RationalWiki:Nothing is going on at Citizendium/2013

November 2013
The latest article featured on Citizendium's main page is Partial pressure. While fairly similar to the Wikipedia article, this appears to be mostly down to sharing an author. Should it credit Wikipedia? Maybe, but it's at least not as clear-cut as the last one. Follow up to the censoring a comment three years later: The author returns and brilliantly deals with their stupidity. Technically, Fall 2013 lasts until December 21st, so when Infobitt, Larry Sanger's latest project, proudly announces it's "Launching Fall 2013", it's not yet a lie. But it's not a good sign. (Update: Now "Early 2014".) Wayback Machine history of the Infobitt front page. Good to know Citizendium still cares more about censoring the rudeness of criticizing other editors than dealing with it, even if they only discover the criticism three years later. This probably won't last, but, for the moment, the snarky article poking fun of Citizendium's failure is an official subpage of their main Citizendium article, linked from the top of the article's main page. Outside of moving it to a subpage, not a single snarky word has changed in the article text. Two new authors have joined Citizendium. Good luck with that. Oh, no! The article on the Sandy Hook shootings used content from Wikipedia! DELETE IT! Citizendium can write a far better, more informative article. John Stephenson has created a new "subgroup" to help organise Citizendium's editors: The Transportation subgroup. However, across all of Citizendium, only 27 users have made even a single edit in the last 30 days. ETA: This is apparently because John thought the group existed back in September, so began putting articles into it, e.g.     (+5 more, same date) Four months later, John Stephenson discovers What happened to Citizendium? a parody of a now-somewhat-sanitized attack article on Wikipedia Citizendium has, originally titled "What happened to Wikipedia?". But what should they do about it? Update: "It could be deleted or, with some effort, a de-snarked and corrected version could be placed under Citizendium/Activity" - John. (Because he couldn't have done that without asking Anthony?) We recently discussed the recognized gaps in Citizendium's coverage which they're trying to fill in. What wasn't clear then was how half-assed a job they'd consider "fixing" the problem: The new article on Central America is just one (badly-written) sentence long. But that's enough to tick it off the list. Great work! This isn't a one-off occurrence either: Their solution for "Teaching" being missing is, if anything, even worse. Newest article featured on the Citizendium main page: Subjective-objective dichotomy. It's not a terrible article. It is, however, pretty heavily based on an uncredited use of Wikipedia's article Subject–object problem. So, copyvio on the main page. Great job, Citizendium! Automated list of all identical phrases and sentences. A pair of graphs about Citizendium that ask an important question: Was Citizendium ever successful? (Full set of graphs here. Also, note Figure 4: Article creation really has remained consistently flat, despite Sanger's predictions .)  Lots of  tiny  stubs  about  pop singers today. Are these really useful to anyone?  The October Financial Report is up, only slightly late. Although they brought in more funds than they have any time since March, they still lost money due to the transition costs of moving to the new server arrangements.  Recognised gaps in Citizendium's coverage include obscure technology startups such as IBM, geographical backwaters like Central Europe, Panama, and Central America, and recent scientific discoveries such as the steam turbine, spinal cord, mushroom, and pancreas. Though they do want to do something about this. The Monthly Donor Roll and Monthly Honour Roll of Users Editing the Wiki may still be months behind, but at least we have a very good reason for the delayed Financial Report. Also from that last link: They're currently paying two sets of server fees while putting in the new hosting plan, but that's at least progress.

