CZ:Charter drafting committee/Position statements/Drew R. Smith

According to the bottom of CZ:Fundamentals, the charter is supposed to "adopt a binding community charter that states, in a clear but general way, the fundamental goals and policies of the Citizendium project."

In my opinion, our goal is not to be "wikipedia but better". Our fundamental goal, and the only reason any of us contribute here, seems to be, and should continue to be to share our knowledge. Readership is great, but if that's our goal we should adopt a structure more like Fox, MSN, or CNN.

As for policies, I don't really have strong feelings one way or the other regarding neutrality.

On registration, I like the real names policy, but I think that the registration process should be simplified. To many posible contributors are lost due to not wanting to bother with our extremely tight registration. At this point in time I have no solid solutions, but hope to collaborate with other charter drafters to find a solution.

On editor and author "rights" - In my opinion we need to adopt one of the following policies: 1)Make it easier to become an editor. In some areas, such as hobbies, the "experts" are the people who engage in the activity, not the people who study it. For example, I studied the breeding habits of the Violet Goby for years before attempting to breed it myself. My first and second attempt ended in failure. The third time I tried something different and viola! Success.(for those "in the know" about breeding fish, I gradually raised the pH, instead of the sudden raise most forums and breeding guides seem to suggest) 2)Give editors much more power. Since we seem to be in the habit of granting editorship after being around for awhile, perhaps we could even allow editors to approve their own articles, provided there are no objections. If CZ just isn't ready to go that route, we could at least empower our editors to boldly approve articles that are under their workgroup so long as all authors of the article agree on the content.

Aside from those two points, authors need some say in the approval process. Perhaps five authors in agreement could have the same power as a single editor. Perhaps we could create simple template that puts articles in a category for "approval review", and it would have an area for editors to point out flaws, typos, and other issues that need to be resolved before approval.

This may or may not actually be under the "jurisdiction" of the charter, but I also think that the workgroups need to be restructured. Something similar to WP's wikiprojects may be more functional, and might possibly create more editors.