CZ:Nomination page/Editorial Council 2011/Hayford Peirce: Difference between revisions

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* I've been at CZ since May of 2007. I have a background as an English major in school and as a professional (and published) writer of fiction. I have a fairly broad knowledge of most items that fall under the "liberal arts" blanket but no particular expertise in any of them.  Likewise I have an intelligent amateur's knowledge of a number of other things such as eating and drinking, tennis, baseball, Polynesian culture, and other trivial and useless items.  For most of my career at CZ I've enjoyed creating articles, more or less at random, about these interests, and also making edits to and comments about articles created by others. Here are two that I've started in the last year:
{{DecemberElection}}
I've been at CZ since May of 2007. I have a background as an English major in school and as a professional (and published) writer of fiction. I have a fairly broad knowledge of most items that fall under the "liberal arts" blanket but no particular expertise in any of them.  Likewise I have an intelligent amateur's knowledge of a number of other things such as eating and drinking, tennis, baseball, Polynesian culture, and other trivial and useless items.  For most of my career at CZ I've enjoyed creating articles, more or less at random, about these interests, and also making edits to and comments about articles created by others. Here are two that I've started in the last year—they're pretty representative of the sort of thing I do:


** [[Gnocchi alla Romana]]—food
* [[Gnocchi alla Romana]]—food


** [[The Handsome Eight]]—tennis
* [[Ken McGregor]]—tennis


* For more than a year and a half I was honored to have served as a Constable.  Finally the general aggravation inherent with the post caught up with me and I abruptly resigned about six weeks ago.
I've also embarked on a couple of more ambitious projects, one about the American novelist [[Richard Condon]], with individual articles such as [[The Manchurian Candidate]] about the first eight of his many novels, the other a catalog of [[Famous tennis players]]—someday I hope to actually complete both of them.
At Larry Sanger's direct request, I was honored to have served as a Constable for more than a year and a half.  Finally the general aggravation inherent with the post caught up with me in the Fall of 2010 and I abruptly resigned. Not long after that, the new Charter came into force and elections were called for various offices. I was nominated as a candidate for the Editorial Council. It was only with reluctance that I accepted, fearing that the Council would the same sort of battlefield as the Charter-writing process had clearly been.  At the time I accepted the nomination, I posted a rather lengthy Statement that you can read here:
* http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Hayford_Peirce/Editorial_Council_Election_Statement_2010


* In spite of my liberal arts background and lack of formal training in the hard sciences, I have a deep, deep appreciation of the "scientific method" and all that that implies when creating articles for CZ and judging them.
In that Statement I said that if elected I would fight to ensure that the Council was run by a simple "majority rules" system of voting in order to avoid the dysfuction that had plagued the Charter-writing committee, and that I would try to weed out, or severely rewrite, any "fringe" articles that had crept into the project and had been the source of much contention.


* I am deeply skeptical about all non-mainstream pseudo-scientific and fringe beliefs and think that they should be treated at CZ with great rigor and from the point of view of mainstream scientific authority.
I was elected, and, eventually, both my stated goals were achieved.


* Consequently, if elected to the Editorial Council, I will make it my first order of business to try to redo the Workgroups completely.  I would, for instance, try to completely eliminate the Healing Arts group, which has come to encompass things that it was not meant to when it was created four years ago during the first days of Citizendium.  Does this mean that certain Editors such as those involved with the Homeopathy article would then no longer be Editors under the new Workgroups and would therefore no longer have veto power over certain articles as they now do? Yes, absolutely.
A short while after the formation of the Council, upon the resignation of the original Secretary, I was unanimously elected to serve as its second Secretary. In that post I have played a fairly active role, both initiating a number of proposals of my own and shepherding, as expeditiously as possible, others' proposals through our process.  During the last twelve months there have been 78 proposals that the Council has considered and decided one way or another.  Fifty-three of these proposals were passed and have become part of the rules and guidelines for our project, while the other 25 were either voted down or failed to pass for parliamentary reasons. Whether or not you agree with any of these decisions, we have been doing our job of both proposing and considering others' proposals; ours is a representative democracy and we on the Council have been doing what we were elected to do. There has recently been criticism from certain Citizens that the Editorial Council has fallen down on doing its job and that we are basically inactive. I would reply to them by saying that 78 motions formally considered within a 370-day span is about one motion every four and a half days.  How much faster are we expected to work?