October 2013
<vote poll=cz247 closed="yes">I do hate to harp on this, but... Anthony, we get it, you're proud you pushed the ruling through. Stop shoving the text of it in where it doesn't actually belong. <vote poll=cz246 closed="yes"> Ukiyo-e may be a new low for the "Featured articles" on the site's main page: A short, six-paragraph article, with ridiculously bad explanations of every one of its key concepts (the "Floating World"; the details of the printing process), and vastly inferior in every way to the corresponding Wikipedia article. <vote poll=cz245 closed="yes">Well, what InfoBitt is has been revealed: A pagerank service for existing news articles, with competitions to summarise them. In other words, a for-profit news aggregator service that doesn't have to pay its writers. Clever? <vote poll=cz244 closed="yes">Meanwhile, what's going on with Citizendium's reduced-cost hosting plan, which has been in limbo for several months? Apparently, they're still working on it, but very slowly. In a year or two, perhaps? <vote poll=cz243 closed="yes">It's hard not to belabour a Citizendium talking point when Anthony Sebastian is basically vandalizing supposedly encyclopedic articles in order to promote it. <vote poll=cz242 closed="yes">"The Citizendium Council has now strengthened Citizendium’s defense against persons registering under fake names that otherwise appear to be real names, persons who could register several accounts under different pseudo-real names. The Council has strengthened the Citizendium's defense against anonymity, and all that goes with that, and commercial abuse." -- Anthony Sebastian

Because that was really the most pressing problem Citizendium had? <vote poll=cz241 closed="yes">On the subject of the plagiaristic James G. Blaine article: apparently, if you want to edit crap encyclopedias, you can feel free to edit two: It's virtually the same as the Conservapedia version, because they were written by the same person. <vote poll=cz240 closed="yes">Citizendium's application process is already well-known for being convoluted, difficult, and slow. Anthony Sebastian wants them to double-down, requiring name verification "as foolproof as is practically possible." Because Citizendium is doing so well at attracting new users? <vote poll=cz239 closed="yes">We're halfway through October, and still no Financial Report for September. <vote poll=cz238 closed="yes">So, Anthony, why does Citizendium require real names? "The Citizendium's Charter mandates it." Well, okay, but why do you have to go through so much complicated verification? "Otherwise Citizendium cannot ensure compliance with the Charter." ...Can you give an actual reason? "Anonymity would render questionable the reputation of Citizendium." Original post. <vote poll=cz237 closed="yes">Hey, remember Infobitt? Larry Sanger's latest project that he's abandoned all his old ones for? Wonder what's going on there? According to its main page... [http://infobitt.com/#Oct2013 Absolutely nothing. It hasn't changed in months.] <vote poll=cz236 closed="yes">"There are limitations to how much knowledge each user has. CZ is highly efficient in this regard. People join, write everything they know, and leave once they have nothing more to contribute." - Chunbum Park. According to its main page, Citizendium has only 1,124 developed articles. <vote poll=cz235 closed="yes">If you don't feel like doing the work, just copy the abstract of an article over with the change of a single word. No one on Citizendium will notice. Compare: Last paragraph of Citizendium article James G. Blaine EDIT: now removed -- Article plagiarised from. <vote poll=cz234 closed="yes">The reduced-cost hosting plan discussed back in August, proposed back in June or so, and widely discussed as something necessary to save Citizendium... still hasn't been put in, from what anyone can tell. It's meant to remove the forums, you see, and they're still here. <vote poll=cz233 closed="yes">It does indeed appear that CZ has given up on updating the monthly donor and user honor rolls. At least the Featured Article appears to be getting changed every 2 weeks.

