CZ:Nomination page/Editorial Council 2011/Hayford Peirce

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

• Ken McGregor—tennis

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 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.