result, you also created another murderer article stub, which you also failed to improve per my request, and you added articles about the play about the murderer and more articles emphasizing one particular award this play had one. I was frustrated yesterday to find TWO versions of the article about the play (each differing by a single letter in the title), so I couldn't tell which version to delete--and both pointed at the murderer article. And then, I found there were at least three different articles about the minor award, which was little more than a modest monetary grant as near as I can tell, with no one publicizing it except the group which granted it. Duplicating information across multiple articles on a wiki is not a good idea; the versions diverge and then no one can tell which one to edit. So yesterday, assuming you would not object because you seemed to have left the wiki, I removed the entire cluster of articles relating to the murderers. Those peripheral articles should I feel have been included in the stub murderer article anyway, and they pointed back to the now-missing article, inviting someone to create those again in the future. I understand very well how it hurts to have one's work deleted, but I am not willing to restore any of those articles right now. IF you return to the wiki and are active here, I will consider restoring the "9 Circles" article (whichever one you want), but with restrictions: I will not have it name the murderer except once in one footnote, nor will I have that name be an active link inviting for an article to be created about said murderer. Any information about the award can be included in the article about the play. You had included around a dozen excerpts of the play's reviews in the footnotes, and I read those, after which I still wanted that article gone as well, because most reviewers pointed back to the murderer as having been the main model for the play's protagonist. And, should it matter whether an author worked as a priest or a waiter to put food on the table? It seems like an attempt to add moral justification to him writing a play sympathetic to a brutal killer. But he could have set his play in any number of other times and places and still provided a setting for his version of Dante's nine hells as represented by a Kafka-esque bureaucracy. By choosing this sensational case to model, even if his intention was to lambast the lameness of the law, the government, the military, or psychiatry (and I don't KNOW what his intentions were, but even if they were "good" intentions), his results are muddied and weakened by the fact that his play engendered a certain degree of sympathy in reviewers for the murderer. And that's why I deleted that article. I couldn't have gone through the normal process of warnings without proliferating and attracting yet more attention to these murderer's names, so I have made an editorial decision, which is my right to do because I am, right now, personally and almost single-handedly keeping this behemoth of a wiki afloat because I believe deeply that it is still a better place to write than Wikipedia. If you have more objections after this explanation, I urge you to private message me. I will listen sincerely to everything, but I will not have these murderers names in the wiki any more than they already are, because as you know, nothing ever written in a wiki really disappears. George, I sincerely hope you will put up with our disagreement about this and return to The Citizendium, where you have informed and delighted me many times over the years. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:38, 29 November 2022 (CST)
You are of course in charge here & can make policy as you wish, but you might like to think about this. It's certainly true that reports of crimes can cause copycat ones. But should the news be censored? It's not just that. Every time there's a news report of an Islamist terror attack it's followed by a spike in violence against Muslims. Every time there's a news report of Israelis hurtin Palestiisns it's followed by a spike in violence against Jews. In recent years there's been an uptick in violence against Chinese, and in recent months against Russians. We accept all this as part of the price we pay for free press & democracy. Proportionate coverage seems to me reasonable. What application that might have here I'm not expressing any opinion. See also [4]. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:07, 30 November 2022 (CST)
Peter, I welcome your and George's comments, because it's a gray area. Wikipedia (WP) has long articles on all the mass killings. The WP articles have unrelenting detail, though they are not all under the names of the killers. I was unable to sleep for two nights after reading WP about SDG, the killer who got a sympathetic play written about him by a Jesuit priest. Any twelve-year-old might stumble across that article while reading about Iraq, and it would tempt reasonable parents to confiscate their kids' cell phones immediately. Clearly, George tried to do better here, and I appreciate that. *If* these articles get restored, I would like that the murderer's name not the title of the article if at all possible (though in some cases, it may have to be). If there are legal/social aspects making the case of interest, that should be made clear in the introduction. In other words, I am tentatively open to restoring any or all of these articles *if* my editorial requirements are honored.Pat Palmer (talk) 10:22, 30 November 2022 (CST)
It occurred to me afterwards that we already have articles on Osama bin Laden & a number of his associates (nothing to do with George; probably written by Howard). Could it be said they're known for anything other than killing people? Peter Jackson (talk) 05:50, 1 December 2022 (CST)
Bin Laden touched off a war, founded an international terrorist organization that occupied much of the world for decades, and thus is a figure who will for better or worse appear in history books. SDG (and his associates) are soldier criminals who murdered four people on their day off. Crimes of similar horror happen around the world at regular intervals though thankfully not "often" statistically, and we don't cover them usually. This particular crime got lots of press in part because of the play and its publicity, but also because at first there was a question of whether the crime was part of systematic behavior by troops in Iraq while doing their jobs. It turned out not to be, and there was no deliberate attempt by higher-ups in the military to cover anything up. SDG is only one example of a psychotic personality who should never have been allowed into the military--THAT topic might deserve an article. As for mass gun murderers such as NC, at most I think we might list their names in a catalog somewhere, but certainly not giving them a biography and an article of their own, because to do so is inconsistent--are you aware of how MANY of these take place every year? If we covered all of them, we would soon double the size of the wiki--and greatly increase the chance of children stumbling upon the descriptions of their brutal acts. That is what is happening over in Wikipedia right now--they ARE largely covering all of them, and it's a feedback loop creating an ever-expanding set of horrible descriptions of crimes. The more I think about this problem in such terms, the clearer it becomes to me that we ought not to grace every one of these cases with a distinct article. But as I told George last June, if there IS a compelling reason why a certain case is of special interest (and not just to lawyers), detail why that is true in the introduction to the article. That had not been done in the articles I have deleted.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:15, 1 December 2022 (CST)
I'll just add one more about Wikipedia covering almost all the mass shooting cases. I can see why they might choose to do so, but since they ARE doing so, and in such detail, I don't see why we should do it also. It doesn't add anything for us to do it, even if somehow our articles are more nicely done. And frankly as an editor, I am horrified at the specter of being asked to overlook the creation of such articles every time such an incident happens, which in the United States right now is about every two to four days. On the other hand, I am reluctantly open to someone using this wiki to create an alternative version of an existing Wikipedia article, and then going over to Wikipedia and saying, "Let's do it this way instead". But no one has proposed to do that, and it usually doesn't work. Almost all of us have tried replacing some really awful material in Wikipedia with a better version of the topic that we first created here, and what usually happens is that the person(s) in WP who created the thing protect it there because of all the work they already put into it. I'm not going to make a rule that we can never have any articles in Citizendium about mass murderers, psychotic people in the military, or matters pertaining to violence. I'm saying let's have an intelligent, clear-cut reason for having those that we do, and maybe put a blurb on the Talk page explaining the motivation for a particular article to save us from recreating the debate we are having right now.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:32, 1 December 2022 (CST)
Are killers monsters, so there is no point covering them...
Pat, I made several sets of notes in preparation to responding to your note of 2022-11-29, the first comment in this subsection. It is one long paragraph, containing a dozen or so points, rather than a dozen paragraphs, each focussed around a single point. Comments written this way make it impossible for a response to start with something like, "WRT the point in your fifth paragraph".
Rather than try to respond to them all, at once, may I start with your early point, where you wrote that any article on a mass-murderer "... is known for encouraging more people to commit outrageous crimes in hopes of becoming famous."
Pat, did you mean to assert that this is a fact, some kind of unchallengeable, universally accepted fact? But is it a fact? Could it even be described as a hypothesis. I am not a scientist, but I spent years working for scientists, and I challenge whether this could be described as a hypothesis, because I suggest it is untestable. It seems to me that, while anecdotal reports might be used to back this up, these are not evidence.
I think your assertion could be called a premise. The alternate premise, that my edits are based on, is that difficult problems are best dealt with by dispassionately and neutrally trying to understand them.
You didn't actually say this, but other people, who held similar opinions to yours, have implied or explicitly stated, that serial killers, spree killers, are monsters. At least some of those people meant this literally. Killers were so unlike us regular people that they were not really even human beings. No regular human being could ever understand them, and it was a mistake to even try.
Here is a complication of that position... if monstrous killers are born, not made, then steps to purge the historical record of other killers should have no effect on their potential death toll.
Pat, you are about my age, or maybe just a bit older. When I was a teenager I heard about two deeply important psychology experiments. They weren't only deeply important, they were deeply disturbing. What both experiments showed, in different ways, was that it only took the wrong circumstances, and the wrong pressure, to get ordinary people, people who thought of themselves as ordinary decent people, to commit monstrous acts.
I am going to remind you of those experiments. In one of those experiments ordinary decent volunteers were paired up. A flip of a coin would assign one to a booth where they could hear the other experimental subject being asked to answer questions. The experimental subject in the booth would be directed by an experimenter, in a lab coat, to press a button that administered an electric shock, when the other guy gave the wrong answer. During the course of the experiment the experimenter would direct the subject to increase the voltage. During the course of the experiment the subject in the booth could hear the other guy complain, then scream, then shout that a higher voltage would kill them, then go silent, as if they had died.
It was a cruel experiment, as there was never more than one subject. The other experimental subject was an actor, a confederate of the experimenter, and no actual electric shocks were ever administered. The experimental subjects were told it was an experiment into whether pain and the absence of pain, could be used to make people better learners. But it was really an experiment into how much pain an ordinary decent person could be made to administer.
