User:Thomas Wright Sulcer: Difference between revisions

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But my biggest concern was that when I googled my own articles, which were supposedly online at CZ, I ''couldn't find them'' -- even if I put the article title and the word ''Citizendium'' in the search bar. What was going on? For all of Wikipedia's problems, at least there was the benefit that ''people were reading what I wrote'', sometimes hundreds of people each day. And the criticism section of articles like the US Congress on WP (which I wrote), traffic would be ''thousands'' of people each day.
But my biggest concern was that when I googled my own articles, which were supposedly online at CZ, I ''couldn't find them'' -- even if I put the article title and the word ''Citizendium'' in the search bar. What was going on? For all of Wikipedia's problems, at least there was the benefit that ''people were reading what I wrote'', sometimes hundreds of people each day. And the criticism section of articles like the US Congress on WP (which I wrote), traffic would be ''thousands'' of people each day.


So, my agenda shifted. How to get readership? Was this something I could influence? My first foray was thinking that if I wrote ''hot articles'', (hot=identified by WP as big draws of eyeball traffic), imported/revamped to CZ, that more people would be steered here, and it might build the encyclopedia, possibly causing more people to look at my stuff, and bring in new contributors possibly, to help CZ grow. So, for about a month, I wrote all kinds of supposedly ''hot'' articles like [[Lady Gaga]], [[HDMI]], [[Nas]], [[Acai berry]] or [[Elin Nordegren]]. I wanted to do this quickly while maintaining quality, so I often would start from the WP article, add new information, rewrite the LEDE, trim material I thought was unimportant, and bring it in. These efforts, sometimes, were viewed with suspicion by others here, with fears that I was polluting the project with substandard material, and perhaps who didn't grasp what I was trying to do. I found writing new articles from scratch (and trying to maintain quality standards) was slower, but I wrote articles on [[Romantic love]], [[love]] with mostly new material. I also surmised that unusual sounding article titles might drive traffic such as [[bromance]] so I wrote that article, although I got some kidding (perhaps fair) about it. I wrote [[SEO]], another article driver. Long story short: ''hot articles'' didn't boost traffic. CZ still anonymous. No eyeball traffic. I tried. Lesson learned.
So, my agenda shifted. How to get readership? Was this something I could influence? My first foray was thinking that if I wrote ''hot articles'', (hot=identified by WP as big draws of eyeball traffic), imported/revamped to CZ, that more people would be steered here, and it might build the encyclopedia, possibly causing more people to look at my stuff, and bring in new contributors possibly, to help CZ grow. So, for about a month, I wrote all kinds of supposedly ''hot'' articles like [[Lady Gaga]], [[HDMI]], [[Acai berry]] or [[Elin Nordegren]]. I wanted to do this quickly while maintaining quality, so I often would start from the WP article, add new information, rewrite the LEDE, trim material I thought was unimportant, and bring it in. These efforts, sometimes, were viewed with suspicion by others here, with fears that I was polluting the project with substandard material, and perhaps who didn't grasp what I was trying to do. I found writing new articles from scratch (and trying to maintain quality standards) was slower, but I wrote articles on [[Romantic love]], [[love]] with mostly new material. I also surmised that unusual sounding article titles might drive traffic such as [[bromance]] so I wrote that article, although I got some kidding (perhaps fair) about it. I wrote [[SEO]], another article driver. Long story short: ''hot articles'' didn't boost traffic. CZ still anonymous. No eyeball traffic. I tried. Lesson learned.