* As you will see from the above paragraph, I believe deeply in the original CZ concept of "expertise".  And I believe that it must now be applied to the number of fringe articles that have arisen over the years.
As Secretary of the Council, I have been its public face, and, as such, I have received 99% of the flak thrown at the Council from both within the project and from people outside the project.  I have, I admit, a confrontational personality and I do not suffer fools gladly.  Like everyone in any public office, I have made mistakes and I have tried to acknowledge doing so.  I have also tried to learn from them.  Whether or not I have, is up to you to judge.  I am proud of our record of achievement during my term, and I doubt if anyone else in my position could have gotten much more accomplished.  For nearly six months the Council also was belabored by the disruptive presence of Howard C. Berkowitz, who tried in vain to have the Council run the same way that he had delayed and impeded the workings of the Charter-writing committee. During the time that the Council was considering, in a formal way mandated by the Charter, the credentials for Howard's editorships, the Council, and I in particular, were frequently accused by his partisans as conducting a witch hunt.  It is instructive, however, to note that as each of his editorships and his qualifications for them were considered, that no one, and I repeat NO ONE, of his partisans every jumped in a single time to defend what purported to be his credentials.  There is, I think, still ill-will remaining from this long process, and there is nothing I can do about it. Howard left the project permanently about six months ago and I think that most Citizens will agree that the project has proceeded far more smoothly without his continually disruptive presence.  I wish that the Council could have spent the time that we devoted to Howard on other matters, but that was independent of our will.  


* I have looked through the new Charter carefully and I see nothing in it to tell us how the decisions of the Editorial Council will be formulated and voted upon. Except that the Council will always operate within a quorum of the majority of its members.  I myself am adamant that it should be firmly established that the Council should make any decision WITH A SIMPLE MAJORITY OF THE VOTING MEMBERS.  Period.  If four members vote for a proposal and three vote against it, the proposal is adopted -- and that's the end of it.
What do I propose to do if I am reelected to the Council? What visions do I have for the Council?  I will tell you flatly: whether I am Secretary or simply a member of the Council, I propose more of the same.  The people who have attacked me so freely over the course of the last year seemed to be playing the same note over and over again: that I, as Secretary, had ridden roughshod over the supine bodies of the other members of the Council, pushing through my initiatives no matter how ill-considered or destructive they might be.


* If elected to the Council, I will do my best to make sure that this Majority Rule is quickly instigated and then followed.  If this policy is not adopted, I will then resign from the Council.  Without Majority Rule, in my opinion, the Council will be useless and there would be no purpose in serving on it.
I repeat what I have said many times before: I have been but a single member out of seven on the Council, and if I am reelected I will once again be one member out of seven.  I don't think that I am revealing any secrets that I shouldn't be when I say that the other members of the Council have not been particularly happy to be characterized by a few Citizens as acquiescent puppets in my hands.  They never were, and they never will be.


* That said, I do pledge to take an active interest in the Council and to *always* be available for discussions of the issues brought before it -- and then to vote on those issues.  And to fully support any decisions of the Council, whether or not I voted for them.
If you think that I'm worthy of being reelected, vote for me.


* In other words, if you support my candidacy, you will not be choosing someone who will, like a number of those Citizens chosen a year ago to work on the Charter committee, simply vanish.
If, for a myriad of reasons, you don't think so, then vote for someone else.
 
Are some of the statements above confrontational?  Yes.  But they also serve to tell you exactly where I stand on a number of the most important issues concerning Citizendium.
 
'''Addendum of October 7, 2010:''' There are a certain number of other Citizens who, to me, have agendas to push concerning what I consider to be "fringe" topics or pseudoscience.  I have nothing against the inclusion of such topics as articles in Citizendium as long as they are not handled in a credulous manner—I strongly believe, in fact, that they '''should''' be here, in order to educate the curious and ill-informed. I do not, however, think that partisans of these, to me, strange beliefs, have any place on the councils of Citizendium, where their presence will only create discord and gridlock with the other members.  I'm pretty sure that anyone who is a regular contributor to, or observer of, Citizendium can think of a number of Citizens who are firmly in what I think of as being the "fringe" camp. Some of their names appear on the list of nominees for the Editorial Council.  I will now make it perfectly clear: if any of these people are elected to the Council, and I am as well, I shall refuse to accept my election and I shall refuse to serve on the Council.  If, like me, you believe in the intellectual integrity of Citizendium, then I '''urge''' you to be extremely careful in your choice of candidates.

Latest revision as of 03:05, 8 March 2024

To return to the main election page when you have finished reading, please click here: CZ:EC Election and Referenda December 2011.