And the experiment showed that almost all ordinary decent people could be pretty easily convinced to administer a lot of pain.
The other experiment took a bunch of college student volunteers. They were split up into two groups, prisoners and guards. Surprisingly early in the experiment the guards started dishing out cruel treatment in order to control the prisoners.
I read that the guy running this experiment was so excited by what he was finding he invited some of his peers to come and observe, even though the experiment hadn't run to completion. One of his colleagues stood up to him, even though he had been her thesis advisor. I'm paraphrasing from memory here... she told him he had to end the experiment, right that moment. She told him that he was so blinded by the results he was getting that he was totally overlooking the traumatizing effect the experiment was sure to be having on his subjects.
He realized she was right, and he did end the experiment.
I suggest this experiment also shows that people who had previously been regarded as ordinary decent people, people who had previously regarded themselves as ordinary decent people, could be induced to commit monstrous cruel acts.
And, therefore, I suggest it is very strongly in the public interest to try to neutrally and rationally understand killers, torturers, and the people who commit other atrocities.
As for whether it is pointless to try to understand any truly monstrous inhuman people. There are scientists who study non-human animal behaviour, and they are capable of drawing meaningful conclusions about that behaviour, even though their subjects are non-human, by defition. George Swan (talk) 13:21, 8 December 2022 (CST)
@Peter Jackson I followed the link you provided me and spent much of Sunday reading about this whole #no-notoriety premise.
I am shocked. I had thought the #no-notoriety premise was a fringe premise. I had no idea that some academics had got behind it. I think I wrote, above, that I am not a scientist, merely someone who used to work for scientists. Having said that, the papers those academics wrote, to support the #no-notoriety premise seemed like bad science. Their papers were based on comments from killers who said they had been influenced by earlier killers.
The very important point they were overlooking is that killers from within the incel community, the gun-enthusiast community, the anti-arbotion community, the MAGA community, they all have their own websites, message boards, mailing lists. They don't need to look to mainstream press, scholarly papers, or online encyclopedias, to read about those previous killers. I think this means the news embargo proposed in the #no-notoriety premise will have the opposite effect of what those proposing it desire. I am afraid the leaders within those movements are more dangerous under a #no-notoriety information embargo, as it allows the leaders within that movement to offer their followers hagiographies of those killers, using their internal websites, that then go without challenge.
I am afraid those potential copycats are going to be MORE LIKELY to follow the examples of earlier killers when the only accounts they get to read of them are hagiographies from within the killer's community. I suggest those potential copycats are going to be LESS LIKELY to follow those examples when they have access to neutrally written accounts of those earlier killers lives. George Swan (talk) 10:41, 13 December 2022 (CST)
I think you may well be right there. I'm thinking mainly in anecdotal evidence. For example, back in 1981 there was a race riot in Brixton. What followed looked like people round the country seeing it on TV, thinking that looked like fun, & organizing their own riots, which were nothing to do with race. But that's not much in the way of scientific. More broadly, the way society works is by people following an instinct to follow the tribal customs, doing what others do, especially successful people. I don't know how scientific that is either. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:10, 14 December 2022 (CST)
I'm considering deleting the article about Onion (dog)
Will anyone argue, now, against deleting the article Onion (dog)? I've put my reasons on its Talk page. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:36, 3 December 2022 (CST)
Although the manner in which the killer turned himself in is slightly bizarrely interesting, overall this is just another crime report. Anyone have a real reason why it should not be deleted? Also, articles of this sort may NOT be titled merely with a person's name; other people bearing an identical name almost certainly exist, and I don't think they should have to tolerate finding their name in an encyclopedia delineated as a murderer of police.Pat Palmer (talk) 09:57, 7 December 2022 (CST)
For the record, third parties, I wrote this article.
I don't agree that "this is just another crime report". Canada is not the US. Police on citizen violence is relatively rare. Citizen on Police violence, also relatively rare. So, in Canada, there are no routine crime reports on Citizen on Police violence. Rational commentators tried to make meaningful suggestions as to the steps that could have prevented this tragic event.
As for what is "routine", back in 2007 I copied a discussion from a talk page to my userspace here. In particular, I direct your attention to the 4th and 5th paragraphs in this section.
With regard to the embarrassment, or actual danger, an individual faces when he or she has a notorious namesake...
Did you know that when the Department of Homeland Security was created, and it compiled and published its first "no-fly list", Ted Kennedy's name was on it? Senator Ted Kennedy, wearing a face that would be known and recognized by every security guard, was prevented from boarding his flights because his name was on this list. Kennedy was able to buttonhole the Director of Homeland Security, and have him personally order his name to be removed from the list - after he had been prevented from boarding five times.
We have all got namesakes. Every notorious person has namesakes. Is there a good reason to protect any non-notable namesakes from the embarrassment of a wiki covering the notorious namesake? Being temporarily mistaken for a notorious namesake is a risk every single human being faces. I suggest there is no effective step a wiki can take that would guarantee non-notable namesakes would be free of the risk of being embarrassed by a notorious namesake. I don't think it makes sense to protect non-notable people from being embarrassed by being a namesake. George Swan (talk) 14:06, 8 December 2022 (CST)
Nothing in the article as written makes the point that "police on citizen" violence is rare in Canada and that this somehow makes this case special. Did you mean citizen on police (the opposite)? The homicide rate in Saskatchewan province is higher than in the neighboring state of Montana. Are you concerned about the shooter's claim that police "started the whole thing"? I'm baffled.Pat Palmer (talk) 11:33, 9 December 2022 (CST)
Nothing about this case has anything to do with Guantanamo captives, so I really don't understand the passages you direct me to here in relation to this article.
With the exception of extraordinarily famous historical figures, articles in The Citizendium should not be titled with a simple name. This is my editorial opinion. I have a list of several such articles in The Citizendium that I intend to rename when I get time. It's common sense that there might be another notable person with the same name someday in the future, and many people with the same name who have *not* become notable, so let's please try to be unambiguous from the beginning if we can.Pat Palmer (talk) 11:33, 9 December 2022 (CST)
I have two concerns: (1) overall article-topic organization; (2) provenance.
I have a topic informant page on the months I spent working under Ted Nelson, in 1979. TI:George Swan/Project Xanadu's computer resources in 1979 I may have been one of the least significant volunteers to work under him, but it is enough I think I get to claim him as a mentor. Does working under the guy who first described a hypertext give me any extra credibility when talking about article organization?
The world of human knowledge is full of topics. Those topics intersect. Sometimes they richly intersect. Wikipedia and Citizendium articles on topics that are richly interconnected with other topics are full of outgoing links, and have lots of incoming links.
Pat, you recently wrote about a concern over duplication of material within multiple articles. That is, in general, a very valid concern, for various reasons, including that, even if the duplicated material started off identical in every article where it occurred, it is likely to diverge, as those articles are edited and updated. The wiki equivalent of genetic drift. That can result in one instance getting an important update, while others don't. It can even result in the two different articles contradicting one another.
There is a solution to this.
When the article on Topic A and the article on Topic B both address another topic, topic C, it may be time to have them both link to an article on Topic C. In this particular instance there is an article Ronald Reagan, so that would be Topic A. The Citizendium also has an article on the U.S. Constitution. It contains a redlink to Article III of the United States Constitution, the article that talks about Impeachment. When the Citizendium has more articles the article on Impeachment should link to an article on Efforts to impeach US Presidents.
19th Century President Johnson was actually impeached; Nixon was almost impeached; Clinton was actually impeached; and Trump was actually impeached. There were efforts to impeach multiple other Presidents, including, most recently, Joe Biden. Marjorie Taylor Greene seems to have been the first Congressional Representative who tried to initiate an impeachment of Biden. Over on the wikipedia someone argued it shouldn't have an article Efforts to impeach Joe Biden because no one had worked on an article on Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan.
That didn't sound right to me. I guessed that, if I looked, I could find enough good valid references to support an article on Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan.
I know there are people who would tell me, "Geo, even if there are enough good valid references to support an article on the topic Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan surely you realize that it would be better to shoehorn all that stuff into the article on Ronald Reagan?" And, no, I strongly disagree with that approach, in general, and in this particular instance.
Why? Because the material you shoehorned into the article on Ronald Reagan could equally well be shoehorned into the article on Impeachment of US Presidents.
We are on a wiki. We should take full advantage of the freedom it offers both authors and readers. The freedom wikis offer authors is they allow the author to go in two different directions. When the topic they are writing about intersects with another topic, they can both continue writing about the original topic, and provide a wikilink to the intersecting topic. People with an urge to merge claim that it is better to have one big article that covers both topics.
I very strongly disagree. I disagree because I think it is a disservice to readers, and because that is not really how the universe of human knowledge should be structured.
Disservice to readers? Writing shorter articles, that are only about a single topic, and are richly wikilinked to related topics provides readers a lot more freedom. When a reader encounters a wikilink, they have a choice. Keep reading the current stream, or jump through the wikilink, because it might be the actual place they can find the information they are looking for. If they follow that wikilink, and after ten seconds, or ten minutes, they decide it didn't have the information they were looking for, returning back to the text where they choice to try something else is trivial... Just hit the back button.