In the meantime, I tried to pitch in on projects where I thought perhaps I might be helpful, such as [[Panton Principles]], [[Panton Arms]], [[Nitrogen cycle]], [[Air]], [[Brain morphometry]], and deferring to existing contributors, adding diagrams, and such. I also worked on, either revamping, adding to, or starting from scratch: [[Plane (geometry)]] (contributed pictures plus a simplified definition) - [[Skive]] - [[Script kiddie]] - [[Quiz show]] - [[Jamie Cullum]] - [[Elin Nordegren]] - [[Intron]] - [[Cat adoption]] - [[Brittany Murphy]] - [[Scrubs (TV show)]] - [[Content Management System]] - [[Nibiru]] - [[Search engine optimization]] - [[The Burr in the Garden of Eden]] - [[Sanford Levinson]] - [[SERP]] - [[Panton Arms]] - [[Panton Principles]] - [[Dana Delany]] - [[Air]] - [[DVD]] - [[Julian Hatton]] - [[Handyman]] - [[Georgina Starr]] - [[The Fame]] - [[Lady Gaga]] - [[Acai berry]] - [[James M. Bennett]] - [[Naruto]] - [[FairTax]] - [[2012]] - [[Vicki Genfan]].
In the meantime, I tried to pitch in on projects where I thought perhaps I might be helpful, such as [[Panton Principles]], [[Panton Arms]], [[Nitrogen cycle]], [[Air]], [[Brain morphometry]], and deferring to existing contributors, adding diagrams, and such. I also worked on, either revamping, adding to, or starting from scratch: [[Plane (geometry)]] (contributed pictures plus a simplified definition) - [[Skive]] - [[Script kiddie]] - [[Quiz show]] - [[Jamie Cullum]] - [[Elin Nordegren]] - [[Intron]] - [[Cat adoption]] - [[Brittany Murphy]] - [[Scrubs (TV show)]] - [[Content Management System]] - [[Nibiru]] - [[Search engine optimization]] - [[The Burr in the Garden of Eden]] - [[Sanford Levinson]] - [[SERP]] - [[Panton Arms]] - [[Panton Principles]] - [[Dana Delany]] - [[Air]] - [[DVD]] - [[Julian Hatton]] - [[Handyman]] - [[Georgina Starr]] - [[The Fame]] - [[Lady Gaga]] - [[Acai berry]] - [[James M. Bennett]] - [[Naruto]] - [[FairTax]] - [[2012]] - [[Vicki Genfan]].

Revision as of 13:34, 10 April 2010

Picture of a male face.
Welcome to my Citizendium page.

I am an independent thinker from New Jersey. I read extensively. I'm a handyman.

Interests

Animation of a waterfall.
One of these days I'm going to learn how to make a cool waterfall animation better than this one.

My interests: philosophy, gender relations, politics, history, medicine, terrorism. I used to be a market researcher so I'm good with numbers. When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, I read philosophy extensively and tried to figure out what life was all about, but even at this time in my life, I realize that I still don't know. My favorite philosopher is Spinoza. I want to write articles that people enjoy reading. I love great pictures and animations in articles. I write simply, clearly, sometimes with too many stop-and-start sentences.

Sandboxes

My sandbox page: User talk:Thomas Wright Sulcer/sandbox currently "terrorism prevention strategies". Current plan: chop this up and use as material in other articles as per Howard Berkowitz, and assist with researching if asked. Urging HB to make this a real article.

Another sandbox: User talk:Thomas Wright Sulcer/sandbox2 currently "History of U.S. citizenship" (which I wrote on WP) awaiting word from User:Martin Baldwin-Edwards about how to proceed; Howard Berkowitz has suggestions as well. My status: made it into a real article. Did ancillary articles, but will keep doing more.

Another sandbox: User talk:Thomas Wright Sulcer/sandbox4 currently "Criticism of United States foreign policy" awaiting feedback from politics editors. General take: perhaps belongs in an article such as "Foreign policy of the United States". Paragraph format preferred to bullet point format. Status: waiting.

Another sandbox: User talk:Thomas Wright Sulcer/sandbox5 currently "Famous tennis players" but it's way too long; importing from WP. Status: wait and see, perhaps HP may want to do something with it. Will leave there for now.

Another sandbox: User talk:Thomas Wright Sulcer/sandbox7 currently possibilities for Panton Principles.

Another sandbox: User talk:Thomas Wright Sulcer/sandbox9 currently my way to keep track of articles needing my attention and status such as improving WP imports.

