RationalWiki:What is going on at Citizendium?

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Keep up to date with what is going on at the alternate Wikipedia, Citizendium, with our rolling reports of the happenings there. We report, you decide which entries are worthy of thumbs up and down! If you are contributing for the first time please read the instruction manual. For older entries, have a look at the archives.

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What is going on?

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Place new items at the top.


[edit] What is going on?

[edit] May 2013

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4Here's a very creationist-like argument: Because Wikipedia has problems, something like Citizendium is needed to replace it.
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Alright. You know what? Let's look at the real problem with the pronunciation guides taking over Citizendium: They're full of stupid, basic mistakes, which make them unfit for purpose. Let's follow up on a few days ago, and just cover all the remaining problems in "Apostrophe",img which we already began to fix.
  1. dãren’t, wëren’t, cān’t, shān’t are all monosyllables. - Not necessarily for daren't.
  2. It is also silent when it substitutes for the í in ís, and in the possessives, provided that the preceding letter is not -s, -x, -z, -ce, or -se - Examples then fail to include any such cases.[1]
  3. Expressions of time are treated as possessive plurals: a feŵ dâys' time, fîve hòurs' slêep. - No, they follow the same singular-plural rules as everything else. The phrase is "a day's notice", not "a days' notice", and so on. This mistake is just bad.
  4. whose possessive = who’s contraction: This should be written "vs." not "=", and also is very badly placed in the article. If you're going to cover common mistakes like it's vs. its and whose vs. who's - put them together. Don't just randomly scatter them all over the article, as if you sat down to the keyboard and wrote whatever came into your head, even if that's clearly how these articles are written.
  5. ...and who´s bést at presénting them - In an article about the apostrophe, it's helpful to use the apostrophe, not the uncombined acute accent, ´.[2]
  6. Another silent apostrophe appears in the plural of initials and letters of the alphabet: CD’s (*sêedêez), a lánguage fùll of z’s. - This usage is not universally accepted.
  7. Ô and a silent apostrophe begin many Irish surnames [...] In thrêe o’clóck, however, the first o is a schwa. - Alright, first of all, lose the damn accent-mark pronunciation when it's going to cause confusion: In Irish Gaelic, it's written "Ó", with an acute accent. Using a circumflex is just confusing. Secondly, O' in Irish surnames is from a Gaelic word meaning, roughly, "from", and indicating descent; in "o'clock", it's a contraction of "of the clock" or "on the clock". The two are not grammatically related, and, while discussing "o'clock" might be about as relevant as everything else in this article, the pronunciation of the "o'" is completely irrelevant to an article about apostrophes.
  8. ...where it is (in English more in theory than in practice) a glottal stop - That's just badly written. It should have a comma after "English" at the bare minimum; taking it behind the woodshed and shooting it would be even better.
  9. But what is the point in putting an apostrophe in ál-Qà’êda if you are going to pronounce it *ál-Qŷda? Answer: Given that it's being written down, the pronunciation could just as easily be the rather common *ál-khŷ-ê-da, in which case the apostrophe takes a role similar to the Diaeresis. Seriously, don't use one extreme case of pronunciation to alter spelling.
  10. [After a discussion on ' as a glottal stop] And Hallowêen is best left without an apostrophe between the e’s. - First of all, the apostrophe in Hallowe'en indicates "e'en" is a contraction of "evening", not that the article decides to discuss something actually relevant like that. It has nothing to do with glottal stops, so it shouldn't be discussed here in the first place. Secondly, Since when is Citizendium's stance that British spellings are objectively wrong now? It is now an objective fact that Americans are right?
  11. "[...] But apostrophes are useful for shortening words in captions, as with gòv’t for gòvernment. - that's the second one-sentence paragraph in a row, and the third sentence beginning with "and" or "but" - a sign of bad writing.
  12. In Breton, the apostrophe serves as a diacritic by distinguishing the graphemes c’h (pronounced [x]) and ch (pronounced [ʃ]). - What, now, after creating Citizendium's own pronunciation guide, we're going to use IPA? Without explaining it?
  13. Inverted commas (which have the same tendency to be used superfluously around notices) - This "tendency to be used superfluously around notices" is not discussed in the article.
  14. ...can be single ('…') or double ("…") and are used to open (if not straight, then like 6 or 66) or close (9 or 99) direct speech... Here: and . Just show them. Edit this page, and copy paste in the code you find here.