Contrast that with the cognitive burden imposed on the reader when we yield to the urge to merge. They go to some OTHER section of the current article. How? Repeated presses of the arrow keys, or through the use of their browser's find button. And, how do they get back to where they were? More scrolling, or more uses of the find button. Woah. I am generally already using my find button, and every browser I have ever used only remembers the current find search.
It is much more convenient for a reader to follow wikilinks to short articles that are only about a single topic, than to scroll around in big omnibus articles, because returning where you came from is trivial, with the wikilinks, and painful in the omnibus articles. You restore the history, and the talk page, and I will add the provenance subsection, if I initially failed to put it in. George Swan (talk) 14:21, 15 December 2022 (CST)
provenance
Pat, when a smaller article is merged into a larger article, on the wikipedia, the person who squeezed it in is supposed to explicitly say "merging intellectual property from Efforts to Impeach Ronald Reagan", in their edit summary; and, if they think there is no more need for an article on Efforts to Impeach Ronald Reagan, they don't delete it, or call for its deletion. They turn it into a redirect. Not only do they turn it into a redirect, but there is a special template that is left on the redirect that explicitly says something like "do not delete this redirect, because, when this was an article, material was cut from here and pasted into another article, and this page's revision history is required to preserve the chain of provenance."
I was out, when I read the email that told me you deleted the article. I didn't recall whether I had ported the article from the wikipedia, to wikialpha, before I ported it here. Wikialpha contributors put all their contributions into the public domain, so it could be argued that, legally, you did not have to acknowledge re-using public domain material from wikialpha.
However: (1) I ported that article from the wikipedia, without going through wikialpha first; (2) over on the wikipedia someone merged and redirected my original draft there into the wikipedia article List of efforts to impeach presidents of the United States.
I put lots of stuff into the public domain, on wikialpha. So I am prepared to let people re-use material I wrote, without explicitly acknowledging my contribution, but I really do think there are strong reasons to acknowledge the source of material, even if it comes from the public domain, because not doing so can look like plagiarism.
Pat, while I don't generally care if material I wrote is copied without attribution, someone looking at the revision control record of the Ronald Reagan article is very likely to think you wrote those three paragraphs. And, if they compared them to the similar three paragraphs in List of efforts to impeach presidents of the United States it would look like you copied them directly from the wikipedia, without attribution.
As above, I think the article should have remained a stand-alone article, that parallel articles on the efforts to impeach other presidents should also be standalone articles. Why? The duplication issue you addressed a week or two ago.
If material was going to be cut and pasted an edit summary should have said where it came from.
The revision history of the article where the merged material came from should be preserved. I generally tried to leave a "provenance" subsection on the talk pages of any articles I ported from elsewhere. If I thought I was the sole author on the other site, I always wanted to say so. I should have left a Talk:Efforts_to_impeach_Ronald_Reagan#provenance. I don't know if I did, because you deleted the talk page, as well. George Swan (talk) 14:21, 15 December 2022 (CST)
This happened to me here once. I'd written a detailed account of the history of the House of Lords in that article. The late Nick Gardner thought it was out of proportion to the size of the article as a whole. I suggested it might be a separate article, History of the House of Lords. Nick, without thinking about the issues you're talking about here, did that, resulting in an article that looked like he'd written it (I don't know whether he'd have wanted the credit). It took some time to work through the then bureaucracy, who evetually left it to me to add a suitable note. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:52, 16 December 2022 (CST)
George, I did not know the provenance of the deleted stub. Please feel free to put a note on the Talk page saying that you wrote that section and copied it over from wherever, before it got merged into the main article. Nothing was linking to that stub, and there are at present no other articles about attempts to impeach other presidents, or sections in president articles about impeachment (though there is occasional brief mention), nor any article about presidential impeachment generally. If someone wants to write that, they can link directly to the section about impeachment using a bookmark: Ronald_Reagan#Efforts_to_impeach [[Ronald_Reagan#Efforts_to_impeach]]. For now, I propose to leave the information as part of the Ronald Reagan article because it's relevant there and more likely to be found. The wiki search now can find any article even containing the word "impeach" or "impeachment", making it possible for someone in future to pull all this kind of info together. If someone *does* undertake such an article, we can split the information off again and point over to it. Can you live with that?Pat Palmer (talk) 09:16, 16 December 2022 (CST)
WRT the provenance of any material anyone would want to copy? In every simple case isn't the provenance in the revision history? I suggest it should be considered best practice, when copying content from one article to another, to always state, in the edit summary, which article the copied material came from.
Contributors to Citizendium and Wikipedia agree to release most of their intellectual property rights, when they click the Save changes button. But one key right they retain is the right to have their contributions acknowledged. This is, I think, not a mere courtesy, but an actual legal obligation.
WRT me putting a note, on Talk:Ronald Reagan, stating I was the author of those paragraphs... I don't know how to say this more tactfully. The obligation in the licenses we use, to ackowledge earlier contributors, when material is copied, is on the copier.
WRT to incoming links to Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan... well, I should made sure that, at least, the Ronald Reagan article linked to it. Sorry for that. But the fact clicking the what links here button doesn't find incoming Citizendium wikilinks doesn't mean that no one linked to the article. Citizendium's goal was to offer citable articles. Citable articles guarantees incoming links from outside the Citizendium, that won't show up through the what links here button. Consequently, in a case like this, where I do not believe you are asserting that the topic of efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan is not worth covering, if the editorial decision is that it should be merged into a larger article, than it should have been turned into a redirect, not deleted.
You write someone "... can link directly to the section about impeachment ... [[Ronald_Reagan#Efforts_to_impeach]] ..." I wrote that I was a protege of Ted Nelson, the guy who coined the term hypertext. In the theoretical ideal hypertext he described, an author would be able to link to anything, even just an iconic phrase. But, using WMF software, as on Citizendium or Wikipedia, the wikilink to the article is really the only kind of link that works properly. Wikilinks to subsections within articles work, but only halfway.
The Wikipedia makes EXTENSIVE use of wikilinks to subsections within the pages in the Wikipedia namespace. They are rarely used in article space. In my opinion, because wikilinks to subsections within articles is only partially supported, these links should never be used, in article space.
One of the huge advantages wikilinks have over the plain old everyday URLs of the regular internet is that those links are fragile. In the 18 years I have been contributing to wikis I have seen about half of the newspapers we cite re-arrange their directory hierarchies. Universities do it too. All kinds of institutions do it. And, when they do it all the other places that linked to a specific page in the old hierarchy? Broken. Those links don't work anymore. Most of the time the old page IS still accessable, but in a different spot. Sometimes it is merely hard to find. More often the new location of old page is essentially impossible to find. With wikilinks that isn't true. You move a page, and a redirect is left behind. On the wikipedia there a robot that quietly watches for pages that have recently been moved, checks the incoming links to the old name, and the incoming links that were redirects are quietly changed to point to the new location.
So, wikilinks don't break. Regular wikilinks, that is, the unusual wikilink to a subsection within an article does break.
What happens if someone innocently edits the Ronald Reagan article, and they think it would be an innocent improvement to change the name of that subsection heading from "Efforts to impeach" to "Impeachment efforts"?
Early in my wikipedia career I wrote an article on the iconic phrase "There is a sucker born every minute". When I started that article I knew the phrase was widely associated with circus impressario P.T. Barnum. I was delighted to learn he denied ever saying the phrase, and that scholars backed him up. A few months later someone nominated the article for deletion, arguing that the material in the article really belonged in the article on P.T. Barnum. It was suggested that the article I wrote should be pasted into a subsection of the P.T. Barnum article, and the article on the phrase should be turned into a redirect, [[P.T. Barnum#There is a sucker born every minute]].
So, what happens when the subsection's name is changed? Clicking on the wikilink does take the person away from where they were. But, since that exact phrase is no longer the name of a subsection, the reader is left at the top of the Ronald Reagan article, or the P.T. Barnum article, wondering why the heck they were left there. In the case of that phrase, one author could link to the phrase, not realizing it was a redirect, and another author could trim the subsection heading, and the entire subsection, as off-topic. So, a reader clicks on a link to a phrase, looking for an explanation of the phrase, and finds themselves at a completely unrelated article about some boring old impressario.
I am going to restate an important point I made earlier, that you did not respond to. The topics in the Universe of Human Knowledge are deeply interconnected. Projects like Citizendium and Wikipedia work best when the structure of articles reflects the deep interconnectedness of the real world. That is best achieved with small focussed articles, that confine themselves to a single topic, but are richly connected to the other related topics.
I think we both know this would be a bad idea. And one of the reasons why it would be a bad idea was the person who was interested in some branches, Astrophysics, and Stellar classification (astrophysics), can currently put just those two topics on their watchlist, and skip the rest of Physics. If there is just one article on Physics the watchlist holder gets a watchlist hit when there are updates to the coverage of Physics topics they aren't interested in.
I don't know what you meant when you wrote that the information impeaching Reagan would be "more likely to be found" if it were shoehorned into the article on a related topic, than if it remained in its own standalone article.
You wrote: "The wiki search now can find any article even containing the word 'impeach' or 'impeachment'..." Hold on a second. Is searching for an article the only way someone reading a wiki finds the information they are looking for? Absolutely not. I suggest it is not even the most common way people reading a wiki find the information they are looking for. Sure, they START with a google search for a search term, or they start with typing a search term into the wiki's own search box. But, once they have done that, to find their starting place, and started reading, they should be reading text that is chock full of lovely blue-links. They think to themselves, "that blue link looks promising... maybe that is where I will find the information I really want..."