Another sandbox: User talk:Thomas Wright Sulcer/sandbox11 currently a wikitable experiment. It suggests SEO factors -- PageRank and "what links here" are highly correlated. It suggests a way to boost the web presence of any Citizendium article is to have a thicket of interlinking articles on a subject -- not just a lone article. This will increase an article's "PageRank" -- a Google metric which predicts an article's relevancy and which is a big (but not the only) factor on where an article appears on the SERP page. Moved this to a CZ article.

My experience at Citizendium

I came to Citizendium after being thoroughly frustrated by Wikipedia. I considered that I was one of Wikipedia's best contributors, having mastered its rules, and was a good researcher, competent writer, skilled at referencing, neutral, and I wrote perhaps 50 new articles as well as important sections of important articles, but found Wikipedia frustrating. You know why. Or read my account here on Amazon of my Wikipedia experience (see my review): My review of a book about Wikipedia chronicling my Wiki-mis-adventures

I wanted to write about topics I care about: Spinoza's philosophy, citizenship, government, music.

I hoped Citizendium would be an improvement. It's smaller, tighter, with a higher quality of contributors in terms of smarts and skill, and a generally nicer atmosphere overall. When I ported good articles I had written on Wikipedia to Citizendium, I ran into flack about doing this -- even though I knew the articles were solid because I had been involved extensively with them, and wrote or revamped much of the material. The reasons given were that current contributors didn't want Citizendium to look too much like Wikipedia (which is seen as baser, less accurate, poorly written etc). So, to accommodate them, I did less porting, and more original work, but I found this slowed me down considerably. I found Citizendium's subpage system somewhat confusing, unnecessary, and don't think it "sets CZ apart from WP" but adds more fuss, slows down article creation, and may hinder Google's crawlers in determining what links to what, possibly lowering web exposure (but I can't prove this). Technically, I've found the CZ approach fussier from a technical standpoint which makes it harder for both writers and readers to navigate the system. I wanted to write; perhaps I should have studied the manuals first. But this was a speed bump slowing me down. Still, I wrote articles.

But my biggest concern was that when I googled my own articles, which were supposedly online at CZ, I couldn't find them -- even if I put the article title and the word Citizendium in the search bar. What was going on? For all of Wikipedia's problems, at least there was the benefit that people were reading what I wrote, sometimes hundreds of people each day. And the criticism section of articles like the US Congress on WP (which I wrote), traffic would be thousands of people each day.

So, my agenda shifted. How to get readership? Was this something I could influence? My first foray was thinking that if I wrote hot articles, (hot=identified by WP as big draws of eyeball traffic), imported/revamped to CZ, that more people would be steered here, and it might build the encyclopedia, possibly causing more people to look at my stuff, and bring in new contributors possibly, to help CZ grow. So, for about a month, I wrote all kinds of supposedly hot articles like Lady Gaga, HDMI, Acai berry or Elin Nordegren. I wanted to do this quickly while maintaining quality, so I often would start from the WP article, add new information, rewrite the LEDE, trim material I thought was unimportant, and bring it in. These efforts, sometimes, were viewed with suspicion by others here, with fears that I was polluting the project with substandard material, and perhaps who didn't grasp what I was trying to do. I found writing new articles from scratch (and trying to maintain quality standards) was slower, but I wrote articles on Romantic love, love with mostly new material. I also surmised that unusual sounding article titles might drive traffic such as bromance so I wrote that article, although I got some kidding (perhaps fair) about it. I wrote SEO, another article driver. Long story short: hot articles didn't boost traffic. CZ still anonymous. No eyeball traffic. I tried. Lesson learned.

In the meantime, I tried to pitch in on projects where I thought perhaps I might be helpful, such as Panton Principles, Panton Arms, Nitrogen cycle, Air, Brain morphometry, and deferring to existing contributors, adding diagrams, and such. I also worked on, either revamping, adding to, or starting from scratch: Plane (geometry) (contributed pictures plus a simplified definition) - Skive - Script kiddie - Quiz show - Jamie Cullum - Elin Nordegren - Intron - Cat adoption - Brittany Murphy - Scrubs (TV show) - Content Management System - Nibiru - Search engine optimization - The Burr in the Garden of Eden - Sanford Levinson - SERP - Panton Arms - Panton Principles - Dana Delany - Air - DVD - Julian Hatton - Handyman - Georgina Starr - The Fame - Lady Gaga - Acai berry - James M. Bennett - Naruto - FairTax - 2012 - Vicki Genfan.