This is probably a horribly indulgent post, but I think the point comes out only by holding something up for example. These are not good articles, and yet make up probably a good third of edits on Citizendium at the moment.


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2Citizendium knows there's a problem with failure to approve new users, citing this page as the source for the reason behind the problem. As far as can be seen on any public board, however (edit if this is wrong), not a thing is being done about the problem. This encyclopedia is no more! It has ceased to be! Its expired and gone to meet its maker![3] If they hadn't nailed it to the web, it'd be pushing up the daisies! THIS IS AN EX-ENCYCLOPEDIA!!
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2Is this really what passes for encyclopedic ranting writing at Citizendium? "In English the apostrophe, though it looks like a punctuation mark, behaves like a letter, and omitting it is just as wrong as omitting a letter (unlike the hyphen, where there is some leeway), though it is conveniently expendable when writing notes for oneself. It has three pronunciations, í, schwa, and a glottal stop, but, also like many letters, it is frequently silent—and it is the silent apostrophe that causes most of the problems. On blogs, no matter what the general standard of literacy, one can see apostrophes wrongly inserted in plurals ("plural's") and many examples of ít's where there should be íts." - from "Apostrophe"img

Oh, also, ironically enough, given snarking about people's poor punctuation, the article ends with a punctuation error: a full stop outside the quotation mark, where the quotation is a complete sentence that should end with a full stop. Edit: Now fixed, although the fix adds a new error: ...used to open (") or close (') direct speech: one does not use single quotes to close direct speech opened with a double quote. Edit 2: Fixed again. RationalWiki: About the only actual proofreading being done on Citizendium anymore.

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8Go back and read the first entry for May, where Hayford came over to our Wiki to explain that, while they say they publicly thank people and don't, they privately thank them, which is enough. Apparently not: One of the April donors has just edited the Monthly Donor Honor Roll to credit himself.img
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5One interesting thing from the three-edit day was a talk page message alerting me to one of the most complex templates I've ever seen, meant to handle a very simple purpose: English spellings/Catalogs/Masterlist, and variants, all of which call the English spellings template. It has some functionality, highlighting the letter being discussed, though not enough functionality, since it misses out punctuation marks it's also meant to link together. It's an awful lot of convoluted code for something that Wikipedia handles gracefully with the automatic "mark the page you're on" functionality the wiki code has built in.

Of course, if they could maintain it, that wouldn't be a problem. They can't.img

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3It's time for the grand return of only three edits to Citizendium on one day!img
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7While Citizendium may fail as an encyclopedia, it's still a great place to make a page advertising something you wrote,img (Page history)img or for making an article solely to complain about somethingimg that annoys you.img[4] Given how poorly written the image description is one wonders why this excuse for banning wasn't invoked. Good thing for the author that there are no active constables.
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11Sandy Harris, on the CZ forums: As I see it, the CZ-as-a-better-WP project has rather clearly failed; we have neither the body of work nor the contributors to expect to compete. Not ever, since we miss those targets by many orders of magnitude. Reading some of the Rational Wiki comments, I can almost hear Star Trek's Dr. McCoy "It's dead, Jim."
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7As can be seen below, Hayford apparently can't resist making a fool of himself, actually commenting right here on RationalWiki. Apparently, so long as you say you thank your donors privately, announcing you have publicly thanked donors, when you have not done so at the place you link, or announcing that you have a list of active editors you want to thank, and not, in fact, thanking them at all, is irrelevant.
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8Anthony Sebastian has updated the sitenotice to thank the April donors in the "Monthly Donor Honor Roll", and to link to the "Monthly Honor Roll of Users Editing the Wiki". The Donor Honor Roll hasn't been updated since March, and the Editing one hasn't updated since January. Because actually publicly thanking them isn't as important of making a show of doing so.
I imagine that you've never considered the possibility that both Anthony and I, as Treasurer, individually thank each donor privately as the donations are received. Hayford Peirce (talk) 18:50, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