This is why readers are best served reading a richly connected wiki full of smaller articles that confine themselves to one single topic, and not poorly connected wikis where topics are, arbitrarily, shoehorned into articles on related topics.
I don't know how many wikipedia AFD you participated in. AFD is short for "Articles For Deletion". Keep, merge or delete, are the three outcomes people generally argue for there. And one of the most frustrating things I found was to see multiple people state something like: "I (1)think this article is too short; and (2) its topic is not as significant as this other topic, which already has a longer article; (3) therefore I think it is obvious it should be merged into that larger article! That is where that information REALLY belongs." But then the next commenter down would agree on their first two points, only to insist the only possible merge target was a completely different article! So far as I am concerned, any time the people who think a small article should be merged into a larger article on a related topic, but can't agree on the merge target, that is a crystal clear sign there is a need for the information in that smaller article to stay just where it is, in that smaller article -- so all the related articles can link to it there.
If I return to active participation here I do so as a volunteer. You have said you are the editor-in-chief, and what you say goes. If I was an employee I would have to accept that, or lose my job. If I was an employee, and you pulled rank, I would have to say "I agree to do what you say, boss." I am not an employee. I am a volunteer. No, I don't agree that the article on Ronald Reagan is where that information should remain. I think the information was already where it belonged.
My penultimate point, returning to Astronomy. I said Ted Nelson, the guy who first described hypertext, was my mentor. A point I thought he made very convincingly, in his 1974 book Computer Lib, was that hierarchies were arbitrary. Suppose you and I thought we were the too most senior Astronomers on Planet Earth, and we were collaborating on the definitive Astronomy textbook. We could agree that no one should learn about the links between Red dwarf stars, and the Goldilocks Zone, until they had a firm understanding of Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams, stellar classification. A professor can insist on his or her students learning the subject of their course in the precise order and manner they are sure is the right order. But our readers aren't our students. WRT stellar classification they might already know red dwarfs are the really small dim stars. They don't actually have to understand Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams to understand the habitable zone.
Biologists, who study such things, used to have a pretty rigid hierarchy of Species and Genera, of Kingdoms and Phyla. They thought they knew which species shared common ancestors. And now that we can analyze DNA, it turns out their hierarchy was often surprisingly wrong.
My final point...
Pat, back in March and April, I thanked you, and your colleagues, who worked on the migration to the new server. I was grateful the Citizendium had a new server, and maybe a new start. My thanks for that stands.
You are not the only one who made a big time commitment. I know you know that between April and September I either ported, or wrote brand new, from scratch, a bunch of articles. I don't think you were really aware of how many. I don't actually know, myself, over 200, possibly as many as 300. So, about 2-3 percent of the Citizendium's article base.
I am not bringing that up to brag.
Pat, when I discuss an issue with someone, anyone, I try to remember no matter how smart I used to be, I am fallible, and I could be wrong, and the other guy could be right. It doesn't matter to me whether my correspondent has dyslexia, or their English is imperfect because they learned it as a second language, and still haven't masted it. I always do my best to try to understand their points, because, no matter how smart I used to be I am fallible, and they could be right and I could be wrong.
Pat, I know being editor-in-chief is a heavy responsibility. I know most or all of the burden of site maintenance is on your shoulders. Nevertheless, I committed hundreds of hours of my time to the project, since March, and I am afraid you aren't really making an effort to understand the points I am trying to make. George Swan (talk) 15:39, 19 December 2022 (CST)
In the last five days, you have inundated this forum (which is readable by the entire world) with 4,353 words of verbiage complaining about my having merged a short, unlinked stub into the Ronald Reagan article. I have managed to respond, so far, with 396 words. I understand your dislike of bookmarks. I understand that you want things put back the way they were before I deleted the stub. While I am still considering whether to restore the stub, I have questions. Why the hurry for me to render a judgement about a stub that sat untouched for six months, unlinked, unfinished, without provenance, and with no author note attached? Can I not take a few days to think it over before being accused of not making an effort? Why is this request to restore it being made HERE in a public forum where even non-contributors can see it, instead of on the Ronald Reagan article's Talk page? And finally, why are you ignoring my request that you make complaints "off the record" before trying to resolve them "on the record"? In future, please first post on my Talk page, or on the article's Talk page, or better yet, make use of a private message. None of this needed to be in the public forum. Please don't use the forum in this way.Pat Palmer (talk) 07:15, 20 December 2022 (CST)
Regardless of George's attitude in this instance, you still need to develop a practice of compliance with the legal requirements of the licence (or else change to another, but even then you'd have lots of legacy material). Readers should be able to ascertain authorship by taking obvious steps. This usually means analysing the history. If the information isn't there, there needs to be a notice on the article itself saying where the information can be found (whether the talk page or anywhere else). Peter Jackson (talk) 04:32, 19 December 2022 (CST)
I have placed a notice in Ronald_Reagan#Efforts_to_impeach to clarify this a little, because indeed I was careless in failing to give George credit in the comment when merging the stub. However, George failed to label the stub as being from Wikipedia, so that's on him. Also, I would genuinely appreciate it if you would both consider private messaging me first before issuing a public correction when I make a mistake about something. There is no policy debate going on here that I can see, and I don't want us to become adversarial. Having worked in corporations for decades, I will say that going "on the record" to demand a course correction without having first exhausted private communications can make a lot of enemies. That happened with various people in this wiki in the past, and it's one of the reasons that Larry's inspiring "expert model" approach failed. People got into fights, got their feelings hurt, and lost face. Don't let's do that. It's a management style thing. I've been thinking about wiki communications since I first joined Wikipedia in 2006, and I feel that this is one way in which the wiki way really would benefit from change.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:55, 19 December 2022 (CST)
Funny related story
Decades ago there was a guy who posted about losing a job because a plagiarism detection robot falsely accused him of plagiarism.
Here is what happened:
Early in his career he had published one of the first key papers in a practically brand new field. He had published it so early and so long ago that it appeared on a small circulation mimeographed journal, that was never digitized, and put online.
However, his early paper was so important to the field that people who came after him, found those mimeographed editions, and quoted him.
Fast forward years or a decade or more... he hadn't been active in that field, or maybe any field... I can't remember the details, but he is applying for an academic job, after a gap from being an academic
He is asked to submit a sample of his work.
He decides to get out his old floppy of that early paper that was so seminal in a field that is now well developed.
As a standard practice his potential employers tell a plagiarism detection robot to check the machine readable paper he submitted against a big database of online papers.
The robot finds all kinds of papers that quoted his original paper. The robot concluded that he had plagiarized the later authors who thought his seminal paper was worth quoting.
Actually, it was so long ago, I am not sure whether he was able to get his potential employers to recognize the plagiarism detection robots report was unreliable. George Swan (talk) 14:25, 15 December 2022 (CST)
Sports subgroups
I propose a reduction in these from the current 105 to a more manageable five, with perhaps four others under review.
The five I would retain are Baseball, Cricket, Football, Olympic Games and Tennis. I think Football should be the generic one, however, to house all recognised football variants including association, American, Gaelic, rugby, etc.
Of the other existing subgroups, it may be worth retaining Aquatics and Chess under review. Again under review, we could create two additional generics for Motor Sport and Winter Sports. I think everything else should just go under the Sports Workgroup, although many will also have a place under Olympic Games.
Of all those, I think the only ones with a definite claim to retention are cricket (74 articles and counting) and Olympic Games (only 8 so far but has huge potential). The biggest problem is association football (still only 7) which could easily take off.
I have an open mind on this, I should point out, and if consensus is to delete all the sports subgroups, that will be fine by me. Thanks. John (talk) 18:53, 30 May 2023 (CDT)
Status
I've reduced the number of currently usable groups from 109 to 19 and so there are now 90 empty ones. I would say the 90 can all go. The nineteen have some potential for growth and it's possible we may eventually need to split a few subjects out again. I think we have a basis for the immediate future. I've made sure that the rpl problems at Sport/Related Articles have not resurfaced and the page is presently displaying all icons and definitions. John (talk) 10:10, 24 June 2023 (CDT)
Arg, 105 subgroups seems like way too many. Five seems reasonable. Subgroups can be useful when working intensely within a topic area, but at present, they are all over the place. Kudos to you for the reductioning! Yes, let's delete unused subgroups. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:05, 20 January 2024 (CST)
For example, Accidental release source terms has a citable version and, as it has metadata, is also in CZ Live. Aardvark is an undeveloped article, but is in CZ Live because it has metadata; it also has a definition and a related articles (RA) subpage. 10 Downing Street, however, despite being quite a significant topic, is a lemma article that is not in CZ Live – it has three subpages including a definition, but it lacks metadata.
Although the lemma articles do not need subpages other than a definition, there are 868 subpages in Category:Lemma Subpage which excludes definitions. There are 768 pages in Category:Lemma Related Articles Subpage and all of those are in Lemma Subpage too. The difference of 100 subpages is made up by various Approval, Bibliography, Catalogs, External Links and Video subpages.