Working on SEO and SERP suggested another approach to boosting traffic: article thickets. That is, to build traffic to a few core articles, it's necessary to write dozens, perhaps hundreds, of small but intensely wikilinked articles which feed the big ones. I even did a mini-experiment, by looking at PageRank on a bunch of CZ articles, trying to see what variables were most important in boosting traffic -- this little experiment suggested the article-thicket approach would work. Here it is here: CZ:PageRank analysis of Citizendium articles (double click the column to see how important the wikilinks are). What happens is that Google crawlers explore web sites, and try to figure out what links to what and, as a result, get a sense of what's important on the web. Wikipedia is a HUGE so-called link farm with literally millions of highly hyper-linked articles, a VAST thicket. So I wanted to bring that strategy here. It's a legitimate way to create a link farm to increase PageRank and bring Google Juice to us. But it involves a LOT of work. Writing little articles is cumbersome because of CZ's subpage system (lots of clicking on tabs, waiting for pages to load, etc etc) but I was finally introduced to a rather quick way to write CZ:Lemma articles.

So I picked an area I'm interested in -- the Aeneid, about the Journey of Aeneas, written by the Roman poet Virgil in dactylic hexameter (all articles I wrote) -- and found a way to write related "thicket" mini-articles quickly, with plenty of wikilinks, to see if the Aeneid as well as related articles, such as the source Elizabeth Vandiver and The Teaching Company, and tried to build in wikilinks for future projects which are related, that is, articles I may write or revamp substantially in the future, such as the Iliad and Odyssey. So I created dozens of these thicket articles. What happened? As of yesterday, I'm getting flack that the definitions are too extensive and I'm being told to cut back on wikilinks since the objective of having a tight definition outweighs the benefit of having a wikilink thicket. I didn't get any praise or recognition for at least trying to make a contribution. A rulebook being wagged in my face. And no place to take my dispute to. More fuss.

So, can anybody see why I'm frustrated? I want to write articles. I want people to be able to find and read my articles, but it's like the effort of Sisyphos, constantly pushing a boulder uphill, only to run back down again at night. It's a lot of work. It's unpaid. In addition to the work involved, it seems people fuss with me at every step, despite the fact that there aren't any good simple easy-to-use instruction guides for contributors (or even guides for former Wikipedians) -- do it this way -- you can't do it this way -- this isn't standard policy -- etc etc etc.

Sheesh.

Maybe the best policy is to wait and see if Citizendium can get its act together. I'm thinking about this.

Article thickets

Aeneid thicket These are major articles:

But they're backed up with numerous supporting or "thicket" articles which are not as extensive, (but sometimes rather detailed) but highly interlinked to the major articles and to each other: Maecenas - Dictator - Strophades Islands - Tsunami - Western civilization - Italy - Emperor - Sthelenus - The Teaching Company - Amata - Turnus - King Latinus - Juno - Princeps - Anchises - Fate - Helen of Troy - Venus (goddess) - Troy - Spondee - Iliad - Odyssey - Elizabeth Vandiver - Iarbas - Dido - Elissa - Cupid - Creusa - Penates - Poetry - Nisus - Bucolic diaeresis‎ - Caesura - Dactyl - Contraction (poetry) - Elision - Diphthong - Meter (poetry) - Epic - Latin (language) - Hexameter (poetry) - Walter Burkert -- Aeschylus -- Joseph Campbell -- Euhemerus -- Euripides -- Achilles -- Actaeon -- Adonis -- Aerope -- Agamemnon -- Aigeus -- Aigisthos -- Aithra -- Alcestis -- Alcmene -- Amazons -- Amphitryon -- Antiope -- Hoppolyta -- Anush -- Apsyrtos -- Argo -- Argonauts -- Ariadne -- Artemis -- Atlas -- Atreus -- Augean Stables -- Calchas -- Cassandra -- Centaur -- Cerberos -- Ceres -- Demeter -- Cerynian Hind -- Chaos -- Clytemnestra -- Clytaimestra -- Cronos -- Cretan Bull -- Cupid -- Eros -- Cybele -- Daidalos -- Daphne -- Deianeira -- Demeter -- Demophoon -- Metaneira -- Deucalion -- Diana -- Diomedes -- Dionysos -- Bacchus -- Echidna -- Electra -- Epimetheus -- Erebos -- Eris -- Erymanthian Boar -- Eumenides -- Eurydice -- Eurystheus -- Furies -- Gaia -- Theogony -- Geryon -- Gilgamesh -- Gorgons -- Hades -- Hebe -- Hecabe -- Hector -- Helios -- Hephaistos -- Hera -- Hermes -- Hesperides -- Hestia -- Hippodameia -- Hippolyta -- Hippolytos -- Hydra -- Lernaian Hydra -- Iapetos -- Iolaos -- Iphicles -- Iphigeneia -- Jason -- Jocasta -- Kumarbi -- Laios -- Leda -- Lernaian Hydra -- Leto -- Maenads -- Mars -- Medea -- Medusa (mythology) - Megara - Metis - Menelaos - Metaneira - Minerva - Minos - Minotaur - Myrtilos - Narcissus - Lemean Lion - Nessos - Niobe - Oceanos - Oedipus - Olympians - Orestes - Orpheus - Ouranos - Pandora - Paris - Pasiphae - Peleus - Pelops - Pentheus - Persephone - Phaethon - Phaidra - Phoebus - Pirithous - Polyxena - Pontos - Poseidon - Priam - Procrustes - Prometheus - Pyramus - Pyrrha - Remus - Rheia - Romulus - Satyrs - Scylla - Semele - Sinis - Sisyphos - Sphinx - Stymphalian Birds - Tantalos - Tartaros - Lemmas of Greek warriors inside the famous Trojan horse, fighting here at CZ with Google juice (DM's phrasing): Acamas - Agapenor - Ajax the Lesser - Amphimachus - Antiklos - Antiphates - Cyanippus - Demophon - Echion - Epeius - Eumelus - Euryalus - Eurydamas - Eurymachus - Eurypylus - Ialmenus - Idomeneus - Iphidamas - Leonteus - Machaon - Meges - Menestheus - Meriones - Neoptolemus - Peneleus - Philoctetes - Podalirius - Polypoetes - Teucer - Thalpius - Thersander - Thoas - Thrasymedes

Philosophy of Spinoza thicket These are major articles:

Citizenship thicket These are the major articles:

Supporting thicket: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere‎ - Public sphere - Benjamin Ginsberg - Dana D. Nelson - Citizenship -

Love thicket The major articles are:

Supporting articles include: Bromance -

Other subjects

I'm interested in diverse topics. I'll take requests from time to time but mostly I'm working on my thickets (above). Here is other stuff I've written or contributed to (sometimes substantially) if the subject catches my interest, or if I'm asked:

Nitrogen cycle - Plane (geometry) - Skive - Script kiddie - Quiz show - Jamie Cullum - Elin Nordegren - Intron - HDMI - Cat adoption - Brittany Murphy - Scrubs (TV show) - Bromance - Content Management System - Nibiru - Search engine optimization - The Burr in the Garden of Eden - Brain morphometry - Sanford Levinson - CZ:PageRank analysis of Citizendium articles - SERP - Panton Arms - Panton Principles - Dana Delany - Air - DVD - Julian Hatton - Handyman - Georgina Starr - The Fame - Lady Gaga - Acai berry - James M. Bennett - Naruto - FairTax - 2012. Vicki Genfan -

Progress on specific articles

Note: see Tom's wikitable of articles in progress.

