Archive:Notice Board

This page is for notices and reminders--memo-type stuff--to everyone working on the Citizendium pilot project. It's for administrative notices concerning the day-to-day operation, important policy clarifications, requests, technical announcements, etc.

For news, use the Citizendium Blog.

Have questions? Ask here.

For discussion, use the Citizendium Forums.

For community-wide announcements, use Citizendium-L.

For announcements just to editors, use Citizendium-Editors.

January 24, 2007

Please make sure that if your article borrows from Wikipedia, you make a note of that down by the bottom if the little Wikipedia notice isn't there. We don't want to get caught accidentally breaking the GFDL. --ZachPruckowski 11:47, 24 January 2007 (CST)

January 23, 2007

Our first downtime/slowtime

We experienced our first server problems since the launch of the pilot project today. This appears to be related to this heise.de article, but the cause is still unknown. The website was very slow for about six hours and as of 8 PM Eastern Time seems to useable, but still slow.

Press release

Press release postponed until tomorrow.

only german native speakers will be able to read and understand the article, but it is pretty positive about citizendium. Since german is one of my languages - if there is a "need" to have a translated version - I can concoct a translation there Robert Tito 19:32, 23 January 2007 (CST)

New self-registration!

We have just started allowing people to self-register. See [1]. This means that (1) we'll be likely to see more vandalism (our very first vandal visited us this morning) and (2) we'll be likely to see a lot more activity.

Find homes for orphans

NOTE to people creating new articles: please do not create "orphans," i.e., make sure that all new articles are linked from at least one existing article. Some enterprising soul would do the project a great deal of good by going through the orphaned pages and giving them homes, i.e., linking to them from some existing article. By the way, you can find the list of orphaned pages via the "Special pages" to the left.

January 21, 2007

We're going to be doing a press release in two days (Jan. 23). This will announce a newer, much easier method for joining the wiki. We expect lots of new contributors. Please be on hand in the next few days to help direct the new traffic!

January 20, 2007

UPDATE 2: "the big delete" happened the evening of Jan. 20.

UPDATE: it might not be until tomorrow that we do "the big delete." --Larry Sanger 15:45, 20 January 2007 (CST)

As you might have noticed, we've been working on the main page, the sidebar, there's a funding drive notice atop every page, etc. Today and possibly tomorrow the server might go down unexpectedly (sorry if so) as we do "the big delete." Don't worry--we're making backups! Also, if you really dislike the Main Page, that's what you get for leaving it in the hands of a philosopher instead of a graphic designer. Unlike Wikipedia, the main page is open to editing by participants! --Larry Sanger 13:08, 20 January 2007 (CST)

January 18, 2007

Important Announcement

We have decided to delete all inactive articles, i.e., we have decided not to fork Wikipedia! See the Citizendium-L post for more info.

The deletion will take place at or soon after this Saturday, noon Eastern time, about 48 hours after I write this.

NOTE TO ACTIVE CONTRIBUTORS: if you have been working on an article, MAKE SURE that it has been marked Category:CZ Live. Otherwise, it will be deleted! [This actually turned out not to be the case. We simply deleted articles that had not been edited at all. This left us with 3000 pages.]

NOTE ALSO: if you compiled a list of "top priority" articles by tagging all such articles (see, for example, http://tinyurl.com/372fto), and those articles aren't also marked "CZ Live" (as many of them *shouldn't* be because no one has in fact worked on them), then you might want to save that list, which will disappear when the inactive articles are deleted. This should not be hard. Simply go to the "Category:_______ Workgroup (Top)" page, copy the list, place and around the items in the list and delete the index letters (or keep them if you want); finally, paste the result onto the "CZ:______ Workgroup" page. I won't do this myself, so hop to it if you care!!!

January 17, 2007

This isn't an administrative notice, but it's a very important question and I want to make sure everyone in the CZ community thinks about it:

Would you contribute more if the wiki were blank?

That is a question I am posing on the CZ forum. I think it is a very interesting question, because if the answers come back, "Yes, I would, because repairing mediocre Wikipedia content isn't nearly as much fun as starting over from scratch would be," then by golly I'm going to suggest that we jettison the idea of forking Wikipedia, delete all the unchanged Wikipedia articles, and have people start from scratch. If you want to reply, do it there on the forum rather than here. Thanks! Larry Sanger 01:09, 17 January 2007 (CST)

December 21, 2006

From Larry Sanger: I figured there would be some surprises to come out of our experiment. I thought that participation would be very much author-heavy, with editors weighing in only from time to time. In fact, it's exactly the reverse. While we do have a number of quite active authors, I've noticed in recent weeks that the edits have been quite editor-heavy. This isn't a bad thing in itself, obviously--I mean, we want editors to be active--but it has always been my conception that CZ would have at least as much author activity as editor activity. After all, CZ is not for experts only.

December 12, 2006

We're going to have some server downtime in about an hour (6 PM Eastern), for about 15 minutes. Hopefully, after that, the wiki will be faster!

December 7, 2006

We're announcing a contest to design the Citizendium logo.

December 6, 2006

(1) Is this the right place to ask the following question?

(2) Which workgroup is "Law" in, please? I expected to find it in "Social Sciences" but looked for it elsewhere, too. (I didn't entertain the possibility of not having "Law" as a separate category.) -- k. kay shearin

Wow--what an amazing and horrible oversight! Well, I'll fix that immediately. --Larry Sanger 22:42, 7 December 2006 (CST)

See CZ:Law Workgroup. Nothing there now, but hopefully that will change.