Lemma definitions are in Category:Lemma Definition Subpages – there are 7,866 including 10 Downing Street/Definition so there is a shortfall of lemma articles vis-à-vis lemma definitions. There are 1,505 lemma definitions without lemma articles. Whether that matters is a moot point because the typical lemma article does nothing more than repeat the definition. 1976 Winter Olympics/Definition is an example of a lemma definition page without a lemma article – creation of the latter is very easy just by clicking on the article link which precedes the definition. Some lemma articles have additional text and should probably be promoted to main article status with metadata.
At present, I don't know if there are any lemma articles without a lemma definition but that can easily be established so I'll come back with that one.
I'm posting findings to date because I would like to know what others think about how to resolve the lemma scenario. For example, should there be a drive to identify those for which we have no use or which are contrary to our objectives? Should there be a drive to create metadata for significant topics like 10 Downing Street or should we just be content with definition only lemma pages whose topics meet our requirements? Thanks for your time. John (talk) 05:04, 28 July 2023 (CDT)
A bit of time and effort needed to do a deskcheck but there are no lemma articles without a definition, which is probably good. John (talk) 06:28, 28 July 2023 (CDT)
As a rule of thumb, such definitions that are pointed to by 1 or 0 articles can probably be deleted. But definitions pointed to by 3 or more substantial articles probably should NOT be deleted. Just my two cents worth. I guess we have to look at each case individually, but rules of thumb can also be helpful. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:08, 20 January 2024 (CST)
Is this a problem with Related Articles?
I noticed a lot of Fireboat/Related Articles didn't have definitions. I started adding missing definitions, starting at the top.
By my count the first 26 entries show up, but the definitions for the lower entries don't... at least not for me...
On November 29th I added more definitions, and some of those don't show up... Plus I know some of the other entries already had definitions, which aren't showing up...
As bugs go this doesn't seem very serious. But I thought I would record it... George Swan (talk) 18:50, 30 November 2023 (CST)
Hi George. This seems to be a problem with the {{rpl|Article name}} template (and other similar templates). When a long list of them are displayed on one page, as on Fireboat/Related Articles, only the first dozen or so show up, and subsequent ones do not. I think it is some kind of software buffering problem in Mediawiki having to do with templates, and I have no idea how to fix it. Just for example, if you moved Eldon Trinity to the top of the list on that page, its definition would then show up (but the bottom definition now showing would probably drop off). The best we can do for now is live with it. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:50, 20 January 2024 (CST)
And to clarify, the rpl (and similar) templates that grab a definition can also fail if the article's Metadata page has a syntax glitch anywhere in it. But that is a different issue than we are seeing there on the Fireboat/Related Articles page.Pat Palmer (talk) 09:51, 20 January 2024 (CST)
Missing topics
While we should not take too much notice of RationalWiki, they are right about one thing.
One of my beefs about CZ is that far too many of our articles concern obscure topics including individual members of the Taliban, individual nuclear missiles, individual US government administrators and the like. The counterpoint to such excess is the omission of topics that readers would expect to find. RW have listed many of our omissions and, to be fair, the redlinks predominate and the bluelinks are stubs.
I think we should build our own list of missing topics, and the RW ones below can serve as our starter for ten:
That's quite a bundle. We don't need comprehensive articles to clear the redlinks but we do need some good starts to get all these up and running. Thanks. John (talk) 09:04, 14 January 2024 (CST)
I like your list ! And, we are in agreement that this will never be the sort of "complete" encyclopedia that, say, Wikipedia or its recent forks are. But if I were picking the most needed articles, my list would be quite different from your list. For example, on my list (which actually exists in my sandbox), there are all the missing U.S. state capitals. These of course have articles in Wikipedia, but those tend to be very long and confusing, and many read like they are trolled by the local Chamber of Commerce. So in Citizendium, I'm starting created smaller writeups for the capitals that hit on just the main things a visitor from away might need to know about a city if visiting for the first time. Every contributor here would have their own list too. So I think it important that our contributors pick an area they love best and know how to write about, and especially, that they ENJOY writing about. Because working in here needs to be fun and satisfying, or we won't do it. My method of dealing with longer articles with too many redlinks is to remove some of the redlinks and replace them with references pointing out to Wikipedia or another site, so that if anyone isn't sure what that is, they have a pointer for where to go. And of course, having a few redlinks is normal in a wiki anyway. What we do urgently need is consistency in naming within topic areas; so for example, I renamed all the U.S. state articles to be following by (U.S. state), and they now all have dismbig pages too. So I'm arguing for us to focus on quality, rather than quantity. We'll never be able to claim usefulness based on completeness, but we can already claim it for quite a few articles in terms of quality writing, simple and readable introductions that contain the most important points, and objectivity of viewpoint as compared with Wikipedia. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:39, 20 January 2024 (CST)
I agree. I have my own list (nowhere near complete) at redlinks. It would be good if we all kept something like that which is visible as it might generate ideas. John (talk) 00:13, 21 January 2024 (CST)
Proposals for deletion
Unless there is an obvious need to delete an article immediately (e.g., duplication, hoax), a request must be made in compliance with CZ:Article Deletion Policy and CZ:Proposed for deletion. This is essentially achieved by placing {{PropDel}} at the top of the article, above {{subpages}}. The article will not then be deleted for at least one month to allow reasonable time for discussion, consensus or withdrawal. Discussion should be opened on the article's talk page.
A list of proposals is held on Category:Articles for deletion which is automatically populated by the PropDel template. The manual tabulated list in CZ:Proposed for deletion has been terminated because it was tiresome and tedious (who on Earth would build such a thing?).
If you have any ideas about we can improve this process, please let us know.
Thanks very much. John (talk) 05:24, 20 January 2024 (CST)
John, I have comments on some of the proposed deletions. Where do we make comments? On each article's Talk page? Pat Palmer (talk) 09:26, 20 January 2024 (CST)
And one other comment--how can we tell how long a given article has been proposed for deletion already, and for what reasons? Might it be useful to place a section about this on each article's Talk page? I don't know the answer either, just asking. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:28, 20 January 2024 (CST)
Hi, Pat. The discussion should always be on the article's talk page, as per the policy and PFD pages.
The dating process is one I really needed to think about because we can't justify anything so complex as WP:AFD. As we had already gone down the category route and, given that we are never going to have huge numbers of nominations, I thought about using some kind of monthly procedure.
Anyway, I've gone ahead with generation of the month in the name of the sub-category, so that everything nominated this month goes into Category:Articles for deletion January, and I propose that nothing in that category may be deleted until 16 March earliest which leaves six to ten weeks for a discussion to commence. February nominations will stay until 16 April, and so on.
I realise this is all a bit rough-and-ready but, unless we really need something sophisticated, it should do the job adequately.
I've updated the policy and instruction pages and also placed some notes on each of the monthly categories (have only created three so far), but you may wish to amend or expand those depending on how they comply with CZ policies overall. John (talk) 00:10, 21 January 2024 (CST)
Actually, I've had second thoughts because I've missed a trick here. I used the current month function for categorisation but I forgot that any changes to an article in the next month will cause its recategorisation into that month. That being so, anything proposed will keep moving forward, so to speak, if and while someone is working on it. On the other hand, a proposal with no interest will remain in its original month and, that being the case, I don't think we should retain it for two months and more. So, I think anything posted in January should now be deleted on or after 16 February if no one has objected or tried to improve the article. I'll take the initiative and go with that for the time being. John (talk) 10:24, 7 February 2024 (CST)
John, Please be sure to check "What Links Here" and also look at who originally wrote the article. I just removed the {{PropDel}} template from Agricultural Adjustment Administration and created Metadata and added some details to that stub. It is being linked from three legitimate articles and is in a cluster originally written by historian Richard Jensen about the U.S. Great Depression, so even though it's sparse, I see no reason to remove it altogether. I may or may not have time to check out all the rest of the January deletions, but please examine this with this rule of thumb in mind: if linked to by three legitimate articles, maybe do not delete but instead categorize it as needing fleshing out. Thanks for you efforts. Most of the stubs you marked do indeed need zapping. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:12, 8 February 2024 (CST)
Could people please take a look at the comments I just wrote on Talk:American Center for Law and Justice? Is it reasonable to zap a whole cluster of messy, out of date, possibly inaccurate or at least unobjective, articles and stubs? I doubt whether it is helpful just to delete a single stub of such a cluster, because it makes the remaining parts of the gnarly mess even less noticeable. Could I get some other opinions, please? Pat Palmer (talk) 10:07, 8 February 2024 (CST)
John, you initially started a central list of articles that you thought should be deleted. Then you changed your mind, and asked that the discussion as to whether articles be kept or deleted should take place on their talk pages.
I am going to suggest something different. I started subpages, off the talk pages of some of those articles.
This subpage is just for the rationale(s) for keep or delete.
I am going to suggest that, if it is possible to add a new class of subpage to every article that every article could usefully have a specific place to discuss whether it should be kept or deleted, distinct from its talk page.
This page can be transcluded. That is what I did with these. I transcluded them on the usual talk page. And I also transcluded them to User:George Swan/propdel discussions, so the discussions can all be seen, at once.
If other people think this is a good approach, the central discussion should probably be in the CZ namespace, like CZ:Keep or delete discussions/2004-02.