September 2013
<vote poll=cz232 closed="yes">The talk page here has been invaded by an IP who is oh so upset that we criticise Citizendium's alternative medicine - but don't criticise Wikipedia for... accepting climate science! The hypocrisy! Bonus: Check out their supporting link, http://www.philosophical-investigations.org/Wikipedia_on_Climate_Change. <vote poll=cz231 closed="yes">Citizendium love the sound of highly formalized speech, to the point of absurdity. Want proof? Here's a single sentence from the latest Citizendium Council business: "Whereas the duties of the constables are many, including daily checks, and whereas at the present time (September-October 2013) Citizendium has only one Constable on active duty, namely Chief Constable, Matt Innis, and whereas sysop John Stephenson has been active and performing some of the duties of the Constabulary and has indicated his willingness to serve as a Constable, the Citizendium Council hereby request the Chief Constable to invest John Stephenson with the rights of a Constable and the means to exercise those rights." <vote poll=cz230 closed="yes">Holy Grail vandalism has gone unnoticed for more than two years. <vote poll=cz229 closed="yes">Citizendium is rechecking all its approved articles, and have gone through most of them. What's left? Citizendium's woo: Chiropractic,  Homeopathy, and Vertebral subluxation.  To be fair, though, "Chiropractic" has had a lot of work done to make it less woo-y. <vote poll=cz228 closed="yes"> "My own position from the start has been that at least pseudonyms, if not full anonymity, are necessary. [... As I saw it, the CZ real names policy was an experiment worth trying though.]" <vote poll=cz227 closed="yes"> Now it appears that basic web site management duties have been curtailed: "The Monthly Donor Honor Roll" for August has yet to be posted, likewise the "Monthly Honor Roll of Users Editing the Wiki" for June and August. Also, the "Featured Article," which had been changed on a weekly basis as of late, is now in its second week. <vote poll=cz226 closed="yes"> This is a bit late, but... Actual quote from the sitenotice, August 3 to September 6: "August donations open to all users; seeking especially users with letter 'e' in their user name." <vote poll=cz225 closed="yes"> One of the changes made during the last election was from Approved Articles to Citable Versions - basically, instead of locking the main page of an article down when it was judged good enough, and only allowing edits on a draft page, now all of Citizendium is editable, but some pages have a locked-down subpage, which is considered to be pretty good. Perhaps by accident, the changeover means that the article on homeopathy is editable for the first time in years. This may not end well. <vote poll=cz224 closed="yes">While the article may be very short, at least Citizendium can call a recently-come-out transgender woman by her chosen name, unlike Wikipedia. <vote poll=cz223 closed="yes">An entire day (7th September) goes by without a single edit to Citizendium, because of a server outage.

<vote poll=cz222 closed="yes">According to the financial report, for the past three months Citizendium has taken in less funds than it spends on hosting. Still no sign of the new, cheaper hosting plan, though. The mills of Citizendium grind slowly, with exceedingly fine bureaucracy.

August 2013
<vote poll=cz221 closed="yes">The new Citizendium Council has asked for the new, much cheaper hosting plan to be implemented! In a few more months, maybe it will be! <vote poll=cz220 closed="yes">Remember WatchKnowLearn, the project Larry Sanger basically abandoned Citizendium for? Larry Sanger's given up on it in favour of his shiny new failure project.

<vote poll=cz218 closed="yes">It's been a month since Citizendium started approving new user accounts again. What are the results ? One physics crank, one self-promoter and the remaining thirteen users did not make any contributions at all. Uh oh. <vote poll=cz216 closed="yes">Citizendium's $100 hosting solution has been posted : apparently, they don't really need three high-end servers; an anemic Atom CPU with 4GB RAM and a terabyte of disk space (ie. Steadfast's cheapest dedicated server offering) is sufficient. Or maybe they need more RAM. <vote poll=cz215 closed="yes">The election results (sans the one referendum that might've saved Citizendium) are in! See them here; more analysis soon! <vote poll=cz214 closed="yes">With about 30 active users a month, Citizendium's hosting costs work out to $10.66 a user. Apparently, a $100 a month hosting solution is ready for consideration, but said consideration will be delayed until after the elections.