November 30, 2006

Anybody able to add the mentioned layer in the Computer pages?, I think it needs Larry to do that. Thanks, Rob

I'm not needed to do this. If you think that an extra layer of articles is necessary to maintain a sensible amount of granularity, great--and then you can make the change yourself. You simply need to add links to as-yet uncreated articles. Note, however, that articles similar to the topics you're interested in may already exist. Poke around. You may want to discuss the matter in advance either on Talk:Computer or else the Computers Workgroup Forum. --Larry Sanger 21:26, 30 November 2006 (CST)

I just wanted to remind you please to place

[[Category:CZ Live]]

(typed just like that) at the bottom of articles you've worked on. Please do check that this "tag" is there. It should be added to all and only those articles on which someone has made a substantial change (say, the addition or subtraction of a sentence's worth of content; most have been changed much more than that, in my observation).

November 29, 2006

If you add yourself to a workgroup (and you really should), please make sure that you use a pipelink. This way, you're sorted properly on the page. If you just use [[Category:XXX Authors]], then you wind up on the page as a "U" (since you're adding your "User:FirstLast" page). The right way to do it is [[Category:XXX Authors|Last Name, First Name]], so that you show up alphabetized properly. Ditto for editors. --ZachPruckowski 17:25, 29 November 2006 (CST)

November 24, 2006

Is there any objection to put a deepening layer in the Computers pages? I would suggest the following layer between computers and the final detail pages: Computer Science Science of Computers and Computer Linguistics and Semantics (Generally the first two are distinguished as follows: deployment of science, pure science (theoretical) and logics, linguistics and semantics oriented. Thanks. Rob

Could those who know how please look at "Healing Arts" on the list of workgroups on the main page and fix it so that it clicks to its own "Healing Arts" section rather than the generic "other arts". This way we can start the workgroup and tag articles? Thanks. Nancy Sculerati MD 11:33, 24 November 2006 (CST) Thanks to Chris Day for fixing the category. Could someone who know how kindly add a Healing Arts Forum that links to Healing Arts? Nancy Sculerati MD 14:27, 24 November 2006 (CST)

The Forum administrators (who can create boards) are Larry Sanger, Jason P, and Phil W. Also, you need a Healing Arts article. That's pretty important in terms of defining your focus (and how it differs from Health Science and Biology)--ZachPruckowski 16:01, 24 November 2006 (CST)

November 19, 2006

We're just now launching discipline workgroups! Your help is needed!

The wiki has a weird bug. Sometimes you edit a page, and, for no apparent reason, your changes aren't displayed--"hard refreshing" won't even work. But if you edit the page, you can see that your changes have been saved. If that happens to you, here's a handy work-around (until a bug fix comes in): simply add a space to the end of a paragraph (obviously such a space will not be displayed), or make any other edit, and then your previous changes will be displayed.

November 16, 2006

Please report any unusual bugs at bugs@citizendium.org. That address has been set up to send mail to people who are maintaining our canonical bugs list.

November 14, 2006

We've just revised our application procedure and rules. You should see some more authors arriving.

November 12, 2006

Help with CZ recruitment! We have some project recruitment pages that need your help. Add information about mailing lists, blogs, and professional organizations in your area that we should (eventually, and carefully) approach.

November 10, 2006

CZ is not for experts only!

Answer to Rob's question put on Talk:Database. Notice that "Talk" pages (click on the "discussion" tab!) are the best places to discuss articles.

November 8, 2006

Is your User page filled out? Please put something there if you are active on the pilot wiki. We are not anonymous here, but members of a real community (a welcoming one!).

November 6, 2006

The personnel administrators have just finished going through several hundred applications to join this pilot project, and we've also sent out a mail to our many members, asking them to get to work. As a result, there's a lot more activity going on today. Let's keep it going!

If you check "Watch this page" at the bottom of a page, you add it to your "watchlist." That's what the "my watchlist" link in the upper right is for.

November 5, 2006

• I'm off-duty for a few days. I'm answering the occasional email etc. but that's it. Thanks, Peter Hitchmough.
• Is anyone getting extremely poor rendering of pilot pages? See Bug #54 reported by User:Ruth Ifcher --Peter Hitchmough 08:16, 5 November 2006 (CST)
  • I've seen a few, but it seems to come and go. --Larry Sanger 12:22, 5 November 2006 (CST)

November 4, 2006

A tip for people new to wikis: for many, the recent changes page (link on the left, not to be confused with "Random page" and "Related changes") is a source of endless fascination. It allows you to explore what other people are up to, help them, and "keep them honest." More generally, if you've never used a wiki before, there are all sorts of tricks you will discover mostly by regular use and exploration of available links. We'll have to write our own instructions, but for now you can consult Wikipedia's help pages.

November 2, 2006

Please make sure you add [[Category:CZ Live]] to the bottom of the text box of whatever article you're editing. That will make sure your work gets counted, and that it is listed (very conveniently!) on Category:CZ Live. If we're good about labelling our articles this way, we'll have an accurate count of the number of articles we've worked on. Also, don't be shy about slapping labelling articles that others have worked on with the [[Category:CZ Live]] tag. It's properly bold!

Again, see http://blog.citizendium.org/ for the latest project news. This notice board is just for administrative notices, not for news.

November 1, 2006

Please add yourself to your contributor category: [[Category:CZ Editors]] to the bottom of your user page if we invited you to be an editor. Please add [[Category:CZ Authors]] if you're an author (editors can feel free to add themselves to this list, too). Constables should be able to figure out what to do.  :-)

October 30, 2006

Two personal requests from Larry: how about a new article, and a complete revision of an old article?

October 29, 2006

If you're new, please read how to get started with the Citizendium pilot! It tells you to use [[Category:CZ Live]] on articles you've edited, and other essential tips.