If other people think this is a good approach, and we can integrate the Rationale page into the who subpage hierarchy, I think the Rationale page should be preserved, even if the decision is made to delete the article, as the discussion there will be relevant when similar articles are considered for deletion.
Maybe "rationale" is not the best title... George Swan (talk) 13:13, 10 February 2024 (CST)
I've begun working through this list to make corrections and remove any redundancies. There is a real problem with some 40-plus HCB pages which concern the Pinnacle nuclear program and its offshoots. We already have several of these in PropDel but the situation is far worse than that would suggest because the pages are not so much double redirects as tangled ones.
There are a number of what seem to be useful definitions and I've hard-copied them into United States nuclear surety/Related Articles under Incident reporting. Having saved those, there is no reason to keep the stubs but, because of the mess, I'm taking unilateral action and deleting them all now instead of using PropDel. It all looks as if HCB changed his mind about titles several times and didn't bother to clean up the leftovers. A complete shambles. John (talk) 02:39, 9 February 2024 (CST)
Thank you, John. Much appreciated. Pat Palmer (talk) 11:47, 9 February 2024 (CST)
Which articles are going to draw new readers to the Citizendium...
In a recent comment John suggested that if the Wikipedia didn't have an article on a topic the Citizendium should take the hint, and not cover that topic.
In my opinion, the wikipedia has a kind of auto-immune disorder. That is why excellent policy-compliant contributors end up being permanently blocked. And, another symptom is that good valid articles on topics that should be covered, get deleted due to someone's prejudice against the topic.
I started articles on Bernie Madoff's two sons, Andrew Madoff and Mark Madoff, and two of his daughters-in-law, Stephanie Mack and Catherine Hooper. No one has challenged whether his sons were notable, in their own right. But both articles on his daughters-in-law were deleted.
The arguments to delete the article on Stephanie Mack were very brief instances of IDONTLIKEIT, based on the claim "she is just Bernie Madoff's daughter-in-law," ignoring the fact that her memoir made the NYTimes bestseller list. The wikipedia has a tool that keeps track of how many times a page is opened. Mack's article was opened about 700,000 times -- that was about 1000 times a day.
A day or two ago I did a google search on Catherine Hooper. In the last decade or so google offers a short paragraph about the subject of the search. And, almost all of the time, if the topic has a wikipedia article google shows readers the first several sentences of the first paragraph of the wikipedia article.
I was very pleasantly surprised when I googled Catherine Hooper. Google showed readers the first several sentences of the Citizendium article.
I like that.
I suggest that opics that are notable, and apt to attract a lot of readers, that have never been covered by the wikipedia, or where the wikipedia has erased the article for some stupid reason, are very good topics for the Citizendium to cover. George Swan (talk) 13:40, 10 February 2024 (CST)
Dangerous nonsense
According to the former military historian: "While westerners may think of Pakistan principally in terms of terrorism in Central Asia...." before banging on about the dangers of nuclear war between India and Pakistan.
That sort of stuff is irresponsible editing. The article in question was called Pakistani policy towards India and it was appallingly bad when it was written, even more so when you read it now some fifteen years later. You may think I am being over-zealous in deleting a lot of the sensitive stuff but it is because of statements like that which are based not on military or historical or political expertise, but on ignorance. John (talk) 13:55, 14 February 2024 (CST)
I agree, and I'm finding a shocking amount of it. The fact is, in the past, the large community in here often were able to write with no oversight whatsoever, because the numbers overwhelmed the editorial staff at the time. Anyway, cleanup in the present time seems like a good idea to me, especially of articles that are now many years old but are written as if they are in the present tense. If no one has the energy to improve those, let's nominate them for deletion. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:16, 16 February 2024 (CST)
There are an unbelievable number of articles whose context is "here and now". I have picked up a few on Afghan and Pakistani provinces, for example, converting them into geographical mainly. Others are hopeless cases and all we can do is get rid. John (talk) 14:06, 16 February 2024 (CST)
Biographies of living persons
I have copied the following from my Talk page because this discussion may result in some eventual revision of CZ:Content_Policy as well as, possibly, other documentation. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:20, 16 February 2024 (CST)
Hi, Pat. I've not a lot of time for the next three days because family are visiting but we've just been chatting about CZ and one of my daughters has made a useful suggestion.
She is puzzled by the Topic Informant classification and thinks we should simplify how we categorise living person biographies (BLP) by having a Biographies category with a Living Persons sub-category. On the face of it, this seems a good idea to me. I think we'd have to augment it by insisting that all BLPs must have a metadata completed and that no BLP can be a lemma. Also, of course, anyone creating a BLP must be able to demonstrate the subject's significance. For example, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are significant, but is Jeff Zients (whose name I plucked out of a list)? I would add that everything we write in a BLP article must be verified by citation of a reliable source, especially if the person is controversial in some way.
Just one for us to think about as it might be a way towards better control of BLP creation and content. John (talk) 04:22, 16 February 2024 (CST)
I had never heard of Jeff Zients, either. 15 seconds with google taught me he is Joe Biden's Chief of Staff. That is a very important position.
His wikipedia article has been read something like 316,000 times. George Swan (talk) 11:42, 16 February 2024 (CST)
Wikipedia:Jeff_Zients is important for the moment, yes, but Wikipedia already has an extensive article about him, and it's actually not bad, so I'm reluctant to leave the one we have unless someone is going to invest the time to make it better than WP's. Thus, his name and function might well appear in CZ's Joe Biden article, but instead of linking to a CZ stub article on Zients, we can just add a Footnote/Reference pointing to WP, or one is actually able to link directly to Wikipedia like this: [[Wikipedia:Jeff_Zients]]. That would be my preference in cases of minor figures like this. Oddly, WP's Notability policy gets anyone mentioned in the press a lot an article, but makes it damned difficult to add articles about people who, in life, are probably important to many people but are being ignored by the press, such as (just for example) Paul Prestopino, a man who played on tracks from dozens of leading rock musicians in the 60's through 80's and was well-known across the music industry. After he passed away, it took me six months to get the article about him approved in Wikipedia (because Paul never sought the limelight), even though 70 articles in Wikipedia were already pointing off to a non-existent article about him. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:07, 16 February 2024 (CST)
BTW I agree that Topic Informants is not a helpful Workgroup at this point, but we need some method of grouping together all the articles about living people, and reengineering Topic Informants is beyond my capacity at the moment. The code implementing Workgroups is tough to deal with. I like the idea of a Living Persons Biography category, but if we're going to create that, we need to decide what the criterion is for it. I think it's important not to keep adding mid-level professionals to the wiki, confining ourselves to people with tangible accomplishments: books, recordings, films, other works of art, writing plays that have had a long successful run (not necessarily beginners who have won a single award but whose work has not withstood the test of time), holding high office (senator, congressperson, member of parliament, head of state, cabinet member, etc.). This is an incomplete list; being the top general in a war, state or federal judge, etc. should also count. Being White House chief of staff is a very powerful position in that this person can to some extent gate who has personal access to the president, but the position is temporary, and that person is, at least in theory, not really the one "driving the bus", so to speak. After his/her president leaves office, that person becomes (once again) just another party loyalist available for hire by others, unless they decide to run for office on their own (as did, for example, Rahm Emanuel who became mayor of Chicago, which probably does warrant having a bio in here. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:07, 16 February 2024 (CST)
I would like to explain my priorities about Citizendium, which are very different than those which Larry Sanger likely had when he created this wiki. I think we should delete the Citizendium article about Slawko Klymkiw. Citizendium is not in the business of cataloging every person who gets a job. Any info about this guy should probably be under an article about the Canadian Film Centre, if someone wants to create that, but this person does not warrant an article just because his name was mentioned in the press. I would like us to stop thinking of normal professionals, mid-grade military people, and people with minor YouTube channels as if they deserve encyclopedia articles about them. This wiki is not a media outlet, and it is not its purpose to preserve the myriad of details that the media publishes. Mid-grade bureaucrats, however interesting aspects of their lives may be because they were alleged to have given Colin Powell false information or whatever, are already documented in the press whose editions now remain online in perpetuity. Most of them are also documented more thoroughly in Wikipedia. In my view, the only reason for duplicating any article from WP in CZ is if we think CZ can somehow substantially improve it with better writing, additional information, or a complete shift of emphasis. Pat Palmer (talk) 13:45, 16 February 2024 (CST)
I think you have hit the nail on the head with "test of time". That should be a key qualifier for all BLPs except a newcomer who suddenly leaps into the spotlight, and then we would have to decide if that particular spotlight is bright enough. So, I would definitely support Paul Prestopino on test of time. There will be a lot of grey areas, and the newcomer will be especially difficult. For example, if the director of a potential Hollywood blockbuster should cast a hitherto unknown actor in the lead role (think of Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind), I don't think that actor should get an article until, say, they have been cast as the lead in a second film. No doubt the actor will quickly gain a WP article and I think we should then fall back on the rule that, if someone here can write a better article than WP (not actually difficult!), then go for it.
But, I do think we should have a rule that if an article about a relatively unknown or unimportant person is started, it must be quickly developed to substantial coverage and not just left here as a stub. If a person is deemed to be important enough for a BLP, they are important enough for the article to be substantial.
