CZ:Nomination page/Editorial Council/Milton Beychok

(CC) Photo: Milton Beychok

I am honored to be nominated and I accept. As the only active mainstream Engineering editor/author and the only active Chemistry editor/author (at this time and for the last few months), I believe it is important that those two fields of study should be represented on the Editorial Council as well as the Management Council.

Citizendium has 148 Approved articles as of today and 26 of those are articles that I originated and for which I was the main author (in most cases, the sole author). I believe that best shows the degree of my commitment to Citizendium since I joined in January 2008. My user page contains a good deal more information about me as well as a list of the articles I have originated. Some of my feelings about how to improve Citizendium by the workings of the Editorial Council and the Management Council are:

(1) My primary reason for leaving Wikipedia and joining Citizendium (almost 3 years ago) was its original concept of deep respect for expertise. I feel quite strongly that accepting articles involving pseudo-science and fringe topics must be subject to approval by our mainstream science experts. In the past, our failure to subject such articles to control by mainstream science experts has led to a great deal of controversy and to some of our best contributors leaving CZ or resigning from key positions.

(2) I believe that we need to have a great many more workgroup categories. Many of our current workgroup categories are much too broad and encompass too many different disciplines or fields of study. The subgroup concept that was adopted some time ago was more or less a "make do" compromise, and it would be much better to have more workgroups.

(3) I also feel quite strongly that our current requirement of a 50-word biography from applicants to join CZ should be increased to 150 words as a minimum. Such biographies should be automatically placed on the user page of new users and must not be be deleted, although they may be edited if required. A 50-word biography is simply not enough by which to become acquainted with new users and their capabilities

(4) We should change our definition of inactive Editors so that any Editor who has not made any contributions or edits to an article in our main article namespace within the past 3 months is listed as an inactive Editor. That should apply to new Editors as well. Edits to an Editor's user page or talk page should not be considered as being active. The current method of defining active and inactive Editors creates the misleading impression that there are many more active Editors then there really are.

(5) Proposals being voted upon by the Editorial Council should be decided by a simple majority of the votes cast.