Ported "Handyman" from WP which I revamped. Added some new material. Wondering what else to do here. Handyman Also working on Philosophy of Spinoza. Curley's Spinoza translation arrived; hope to update this article in the next week or so. Wrote Julian Hatton -- abstract landscape artist. Created this article on WP, ported. Ported Dana Delany -- actor; I wrote much of the text on WP. Ported Georgina Starr -- artist from G.Britain; I revamped this article substantially a month or so ago on WP. Ported Lady Gaga -- hot topic; 12th most popular article on WP in Dec 2009 with 90K views PER DAY, but added new material and rewrote it somewhat to improve it. Wrote The Fame -- hot first album by Lady Gaga. Added new information (some references from WP) but mostly rewritten. Shorter than the WP version but with less extraneous stuff. I have no clue how to make the "Related Articles" or "Metadata" stuff work. Or, maybe I should add "Lady Gaga" to the related articles page of "The Fame" as a parent? Ported Script kiddie, rewrote it, added new references and tried to spruce it up. It's the 11th most popular article on WP in Dec 2009 with 100,000 views per day. Ported Search engine optimization from WP, rewrote it, kept references, added new pictures. This gets 6000 hits PER DAY on WP, and is also a list of "keywords driving traffic"; hopefully it will boost traffic here to CZ. There are a slew of related articles which can be added too. Also added SERP. Ported and rewrote Acai berry. Ported James M. Bennett from WP (which I wrote) and porting FairTax which I support (but will strive for neutrality) which gets 500 readers PER DAY -- not too shabby. Wrote Naruto which is a hot pop culture Japanese anime phenomenon, often gets 16K readers per day on WP, hopefully more here on CZ. Rewrote & ported Digital versatile disk better known as DVDs. Same logic. Wrote Quiz show so What is the can redirect to it. Wrote Skive and Elin Nordegren and Jamie Cullum (new material) and Sanford Levinson (I wrote originally the Levinson article on WP.) Wrote HDMI mostly fresh material (borrowed some WP sections but trimmed & rewrote). Wrote Cat adoption from scratch -- couldn't resist the pun. Ported, rewrote LEDE, added new info on Brittany Murphy -- sometimes traffic spikes to 50K viewers per day. Wrote Romantic love mostly new, with some pilfering of you know where. Wrote Scrubs (TV show). Wrote Bromance as part of the Love group stuff. Redid the Love article so now there are three related articles -- love, romantic love, and bromance. Wrote 2012, pop culture bunk like Y2K. Writing Nibiru (fictional planet forecast to bump into Earth in 2012, possibly causing skateboarders worldwide to lose their footing for an instant.

New articles done: Public sphere and The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and History of U.S. citizenship and CZ:PageRank analysis of Citizendium articles and Benjamin Ginsberg. Revamped nitrogen cycle and added a section on air about the nitrogen cycle. Also ideas for revamping Panton Principles and Panton Arms.

Possible future articles that drive traffic

Note: see Tom's wikitable of articles in progress. This has a sortable list of articles with information on WP traffic statistics, opportunities, possible future projects, and whether they need my attention or not.

My biases

... which I'll try to keep OUT of Citizendium. Politically I'm non-partisan but see a need for serious peaceful political reform of the US government; there's a part of me which is libertarian, but there are socialist parts too. My view on American politics is that it's broken, dysfunctional, corrupt. I think a parliamentary approach (eg Britain's) is superior to a constitutional approach (US model). I believe citizenship is important and requires active participation by people in local government, but I don't think most Americans are "citizens" by any stretch since they're loathe to participate in politics. There are reasons why this is so. I believe in states' rights. I continue to advocate for a Second Constitutional Convention as a way to repair America. I have criticized America's strategy to prevent terrorism repeatedly. I see terrorism as "violence against individual rights" with three inter-related components: crime (terrorism by a neighbor), tyranny (by our own government) and foreign terrorism (by powerful foreign individuals, groups, or governments). My book tries to show how these types cause each other, and how one type of terrorist can morph into another (my ultimate terrorist = Hitler). And the common way to prevent all three types is with "light"; for example, to prevent crime, citizens must agree to end all anonymous movement in public but that tight privacy fences be put around this information. This permits authorities to prevent terrorism while preserving privacy. This is only one part of my rather difficult strategy which, I claim, can prevent serious terrorism such as smuggled nuclear bombs. I realize many of my views are extreme, and I'm well aware that most people don't even like to THINK about such topics, and there is a practical, cynical side to me which realizes that changes along the lines I propose will never happen. What's cool is this: the name "Citizen-dium" -- I see participation here as a form of citizenship. And I'm a big fan of exposed movement in public -- again, consistent with Citizendium's policies of using REAL NAMES. But here on Citizendium I'll try to keep my biases out of my contributions, and participate in a mainstream way.