July 2013
<vote poll=cz213 closed="yes">Edit: Fixed about 14 hours after start of voting.  Voting is now open at Citizendium... and they've screwed up the voting instructions. Here's step 6. The bold text is in the original, and step 7 has the same mistake: ''Under the heading EC Author, type the name of your preferred candidate(s). (You may vote for up to <number of open EC author seats> candidates. You may also abstain by not filling in anything in this section).'' <vote poll=cz212 closed="yes">There's currently two candidates for the Editorial Council Authors positions. Both of them are really enthusiastic about the position! Have a look at their statements: 1 2 Sadly, the sole Management Council candidate is not much better.  <vote poll=cz211 closed="yes">Bureaucracy gone mad! It takes about three paragraphs of waffling just to describe a one-sentence change in the charter. Comes complete with the ridiculously formal "delete from ... and replace..." - misused, no less. Start skimming from the section named "Text" here. <vote poll=cz210 closed="yes"> A brief review of the other referenda in this election. Referenda 4 and 8 have been discussed already:
 * 1. Merge the Management and Editorial Councils. For those that don't know, Citizendium has three groups of bureaucratic overseers, the third being the constables who actually do things.
 * 2. Managing editor election reform. Notable for showing how over-bureaucratic the charter was.
 * 3. Ombudsman election reform Again, shows how bad the charter was: The supposedly-independent position of Ombudsman was selected by the councils; the community was only able to reject the proposal.
 * 5. Boring bureaucratic bullshit
 * 6. Attempt to fix "Approved Articles" that neglects that the major problem is there being no active constables.
 * 7. Throw out the current system of approved articles. Replaces it with just keeping a good revision off to one side, while letting all articles be edited.
 * 9. Poorly-explained bureaucratic revision.

<vote poll=cz209 closed="yes">Anthony Sebastian completely misses the point: He's proposed a referedum that the Request a new account page be tidied up and get better instructions, when the problem is that constables literally take months to approve users or to get back to them, provided they didn't accidentally delete them. <vote poll=cz208 closed="yes">In a move likely to be later viewed as "the moment Citizendium assured its failure", Anthony Sebastian has rejected both attempts to reform Citizendium's broken approval system for new editors. Prediction: In a year, Citizendium will be dead. <vote poll=cz207 closed="yes">Article creation on Citizendium has plummeted to about one per day. Today's article? How it's possible to go faster than light. (Of course, it was the physics cranks that first inspired Wikipedia's No Original Research rule.) <vote poll=cz206 closed="yes">On the same day that a somewhat controversial referendum proposing automatic account creation is proposed, accounts start getting created again at Citizendium. Coincidence? You decide... <vote poll=cz205 closed="yes">Citizendium referendum: Ditch the horribly convoluted system of signing up, with constable approval and more background checks than my last job, and just ask they use their real names. Finally! Update: Now seconded by Sandy Harris and Ro Thorpe. Update 2: rejected by fiat by the managing editor <vote poll=cz204 closed="yes"> Mary Ash's parting shot: "You must learn to trim down all the rules, regulations and the top-heavy administration. CZ is a small wiki needs very little of either." <vote poll=cz203 closed="yes">Citizendium prepares for its biggest shakeup of the rules of governance since the passing of the charter, all written in pseudo-legalese, of course. It sets up a procedure for transitioning to a volunteer-based system if when voting fails to elect anyone again. Remaining problems: <vote poll=cz202 closed="yes">As the ship sinks, Citizendium argues about technicalities. Does Article 25 of the charter bar John from helping to reestablish governance of the site? Does Article 29 mean his resignation was invalid in the first place? If not, and Anthony claims emergency powers to call an election, is this also a violation of the Charter?? Ah, Citizendium, we should have known you were up for at least one more bit of rules-lawyering, bureaucratic, Kafkaesque nonsense. There's only 27 or so active users by their own count, but they still have to rules-lawyer their way to non-existence. <vote poll=cz201 closed="yes">As pointed out on the talk page here, sending a photo of your driver's license to someone you don't know - as Anthony Sebastian wants new editors to do - is a terrible, terrible idea. Citizendium knows what a good encyclopedia needs: Catty pieces on how its much-more-successful competitor has... failed? Update: Even this is originally sourced from Wikipedia... Update 2: However, NOT sourced from Wikipedia: "What happened to Citizendium?" <vote poll=cz199 closed="yes">June donations were more than a hundred dollars short of costs. Hopefully, the aforementioned plans to reduce their excessive server costs will happen soon. <vote poll=cz198 closed="yes">John Stephenson steps forward to help Citizendium bring its bureaucracy back. Although this may, in fact, be a good thing: So many parts of the site are falling apart, and they seem to realise these need to be fixed. <vote poll=cz197 closed="yes">Almost two months after a potential new user asked why their membership was taking so long to process, they finally responded... by asking them to jump through more hoops - although Matt Innis adds, "I am afraid that all I have been able to do is delete the spam from the mailbox. Hopefully, I didn't delete his." <vote poll=cz196 closed="yes">Hate to say it, Anthony, but even if you're right and gentle expert guidance is a good thing, your method of implementing that guidance is Approved Articles, a project Citizendium pretty much gave up on years ago. <vote poll=cz195 closed="yes">Citizendium pays over $300 a month in hosting costs, and know this is a problem; however, every previous discussion on how to deal with it has petered out without anyone being willing to put in the work.That may, finally, be about to change, though nothing's ever certain with Citizendium's plans.
 * 1) Even the emergency procedure requires Anthony Sebastian to find four volunteers. Special:ActiveUsers lists 25 people at the moment of writing. That's a pretty big proportion of the user base, particularly as they're still pretty much unable to add new users, let alone get the handful the constables remember to approve to actually  start  editing.
 * 2) If anything ever happened to Anthony Sebastian, there's no procedure to replace the Managing Editor/Ombudsman roles. Now at least roughed in through discussion.