Btw, I don't think Mr Zients should have an article now but, if his career goes onwards and upwards in the course of time, maybe someday. John (talk) 14:02, 16 February 2024 (CST)
Here is an example of why I am urging writers to disambiguate article names about living persons: See the comment I left on Talk:Charlotte_Martin, which is proposed for deletion. That short article is getting lots of hits every month from Google, but it is pretty clear that the searchers are hoping to find info about a contemporary singer of the exact same name rather than a groupie from the 1960's. Pat Palmer (talk) 08:51, 17 February 2024 (CST)
Topic Informant Workgroup - do we need a category "Living Persons" instead?
I've been taking a look at the Topic Informant Workgroup. I believe that over the years, contributors started just using it as a bucket place to deposit biographies of living persons. I don't know of a single case that actually meets the definition given in the Workgroup itself of a famous person who has given this wiki explicit permission to quote them. Also, there are companies and things in there that are not even people. We definitely need a place to group our articles which are about living persons so that we can review them from time to time and so we can look at the collection of them and decide whether we need specific policies in how to name the, how much longer than a mere definition or stub they need to be, what kind of intro they need to have, that they not be written in the present tense as though nothing is ever going to change, and possibly, whether there is another source elsewhere online (such as Wikipedia or other online encyclopedias) that have a much better article about these persons that CZ does.
It there exists an obviously better external article about the person that seems to be stable, and if there are only a very few links to the CZ article on this person, it might make sense to convert the links to the person article into a reference pointing out to the other article.
The question is, should we continue using this workgroup wrongly, or should be break down and start a category of "Living Persons"? (I do not prefer "Biographies of Living Persons", as most CZ articles will not be anywhere near what I would call a biography.) There are not so very many articles in the workgroup and it should be possible to clean it up and apply the new Category, if we decide to, to any articles of living people that we can find. What do others think? Pat Palmer (talk) 13:45, 17 February 2024 (CST)
I've given this some thought, Pat, but I'm afraid this is a flying visit. I'll come back to you tomorrow or on Monday. Busy, busy, busy today. John (talk) 14:26, 17 February 2024 (CST)
I can enlarge on this but I think two words to be kept in mind are noteworthy and affiliation. Is a person really noteworthy or merely newsworthy? Is a person noteworthy in his or her own right or only through affiliation with a noteworthy person or organisation? Members of a famous team or club may not be noteworthy except by affiliation with that team or club. The same applies to family members, business associates, political/administrative appointees, cast members and the like.
If affiliation stands a test of time, however, then there is a strong case for inclusion. A good example would be a footballer who has played for a top-class team for umpteen years without becoming a star performer but has created a most appearances record. He has been there so long that people automatically associate him with that team. It's something of a syndrome but I think long-term value is relevant. John (talk) 03:23, 18 February 2024 (CST)
The TIW is certainly a bucket and, as you say, is not fit for its stated purpose. I see we have people called IBM and Someone College in there too. Of the 316 articles it contains, many should undoubtedly be in PropDel. I'll be happy to work through them and make sure they are all in other workgroups such as Politics, Sports and Theater which between them will probably account for the majority.
As for classifiying them as both people and living persons, I suggest a new People Workgroup and affiliated to it a Living Persons Subgroup, which will probably be co-affiliated to the other main workgroups. We could have a Historic Persons Subgroup too. I don't think we should use Biographies anywhere because we only have a handful that qualify. Most people articles are pen pictures or profiles only.
It will be easy enough to edit the metadatas of all these so if you give me the go-ahead, I'll make a start tomorrow when I'll have more time.
Sitewide, I really like the WP reference link which is neat, and we should make liberal use of it. John (talk) 05:04, 18 February 2024 (CST)
I have mixed feeling about providing a link that goes directly over to Wikipedia, so when I'm patient enough to bother, instead of linking, I provide a footnote directing off to Wikipedia instead. It's more work, but it's also less likely that the reader will leave this site and end up "over there". Pat Palmer (talk) 15:49, 18 February 2024 (CST)
That's a good point. We need to keep them here. Maybe we should go into WP and set up CZ links in their articles :-) John (talk) 16:23, 18 February 2024 (CST)
Alternative medicine, homeopathy, and pseudoscience
Hi, Pat. Working through the double redirects, I came across a submission for editorial by Hayford, with whom I used to enjoy some very interesting chats about sport. In that, Hayford said what he thought about the editorial presence of certain persons who were noted for their serious advocation of subjects like alternative medicine, homeopathy, and pseudoscience. I'm sure you know who he was talking about. Within Category:Pseudoscience Subgroup and Category:Complementary and alternative medicine Subgroup, there are a total of 68 articles, many of which are common to both groups.
I strongly recommend that all of these are summarily deleted, plus any others which have escaped the two nets.
Rightly or wrongly, people who take such subjects seriously are generally dismissed as "cranks" or conspiracy theorists. I remember the arguments that went on about this stuff in the 2000s and the flak which CZ received for granting the "certain persons" free reign in promoting it, especially as anyone who objected was told to shut up or be banned. CZ has moved on from the 2000s and we are looking to attract new editors and a wider circulation. That means we must present coverage which is authentic and based on fact, so that we establish a reputation for credibility.
We cannot achieve those aims if critics can point to FIVE articles about homeopathy when we have only one about American football, for example, and heaps of redlinks. We are doing the right thing in deleting Howard's depressingly negative minutiae about terrorism, bureaucracy, and nuclear destruction. That stuff deters new readers because it's bad news they don't want to be reminded of, but crackpot theories like homeopathy generate derision.
It's your decision, of course, but I really do think we need to make a statement of positive intent by removing these articles. John (talk) 00:13, 1 March 2024 (CST)
Please don't do anything to these categories until I have a chance to take a look. I'm crazy busy (tax season and sick friends) so it might be a few days. But thanks for a heads up. I don't know about Britain, but in the U.S., both acupuncture and chiropractic are regulated and licensed, are widely accepted, and even insurance usually pays for them in certain circumstances, so those at least are not fringe topics. Functional doctors are also common these days in the U.S.; they work with patients on preventive measures, are expensive, and insurance generally does not pay for them--but, they are licensed M.D.'s and not quacks. And generally, I feel that for what might be fringe topics, CZ might have an article on them as long as it is written with some objecticity and is not advocacy. So, I'll take a look--and again, it may take me a while. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:01, 1 March 2024 (CST)
No problem, Pat. As you say, it was just a heads up. I hope your friends will be well again soon. All the best. John (talk) 11:28, 1 March 2024 (CST)
seeking community feedback on policy revisions regarding articles about living persons, naming conventions, and stubs/definitions
I am a big believer in having few rules, and for four years, I resisted any serious revision of content policy in this wiki. However, I have now found it necessary to lay out some guidelines for naming conventions (regarding especially disambiguation of place and person names) and content policy (regarding especially articles about living persons and little-linked stubs/definitions). If you have time and interest, please look at recent revisions to CZ:Content_Policy and CZ:Naming_conventions and leave your reactions either here or on the article Talk pages. I will seriously consider your feedback. Pat Palmer (talk) 12:28, 9 March 2024 (CST)
Over the years I drafted many articles on the small, non-WMF wiki wikialpha.org. Since my return to the Citizendium I have ported a couple of dozen articles originally drafted on wikialpha to the Citizendium.
Citizendium is older, larger, and frankly, a lot more serious than wikialpha. So when both wikis had an article on a topic Citizendium's were showing up first. Then, a couple of days ago, when I was away from home, on my cell phone, I used google, thinking it would find the Citizendium article I was looking for. It didn't find it, it only found the wikialpha article, which I had not kept up to date.
Just now I googled Leila Boujnane, an article I started here three months ago. Google didn't find it.
Is this a temporary glitch? A well known problem - but temporary? Did a site-wide __NOINDEX__ get accidentally instantiated? I am going to ping Pat, because this could be serious.
I ported Mateo Sabog from wikialpha on April 2nd. It didn't show up, and neither did any of its subpages.
I know articles I had recently started WERE showing up in the google results a week or two ago. George Swan (talk) 04:01, 27 August 2022 (CDT)
My first draft of the Leila Boujnane article initially had a __NOINDEX__ on it, which I removed about ten minutes later, after I concluded there were enough references to support an article about her.