[edit] April 2013

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5A bit of a weird comparison: Wikipedia's article on the letter W covers a variety of points - the history of the letter, a brief description of usage in English and other languages, and so on. It's fairly typical of how encyclopedias tend to cover letters of the alphabet. The Citizendium article... is basically a lot of grammar and spelling rules, somewhat disorganised, and with the occasional random comment (At one point it announces "the y sound is often pronounced in lûte, however." which has nothing to do with the letter w or any point being discussed), and even inaccuracies. (The claim that "ew" has a "y" sound before it except before r and l appears to have far, far more exceptions than indicated: "new", "sewer", "Jew", etc.)
The thing is, Citizendium is supposedly an encyclopedia. Grammar and spelling textbooks have their own conventions (such as all the bolding and accent marks), and serve a much more specialised purpose than a general encyclopedia. It's as if Wikipedia and Wikisource were put into the same Wiki, with no indication of which one you'd get.
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7*Yawn* Yet again, another panicky site notice about fundraising falling short of costs. They somehow got extra funds in March, so you'd think they'd let up a bit. Or try to lower their server costs by talking about it and never doing anything (again).
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7On the subject of "things Citizendium is failing at": Expert approval. Citizendium has a series of "Approved Articles", in theory equivalent to Wikipedia's "Featured articles" The last one was promoted over six months ago, and only nine have been approved in the last two years.
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11Speaking of Citizendium being unable to maintain its pointless over-bureaucracy...There have been no new accounts created since February 16img. A complete lack of interest in the project? Actually, it's more likely due to the fact that the person who creates accounts hasn't signed on since thenimg, leaving in limbo those who have filled out the byzantine "request account" form. "Join us! It's quick and easy!"
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8Citizendium has its own special secondary wiki devoted to the Editorial Council, their SimBureaucracy game that forms the main focus of the site. (There's also some sort of very amateurish encyclopedia, for some reason. You'd think they'd have got some experts in to handle that part, since the running of the SimBureaucracy game is very professional.)

The EC wiki hasn't been edited since last October. If Citizendium can't maintain its pointless over-bureaucracy, it really is dead.

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6Anthony Sebastian has always had his way with words (Not a typo). Today'simg rape of the English language through tortured metaphor: "Login to Citizendium once daily and make one content contribution [...] You brush your teeth every day; brush your encyclopedia every day."
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10Hayford Pierce takes the mature approachimg to seeing someone mention this board, saying, "If those characters would spend as much time examining their own faults and trying to deal with them as they do looking at what they perceive to be others' failings, they would be a lot more useful." Thanks, Hayford!
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6Of what little activity is left, an inordinate amount seems to be some sort of Manual of Style. See, for example, the very unencyclopedic articles on Hyphen,img lists of random words, some of which have pronunciations,img and Silent and invisible letters in English.img Citizendium is (supposedly) neither a dictionary-without-definitions, nor a highschool grammar textbook, so, at best, these are out of place.
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10Citizendium puts an article on their main page every week. While the policyimg still states they should be approved articles, that requirement was thrown out long ago.

But surely they still check what they post, right? No: Their current "Featured" Article is Margaret Thatcherimg. Had they actually checked the article before shoving it onto their main page, they would have noticed the bold, bright red text at the bottom, pointing out they forgot to add a <references> tag.