June 2013
<vote poll=cz194 closed="yes">Do the Citizendium Limbo, then lower the bar again. There's no point trying to be better than Wikipedia, but Citizendium can present the information in a different order, and the new perspective this provides makes them a valuable alternative. <vote poll=cz193 closed="yes">A lone voice in the wilderness points out that Citizendium's idea of censoring widely-reported leaked information is probably not a good idea. <vote poll=cz192 closed="yes">As has unfortunately become all too predictable at Citizendium, when problems with the articles they're holding up as Citizendium's best were politely pointed out to them, said issues were dismissed out of hand. <vote poll=cz191 closed="yes">Citizendium has begun posting some of the things they think they did better than Wikipedia. While the project may have failed as a whole, judge for yourself whether they've succeeded in some specific cases. Or try to, anyway: They're not doing a very good job of linking to articles. <vote poll=cz190 closed="yes">Citizendium approves new users in batches every few months. Since the start of 2013, approvals only happened on January 15th and 19th, February 11th and 16th, and June 7th, for a total of 13 new users. As it's unlikely that users all applied at once, this hints that a lot of users may have waited a long time for approval... which would explain why only four of those new users have made any contributions whatsoever, and all made fewer than 10 edits. "Join us! It's quick and easy!" <vote poll=cz189 closed="yes">Larry Sanger lets slip what his new for-profit project is about: A clone of the failed Wikipedia project Wikinews using some sort of new ideas to supposedly improve crowdsourcing. (He surely can't mean the ones that doomed Citizendium?) Its slogan: "InfoBitt: Let's crowdsource quality news". Thing is, news sites need huge amounts of new content daily, or they're useless. Sanger has a proven track record... of driving contributors away. Hope no-one invested too much. <vote poll=cz188 closed="yes">Citizendium counts activity a bit strangely, crediting those who edit 20% of days in a month or more as active, which isn't particularly much. Despite this, in May, only 6 users managed to reach even this low standard. <vote poll=cz187 closed="yes">After three months of Citizendium being unable to welcome new users, Aleta Curry has approved one. Are there others still waiting? Who knows: The number awaiting approval is secret. <vote poll=cz186 closed="yes">Hayford Peirce decides all of Wikipedia is utter shit, unlike Citizendium: "As you say, any WP article I look at has been dumbed down and reformatted to the point of imbecility. But, apparently, that's the way they want it...."