I've been at CZ since May of 2007. I have a background as an English major in school and as a professional (and published) writer of fiction. I have a fairly broad knowledge of most items that fall under the "liberal arts" blanket but no particular expertise in any of them. Likewise I have an intelligent amateur's knowledge of a number of other things such as eating and drinking, tennis, baseball, Polynesian culture, and other trivial and useless items. For most of my career at CZ I've enjoyed creating articles, more or less at random, about these interests, and also making edits to and comments about articles created by others. Here are two that I've started in the last year—they're pretty representative of the sort of thing I do:

I've also embarked on a couple of more ambitious projects, one about the American novelist Richard Condon, with individual articles such as The Manchurian Candidate about the first eight of his many novels, the other a catalog of Famous tennis players—someday I hope to actually complete both of them.

At Larry Sanger's direct request, I was honored to have served as a Constable for more than a year and a half. Finally the general aggravation inherent with the post caught up with me in the Fall of 2010 and I abruptly resigned. Not long after that, the new Charter came into force and elections were called for various offices. I was nominated as a candidate for the Editorial Council. It was only with reluctance that I accepted, fearing that the Council would the same sort of battlefield as the Charter-writing process had clearly been. At the time I accepted the nomination, I posted a rather lengthy Statement that you can read here:

In that Statement I said that if elected I would fight to ensure that the Council was run by a simple "majority rules" system of voting in order to avoid the dysfuction that had plagued the Charter-writing committee, and that I would try to weed out, or severely rewrite, any "fringe" articles that had crept into the project and had been the source of much contention.

I was elected, and, eventually, both my stated goals were achieved.

A short while after the formation of the Council, upon the resignation of the original Secretary, I was unanimously elected to serve as its second Secretary. In that post I have played a fairly active role, both initiating a number of proposals of my own and shepherding, as expeditiously as possible, others' proposals through our process. During the last twelve months there have been 78 proposals that the Council has considered and decided one way or another. Fifty-three of these proposals were passed and have become part of the rules and guidelines for our project, while the other 25 were either voted down or failed to pass for parliamentary reasons. Whether or not you agree with any of these decisions, we have been doing our job of both proposing and considering others' proposals; ours is a representative democracy and we on the Council have been doing what we were elected to do. There has recently been criticism from certain Citizens that the Editorial Council has fallen down on doing its job and that we are basically inactive. I would reply to them by saying that 78 motions formally considered within a 370-day span is about one motion every four and a half days. How much faster are we expected to work?

As Secretary of the Council, I have been its public face, and, as such, I have received 99% of the flak thrown at the Council from both within the project and from people outside the project. I have, I admit, a confrontational personality and I do not suffer fools gladly. Like everyone in any public office, I have made mistakes and I have tried to acknowledge doing so. I have also tried to learn from them. Whether or not I have, is up to you to judge. I am proud of our record of achievement during my term, and I doubt if anyone else in my position could have gotten much more accomplished. For nearly six months the Council also was belabored by the disruptive presence of Howard C. Berkowitz, who tried in vain to have the Council run the same way that he had delayed and impeded the workings of the Charter-writing committee. During the time that the Council was considering, in a formal way mandated by the Charter, the credentials for Howard's editorships, the Council, and I in particular, were frequently accused by his partisans as conducting a witch hunt. It is instructive, however, to note that as each of his editorships and his qualifications for them were considered, that no one, and I repeat NO ONE, of his partisans every jumped in a single time to defend what purported to be his credentials. There is, I think, still ill-will remaining from this long process, and there is nothing I can do about it. Howard left the project permanently about six months ago and I think that most Citizens will agree that the project has proceeded far more smoothly without his continually disruptive presence. I wish that the Council could have spent the time that we devoted to Howard on other matters, but that was independent of our will.

What do I propose to do if I am reelected to the Council? What visions do I have for the Council? I will tell you flatly: whether I am Secretary or simply a member of the Council, I propose more of the same. The people who have attacked me so freely over the course of the last year seemed to be playing the same note over and over again: that I, as Secretary, had ridden roughshod over the supine bodies of the other members of the Council, pushing through my initiatives no matter how ill-considered or destructive they might be.

I repeat what I have said many times before: I have been but a single member out of seven on the Council, and if I am reelected I will once again be one member out of seven. I don't think that I am revealing any secrets that I shouldn't be when I say that the other members of the Council have not been particularly happy to be characterized by a few Citizens as acquiescent puppets in my hands. They never were, and they never will be.

If you think that I'm worthy of being reelected, vote for me.

If, for a myriad of reasons, you don't think so, then vote for someone else.

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