My experience with Wikipedia

I was an active Wikipedian for perhaps eight months editing under the user handle "Tomwsulcer", and I wrote many articles along Wikipedia's lines of neutrality, verifiability, and no original research. I added perhaps about 50 articles, either started from scratch, or revamped substantially. But I have major problems with Wikipedia. Biggest problem = anonymity; it permits anonymous bullies (particularly administrators) to push around contributors, and contributes to incivility, bullying, rudeness, vandalism, sock puppetry (users pretending to be other users). Wikipedia, in my view, has many pluses which I hope Citizendium has retained, such as Wikipedia's code, internal linking, pictures, most of its policies. I wrote often on a page called "Wikipedia:Areas for Reform" with many ideas for improvements which I think may possibly apply to Citizendium too, but I'm waiting to learn more how this site works before offering them. For example, a great under-used feature Wikipedia has is its measures of article readership. I think readership statistics should play a bigger role in determining what we focus on here in Citizendium (since our contributions will most likely be more neutral). Even better would be feedback from readers along the lines of Amazon's question "Was this review helpful", so we can get some kind of reader rating of article quality. What I see happening with Wikipedia, at present, is a battle within the elite of core administrators who actively participate for power; it's analogous to the infighting which happened within the leadership of the Soviet Union during its early days (1917+). In January 2010, I quit Wikipedia.

Publications

Picture of a woman holding a cup.
Circe tempts Odysseus in the Odyssey.Painting (1891) by John William Waterhouse.

Ideas to improve Citizendium

Generally, at this point, my thinking is that Wikipedia has the best overall approach since it wins the lion's share of web traffic except for its huge mistake of anonymous accounts and other dubious policies; but in every other respect, Wikipedia's made smart choices, particularly technical ones. Whenever Citizendium does something different technically from Wikipedia, I think we should have a strong argument why this choice is superior. Wikipedia doesn't have forums; Citizendium does. Why? Does this help or hurt? Wikipedia doesn't have subpages; Citizendium does. Why? My sense is (unproven) that this confuses Google's crawlers. Whatever Wikipedia is doing, it's wins top SERP results. I have issues with Citizendium's expert approach, subpage system (confuses Google crawlers) and reluctance to import Wikipedia articles, and general atmosphere, so that right now I'm on the fence regarding the issue of continuing to contribute here, but other than that, I'm continuing to urge reforms like these:

  • Target disaffected Wikipedia contributors. Reach out to them, ask them to join.
  • Readership statistics. I like the "page view" count at the bottom of articles; if we can get a count of non-CZ traffic per day on the tops of each article, that would be great!
  • Readership feedback. Amazon asks "Was this review helpful?" And prevents over-clicking. I think this would be a great idea.
  • Importing good Wikipedia articles. I realize few agree with me about this, and I'll go along with the group, but I believe this is the way to jump-start this encyclopedia; WP lifts our content regularly, and we should do similarly. I think the two encyclopedias shouldn't compete in terms of content but rather in terms of great place to contribute. Here, CZ wins, although the same problems that plague Wikipedia trouble CZ, but on a lesser scale; in any volunteer effort, where individuals are trying to make decisions about a group product, there will be bickering, in-fighting, politicing, rivalries. Problem: how to minimize this?
  • CZ web presence. Boosted by the thicket approach, not the hot article approach.
  • Problems with expert focus. Generally I like the idea that experts prevail. But the focus on experts can hurt us here in some ways. (1) intimidates possibly good contributors who aren't experts (2) intimidates us to try to be perfect all the time (and nobody's perfect), slows down our writing, etc. (3) it's possible for established CZ users to use so-called expertise as a way to unfairly gain advantage in editorial disputes. (4) possible bias against references (since it's like calling in a "competing expert"). (5) causes needless extra steps like this "approved" vs "draft" label on articles which, in my view, is like shooting ourselves in the foot, since it says, in effect, "don't trust this unapproved article". I like the idea by M.I. about moving the "draft" article notice off the top of the article, to the bottom (better yet: make it tinier print).
  • Honoring contributors. A way to find out, quickly, who an article's major creators are. It's also a quasi-reward for major contributors. Newspaper articles have bylines; why can't CZ? It can help us avoid editing disputes too. Put names and face-pictures on articles. Consider this.
  • Reduce the time lag between request for CZ citizenship and approval. This roadblock discourages potential contributors. Let's consider ways to reduce or eliminate the time lag. Perhaps we allow nooBs to contribute, perhaps five edits, but their changes would be automatically reverted after a few days unless their identity was established.
  • See also: sections. Let's use them on the article page in addition to the "related articles" subpage. Google crawlers can find them.
  • Consider abandoning the subpages system (too complex, confuses crawlers, unhelpful for readers, etc.)
  • Simpler ways to reference. Make the mechanics of inserting a reference into an article simpler, perhaps through software or technology. Both WP and CZ have trouble here.
  • Quick guide for converts from Wikipedia. I may write this.
  • Automatically start users with the Wikipedia SKIN. A CZ user showed me how, but why not start off all Wikipedia converts with the same Wikipedia page layout, typeface, and look?
  • Actively solicit quality WP contributors by leaving messages for them on their user pages.
  • Enable Google web crawlers to find our user names. This increases internal linking and boosts Citizendium's web presence.
  • Encourage redirects. They help build our wikilink infrastructure. The more, the better. Misspellings, acronyms, other choices -- link these with redirects to our articles.
  • Move forums within Citizendium. Every time CZers write in a "forum" about articles on CZ, the traffic and wikilinks don't point here to the encyclopedia itself (am I correct about this? If not please let me know). Google crawlers think they're separate, am I right? So participating in CZ forums takes away business, so to speak, from the encyclopedia proper. Let's move the forums WITHIN Citizendium, so we can benefit from discussion (which uses wikilinks) about articles and topics, and make sure Google crawlers can see it.
  • Don't delete tiny articles. They may be the thicket for other articles. Let's improve the pages to teach people how to quickly write lemma articles.
  • Judicial system. Wikipedia doesn't have one and, as a result, it's essentially mob rule, with entrenched thugs wielding the lion's share of power, operating under cover of labyrinthine rules. CZ lacks the rules, but it still needs (in my view) a quick, fair, efficient way to resolve disputes, because disputes are going to happen by the very nature of our project (individuals working separately on a group product). How can this be accomplished? I have no good answers here, but I think it makes sense for us to look to the model of how courts and juries work, eliminate the roadblocks, which uses stare decisis (current decisions being decided based on analysis of past ones) and come up with some way to settle things. Right now, I don't have a sense of where to go to settle a dispute; who do I ask? where do I file a dispute? The idea of expert editors trumping junior ones -- well I see problems there.
  • Encourage praise. Consider we're unpaid, doing rather difficult intellectual-type volunteer work. What is the motivation? My experience at WP was that I rarely got praise, but often got criticized often on tiny details. My experience at CZ here is that there is more praise, but still the criticism outweighs the positive comments. Why? This is a problem, because it means the underlying tone is unhelpful, and it will have the long term effect of driving people, like me, away from here. One idea would be that there should be a general recommendation to match every negative criticism with at least one positive comment.
  • Get feedback from departing contributors. When people leave here, we should try to find out why they're leaving and get some kind of feedback which might suggest room for improvement.

Possible future lemma articles

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