May 2013
<vote poll=cz185 closed="yes">The Citizendium FAQ... revised for accuracy. <vote poll=cz184 closed="yes">The elephant in the room: If Citizendium is capable of appointing a new constable, why haven't they; and if they can't, do they have any right to ask for donations when they can neither approve new members, nor deal with basic site issues like approving articles or dealing with user problems? <vote poll=cz183 closed="yes">Citizendium discusses RationalWiki: Citizendium Managing Editor (and generally nice guy) Anthony Sebastian welcomes critical peer review while Hayford Peirce reckons we're all just banned trolls. <vote poll=cz182 closed="yes">Can't get your vanity article on Wikipedia? Try Citizendium! Update: Matt Innis does something for the first time in three months. <vote poll=cz181 closed="yes">Would you believe that they actually should have had a new, "approved" article, which might have at least made them look a bit active, but they fucked it up? Steam generator has a note at the top saying, "Unless this notice is removed, the article will be approved on 17-Apr-2013." Of course, a constable is required for approval, so it shouldn't be a surprise that nothing's happened for over a month. Oops. <vote poll=cz180 closed="yes">It appears that disgruntled ex-users are starting to notice the complete lack of active constables. <vote poll=cz179 closed="yes">Here's a very creationist-like argument: Because Wikipedia has problems, something like Citizendium is needed to replace it. <vote poll=cz178 closed="yes">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", which we already began to fix. {| class="collapsible collapsed" style="text-align: left; border: 0px; margin-top: 0.2em; width:100%; border: solid 1px silver;" ! style="background-color: #f2dfce; text-align:center;" | Click here for the full details. There's a lot wrong.
 * style="padding: 8px; background-color: white;" |
 * 1) ...where -n’t follows a vowel sound, there is no new syllable:dãren’t, wëren’t, cān’t, shān’t are all monosyllables. - Not necessarily for daren't. ETA: Daren't was removed from the list, which... well, doesn't mean that "n't" after a vowel sound doesn't create a new syllable sometimes, although, for that matter, "r" technically isn't a vowel in either dare, are, or were.
 * 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.
 * 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. Fixed.
 * 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, ´.
 * 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: <span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',Times,'Nimbus Roman No9 L','Liberation Serif',serif;">‘ <span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',Times,'Nimbus Roman No9 L','Liberation Serif',serif;">’ and <span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',Times,'Nimbus Roman No9 L','Liberation Serif',serif;">“ <span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',Times,'Nimbus Roman No9 L','Liberation Serif',serif;">” . Just show them. Edit this page, and copy paste in the code you find here.
 * 15) The pronunciation marks that have been invented for CZ are used... stupidly. Do we really need whole sentences, made up of basic words like "is" and "one" and "does", marked up with some newly-invented pronunciation guide? Who are these being written for? People just learning to read, but who are fine with page after page of unorganised, stream-of-consciousness musing?
 * 1) The pronunciation marks that have been invented for CZ are used... stupidly. Do we really need whole sentences, made up of basic words like "is" and "one" and "does", marked up with some newly-invented pronunciation guide? Who are these being written for? People just learning to read, but who are fine with page after page of unorganised, stream-of-consciousness musing?

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. <vote poll=cz177 closed="yes">Citizendium 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! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! If they hadn't nailed it to the web, it'd be pushing up the daisies! THIS IS AN EX-ENCYCLOPEDIA!! <vote poll=cz176 closed="yes">Is 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" 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. <vote poll=cz175 closed="yes">Go 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. <vote poll=cz174 closed="yes">One 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. <vote poll=cz173 closed="yes">It's time for the grand return of only three edits to Citizendium on one day! <vote poll=cz172 closed="yes">While Citizendium may fail as an encyclopedia, it's still a great place to make a page advertising something you wrote, (Page history) or for making an article solely to complain about something that  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. <vote poll=cz171 closed="yes">Sandy 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."  <vote poll=cz170 closed="yes">As 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. <vote poll=cz169 closed="yes">Anthony 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)