[edit] March 2013

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2Two edits on the 29thimg, and three on the 31st. Not even worth writing about anymore.
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14CZ reaches a new low. A single edit for March 25th.img And that one edit was to remove a single hyphen. And that from a page describing part of their internal bureaucracy.
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8The CZ forums have a new post!img The first new post since March 5th. (That's more than two weeks without any discussion.)
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9Only three edits again on March 17.img Why is it always 3 edits, anyway?
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7A NEW ARTICLE!. Admittedly it only consists of: "Monthly periodical started in 1817 by William Blackwood as a Tory rival to the Whiggish Edinburgh Review." but still ... it shows Citizendium isn't dead ... surely ... doesn't it?
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1Larry's new project now has a landing page: InfoBitt.
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9Again only 3 edits to Citizendium, this time on March 11.img, 0 of which are to actual articles.
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9Citizendium has done a lot of begging funds of late. It would seem people are finally getting tired of it: February's donations were $122 short of costs.img Will they finally try to lower costs? Probably. Will they succeed? Doubtful.

[edit] February 2013

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5Citizendium: the Citizen's Compendium lizts uv mispelled werds.
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9Anthony Sebastian has decided to overrule bureaucracy for once,img in order to bring the project Signed Articles:img a chance for someone to submit something to Citizendium, and have it upheld as an uneditable, unremovable monument to that person's wisdom, that can be made the main text of an article, if nothing else exists.

So, how long before they accept one from Dana Ullman, former long-standing contributor, or some other laughable "expert"?

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10Again only 3 edits to Citizendium on February 24.img But at least this time some articles were expanded.
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18Citizendium hits a new low, with a grand total of 3 edits on February 19img, 0 of which are to actual articles.
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17"We need to get rid of all remnants of bureaucracy and bureaucratic thinking, and start thinking like entrepreneurs again." - Larry Sanger.img
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24Guess what Larry Sanger's starting? A new crowdsourced information site!img We're sure his superlative community management skills haven't left him.

ETA: By the way, check out the details of that job opportunity. You and "Your skillz"[sic] will be permanently on-call, and "if you want to stick around for long" you'll end up as Sanger's secretary and customer service representative as well as coder; there's no pay: you'll get some shares - but Larry Sanger's projects tend to fail horribly when he's in charge; and, worst of all, not only will you be working for Sanger, but you'll be seeing a lot of his smug face when you and him "work together on our laptops a day or two a week at a coffee shop". Dream job, innit?

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19Time's running out but, short of cash and short of elected "officials", there's still time to set up forums (fora?) for the "Managing Editor" (who he?) to talk (to himself presumably).
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18So how does Wikipedia properly document a site that's been in a persistent vegetative state for long enough that the "reliable sources" have all given up covering it?
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24Sigrid asksimg "why do we have such insanely high monthly costs for hosting?" Larry Sanger is all forimg reducing costs... as soon as someone steps forwards and agrees to do all the work, then submit the proposal to Citizendium's bureaucracy.img Prognosis: Doomed. (Thread, forum)

[edit] January 2013

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4Citizendium ponders getting Wikimedia to fundimg their vanity web publishing bureaucracy project.
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12Monthly donations falling short of costs again.img Is this even newsworthy anymore?
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16After the December election failed to go ahead due to a lack of interest, the CZ charter required calling for a special election. 3 weeks of doing nothing later and the issue is quietly swept under the rugimg.
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13The Citizendium blog has updated,img for the first time in four months! Apparently, Citizendium's requirement that you register your real name is, in and of itself, enough to make Citizendium a shining beacon of education and wonder, unlike that Wikipedia.
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17Anthony Sebastian suggestsimg that the few remaining Citizendium members grab Wikipedia articles, turn them into .doc files (so they can contain viruses?), and email them to experts, asking them to rewrite them. Coming soon: Citizendium spam!

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Nitpick: There's also a few exceptions to the rule: The surname "Foxe" is pronounced "Fox", so "Foxe's" has a non-silent apostrophe, and "Circe's" has a silent apostrophe. as does "Else's" (where Else is the woman's name).
  2. While the acute accent may look like a closing inverted comma in very small fonts, the character starts to look different with scale. If he was using the correct characters, he should be using ‘ ’ and “ ” instead.
  3. Which would mean it'll be spending time with Larry Sanger. Must be Hell.
  4. Obviously, the wider topic of errors in textbook illustrations is notable, but the article is on "Optical errors", and only discusses a single illustration, which makes it overly-focused on the one thing that annoyed the user.
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