I'll be more careful about that. George Swan (talk) 11:31, 2 September 2022 (CDT)
My impression is that Google is using AI to assess the quality of articles and thus deciding where to rank them in relationship to other sites. Some of Citizendium's articles are ranking quite well (such as Google:one+way+encryption). I note that it is often not the first sentence that Google thought was newsworthy to show in its summary. That's why I think they use AI to rank the articles.Pat Palmer (talk) 09:47, 6 February 2023 (CST)
Another note: recently, Sergei did some work to help us regenerate the sitemaps for Citizendium. I am running this program periodically, and now, a lot of the above articles ARE showing up in search results, such as Google:Mateo+Sabog. So I think Sergei's work helped.Pat Palmer (talk) 09:57, 6 February 2023 (CST)
Interesting research paper
See [5]. At a quick glance, the paper itself seems to be non-free access. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:54, 6 February 2023 (CST)
A tempest in a teapot, to me. Despite Wikipedia's insistence that every single sentence has to point to a source somewhere, they still get much wrong and omit important historical information due to bias that can't easily be detected or measured--such as a town disassociating itself from an unsavory past.Pat Palmer (talk) 09:51, 6 February 2023 (CST)
Indeed. "Verifiability" is a fraud. You can verify in principle, & often in practice, the existence of sources supporting the article. But you cannot conceivably verify the non-existence of sources contradicting it. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:58, 7 February 2023 (CST)
WP v ChatGPT
Readers regard them as equally credible, but the latter as clearer: [6]. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:11, 4 October 2023 (CDT)
Thanks for this link and the one from the section above it. Much food for thought. It seems like there is already a deliberate push explicitly for AI to generate missing content on WP--yikes! As for ArbCom and conflict management in WP, it is pretty clear that there is a tight knot of inner circle Wikipedians who bully anyone they want to and even boast about how their credibility is so high in the community that they are unchallengeable. I have encountered, and been threatened by, such. This year on Wikipedia, my edit attempts have been reverted more than 50% of the time by anonymous trolls. Their reasons for rejecting well-sourced additions included spurious excuses such as it would make an already long article too long. I also ran afoul of WP's complex Notability rules. The WP Notability requirements were needed to stop self promoters and PR hounds, but those rules are instead stopping much useful content and not stopping much harmful, hateful content about violence and crime. Wikipedia has continued to become worse and worse for most contributors over time. Honestly, who knows if AI generated content would make it worse or better? I say so with only a bit of tongue in cheek.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:02, 20 November 2023 (CST)
Interestingly, they seem to be ignoring this: no discussion, nobody popping up saying "I told you so", no mention added to their articles on ArbCom & Criticism of WP. Occam's Razor suggests nobody reads Signpost.
Now, in the middle of an election, ArbCom has suspended 1 of its own members for leaking. Whistleblower? See [9] for rather opaque discussion. One charge is that he (?) confirmed someone's guess as to why they'd been blocked, which they weren't supposed to know. Peter Jackson (talk) 06:03, 30 November 2023 (CST)
NB: Until the CZ Forums become operational on the wiki, the Managing Editor will post announcements here. Please use the Talk page for feedback, questions, etc.
Citizendium Election 2016
Regarding Citizendium Election 2016:
Citizendium Election 2016 will use ballotbin in order to speed up counting and providing for anonymous voting. Voters will register by e-mail via the wiki to an account to ensure that only CZ account holders can vote. Citizens will then be sent a link by an Election Committee member that allows them to vote and view provisional results as soon as the ballot closes. Official results would still have to be ratified by the Managing Editor or Council and published.
The timetable for the election is as follow:
Begin accepting nominations and referenda at 00:01 UTC on Sunday, May 15th 2016;
Begin registration of voters on Ballotbin from Sunday, May 15th, 2016;
Close the period for nominations and referendum proposals at midnight UTC on Saturday, May 28th 2016;
Nominations and election statements are accepted, and referendum proposals may be supported or amended, until the Council or Managing Editor authorises the ballot (up to June 4th, 2016);
Have the ballot prepared and begin accepting ballots from eligible voters from 00:01 UTC on Sunday, June 5th 2016;
Close voter registration period at midnight UTC on Friday, June 10th 2016;
Stop accepting ballots at midnight UTC on Saturday, June 11th 2016 (provisional results available immediately);
Ratify and officially publish the results by midnight UTC on Monday, June 20th 2016
Regarding donations
As you can see from the Treasurer's_report, monthly donations are just keeping up with our monthly hosting costs (~$100 per month), and the reserve of about $925 is remaining nearly constant. With the help of a few more contributors, we might be able to afford another server to increase the speed of our edits and page changes. Four or five additional contributions per month might enable us to go to a two-server configuration and a faster website. Can we make that happen? Anthony.Sebastian (talk) 21:40, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
Progress report on server migration
NOTICE: Citizendium is still being set up on its newer server, treat it as a beta for now; please see [10] for more.
MANAGING EDITOR DECISIONS PERTAINING TO CITIZENDIUM'S TECHNICAL STAFF
Darren Duncan is hereby officially appointed to the Technical Staff for a renewable two-year term;
Volunteer Francisco Reyes, welcomed by Greg and Darren, is hereby appointed to the Technical Staff for a renewable two-year term, with the Technical Lead authorised to assign him MediaWiki sysop rights if necessary.
We still-active veterans of Citizendium’s launch lost something precious: time. Time to devote to family and livelihood work. Yet we did it to join a project we felt had an important mission, one in line with our own sense of purpose. And we joined using our real names, partly a requirement, partly because we had no hesitation in doing so, as Citizendium was a scholarly project, and scholars have no need for anonymity or pseudonymity when sharing their knowledge. In the early years after Citizendium’s launch, swarms of individuals joined the project agreeing to use their real names.
So it saddens me somewhat that I feel I must allocate time and effort to respond again to the issue of Citizendium's requirement that all who request to join the project must do so using their real names, which Citizendium will verify.
I call your attention to a draft proposal, by Christine Bush, to allow Citizendium to create accounts for individuals using a pseudonym rather than their real name: Why Citizendium Needs to Modify Its Real Names Policy. Christine claims that Citizendium’s real names requirement restricts enrollment, suggesting that many people want to share their knowledge but do not want to be identified as to who they are. Moreover she contends that pseudonymity is an alternative to anonymity and all that anonymity brings with it.
The requirement for registering using your real name did not restrict enrollment during the Citizendium first two years of operation, when swarms of new users appeared. So nothing intrinsic to Citizendium’s real name requirement restricts enrollment. We continue to enroll 3-4 new users with verifiable real names each month (34 new users between January first and September 30, 2014). Just because enrollment is low does not with certainty result from the requirement for real names.
Pseudonymity cannot be defended as an alternative to anonymity for Citizendium, unless the applicant also gave us their real name, which would defeat the purpose of the pseudonym. Even if we could verify the real name of the person using a pseudonym, the question would arise, who would be privy to that knowledge? Could the enrollee ever have confidence that his or her real name would not be leaked?
Why would anybody want to use a pseudonym anyway, in a scholarly project like Citizendium? If I had a law practice and wanted to blog about politics but not want to reveal my identity for fear of losing clients, I might want to blog under a pseudonym. But Citizendium is not a blogging service. Nor is Citizendium a social network, where the use of pseudonyms might be appropriate in certain circumstances.
There is no need for the chaos anonymity or pseudonymity would bring Citizendium. The Citizendium’s real name requirement is part of the core of Citizendium’s creation.
I quote from our founding Editor-in-Chief, Larry Sanger, written in 2006, when the Citizendium started its pilot program:
Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge (longer version)
September 15, 2006
Obviously, you want to know how the Citizendium editorial system will differ from Wikipedia's system. There will be three main areas of dissimilarity. First, the project will invite experts to serve as editors, who will be able to make content decisions in their areas of specialization, but otherwise working shoulder-to-shoulder with ordinary authors. Second, the project will require that contributors be logged in under their own real names, and work according to a community charter. Third, the project will halt and actually reverse some of the "feature creep" that has developed in Wikipedia.
Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge (shorter version)
September 15, 2006
There will be no logged-out editing and no anonymous editing. Anyone may participate, but all must be logged in under their own real names (we will use the honor principle to begin with), and with a working e-mail address. Where Wikipedia shares the culture of anonymity found in the broader Internet, the Citizendium will have a culture of real-world, personal responsibility.
Let’s stay real in solving our recruitment problem. -Anthony.Sebastian 21:24, 14 October 2014 (UTC)
CZ Council passes motion to replace the existing Forums with a wiki-based Forum [20-Sep-2014]
The Citizendium Council has passed a motion to replace the existing Forums with a wiki-based Forums. The text of the motion can be found at: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Council#2014.
I repeat the text below for your convenience:
The Citizendium Council moves to authorize Constable John Stephenson to develop on the main wiki forum boards to replace those of the current non-wiki Citizendium forums. The old archives of the existing forums should be kept as a read-only archive until an alternative is found.
The Council directs John to comply with the existing rules regarding the structure of the forums as delineated by the ruling of the previous Management Council.
Also the Council directs John to mimic the current non-wiki Citizendium forums as closely as possible. Notices should be placed at the top of Council boards to prohibit non-members posting, on pain of Constabulary sanction. (Two strikes = ban)
Regarding the issue of providing for input from non-users, Council requests John to set up a venue for that using Google Groups.
The Council also moves that the Constabulary monitor the new forums on the wiki for abuses that they currently monitor on the main wiki.
The Council directs the technical staff to create a Space on the wiki for the forum so no forum functionality will be lost (advisory by John Stephenson).
When John has completed the development of the forums on the wiki, the Citizendium Council will evaluate and approve or make suggestions for improvement.
Because only a small fraction of active users utilize the existing forums, the Council hopes that more users will avail themselves if the forums are available on the main wiki.
Citizendium 2016 Election Committee
John Stephenson and Russell D. Jones have volunteered to constitute an Election Committee, with John as Chair and Russell as Associate Chair, and they are hereby so appointed. Anthony.Sebastian (talk) 23:23, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
If you wish to request the Managing Editor to act, please create a subpage of CZ:Managing Editor and add a link to it below the line. Please be brief and specific in your request (polar questions are best) and add relevant links if available. Please state a time frame in which you expect a decision. Every Citizen is invited to contribute to the decision-making process.
Please order chronologically, newest entry on top. Template.