April 2013
<vote poll=cz168 closed="yes">A 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. <vote poll=cz167 closed="yes">*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). <vote poll=cz166 closed="yes">On 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. <vote poll=cz165 closed="yes">Speaking of Citizendium being unable to maintain its pointless over-bureaucracy... There have been no new accounts created since February 16. 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 then, leaving in limbo those who have filled out the byzantine "request account" form. "Join us! It's quick and easy!" <vote poll=cz164 closed="yes">Citizendium 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. <vote poll=cz163 closed="yes">Anthony Sebastian has always had his way with words (Not a typo). Today's 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." <vote poll=cz162 closed="yes">Hayford Pierce takes the mature approach 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! <vote poll=cz161 closed="yes">Of 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, lists of random words, some of which have pronunciations, and Silent and invisible letters in English. Citizendium is (supposedly) neither a dictionary-without-definitions, nor a highschool grammar textbook, so, at best, these are out of place. Citizendium puts an article on their main page every week. While the policy 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 Thatcher. 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 &lt;references&gt; tag.

March 2013
<vote poll=cz160 closed="yes"> Two edits on the 29th, and three on the 31st. Not even worth writing about anymore. <vote poll=cz159 closed="yes"> CZ reaches a new low. A single edit for March 25th. And that one edit was to remove a single hyphen. And that from a page describing part of their internal bureaucracy. <vote poll=cz158 closed="yes"> The CZ forums have a new post! The first new post since March 5th. (That's more than two weeks without any discussion.) <vote poll=cz157 closed="yes"> Only three edits again on March 17. Why is it always 3 edits, anyway? <vote poll=cz156 closed="yes">A 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? <vote poll=cz155 closed="yes">Larry's new project now has a landing page: InfoBitt. <vote poll=cz154 closed="yes">Again only 3 edits to Citizendium, this time on March 11., 0 of which are to actual articles. <vote poll=cz153 closed="yes">Citizendium 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. Will they finally try to lower costs? Probably. Will they succeed? Doubtful.

February 2013
<vote poll=cz152 closed="yes">Citizendium: the Citizen's Compendium lizts uv mispelled werds. <vote poll=cz151 closed="yes">Anthony Sebastian has decided to overrule bureaucracy for once, in order to bring the project Signed Articles: 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"? <vote poll=cz150 closed="yes">Again only 3 edits to Citizendium on February 24. But at least this time some articles were expanded. <vote poll=cz149 closed="yes">Citizendium hits a new low, with a grand total of 3 edits on February 19, 0 of which are to actual articles. <vote poll=cz148 closed="yes">"We need to get rid of all remnants of bureaucracy and bureaucratic thinking, and start thinking like entrepreneurs again." - Larry Sanger. <vote poll=cz147 closed="yes">Guess what Larry Sanger's starting? A new crowdsourced information site! 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? <vote poll=cz146 closed="yes">Time'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). <vote poll=cz145 closed="yes">So 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? <vote poll=cz144 closed="yes">Sigrid asks "why do we have such insanely high monthly costs for hosting?" Larry Sanger is all for reducing costs... as soon as someone steps forwards and agrees to do all the work, then submit the proposal to Citizendium's bureaucracy. Prognosis: Doomed. (Thread, forum)

January 2013
<vote poll=cz143 closed="yes">Citizendium ponders getting Wikimedia to fund their vanity web publishing bureaucracy project. <vote poll=cz142 closed="yes">Monthly donations falling short of costs again. Is this even newsworthy anymore? <vote poll=cz141 closed="yes">After 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 rug. <vote poll=cz140 closed="yes">The Citizendium blog has updated, 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. <vote poll=cz139 closed="yes">Anthony Sebastian suggests 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!