RationalWiki:Nothing is going on at Citizendium/2011

December 2011
The third election of the year brings fresh blood to the Editorial Council. Out goes Aleta Curry and in comes Maria Cuervo. Out goes Ro Thorpe, in comes John Stephenson. Staying with the committee for the foreseeable future: Peter Schmitt and top cop turned grand inquisitor Hayford Peirce. The millennia-long plan to create the world's best free encyclopedia is sadly put to one side once more, as CZers debate whether one of their number is using the site to sell her own work. Oh, and to talk about UFOs. It counts as news these days when a third party bothers even to blog about CZ: The Failure of Citizendium.  [http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,4173.msg44763.html#msg44763 We can't allow universal suffrage! If we did, the wrong people might be elected!] A year after the ludicrous "Healing Arts workgroup" was abolished, it's still haunting the site. But bureaucracy comes first, and the tech staff won't remove the group until formally told to by the Editorial Council, even though the Editorial Council has already abolished it. So the Editorial Council will probably have to pass another motion to ask the tech staff to carry out the original motion that they passed...

November 2011
All the rats have deserted the ship, leaving only the aged and the infirm, and one rodent too stupid to know which way to run. What happens if—having built a complex governance structure atop one's wiki—there aren't enough people to have an opposed election? Conclude that perhaps you've gone a bit OTT on bureaucracy? No, of course not. You propose modifying the Charter to allow for this. Which, of course, requires a referendum. It's Editorial Council election time, again. It's like people having a vote to decide who gets to sit at the Captain's table on the Titanic. So civilized. Larry interviewed! "I'm not overly concerned about funding at the moment, we got some nice donations in the last month, enough to keep us going for several months. And we're probably going to start looking for some free hosting at some point." It's not just RationalWiki that thinks Larry is doing a lousy job as treasurer ''. Displaying that famous Citizendium collegiality and congeniality, Hayford Peirce tacitly informs a new user of current management motivation levels.  If you don't understand our policies already then there is nobody here would be able to explain them to you . The "Management Council" has some much-needed new blood, and this time perhaps with a healthy touch of reality. Their newest member suggests dropping that whole "encyclopedia" thing in favor of making Citizendium a student union bar. The "Editorial Council", seeing nothing worthwhile to edit, starts deleting everything instead. Despite causing havoc for over a year, resigning multiple times, and calling Citizendium a breeding ground for terrorists, Mary Ash comes crawling back - but this time Citizendium sees her coming.

October 2011
Ars Technica: "Citizendium turns five, but the Wikipedia fork is dead in the water". (First news coverage in months.)  Citizendium mysteriously gains money... retroactively. Just a week ago, they were fundraising on the basis of only having $500 in the account. Now, Larry claims they have had $1,000 in the account for several months. This would be a lot more believable had donations not been disabled for a month, meaning none could have come in. <vote poll=cz84 closed="yes">Citizendium's article on Wikipedia is full of major butthurt. Wikipedia's article on Citizendium is calm and NPOV. Rambling personal anecdote and ranting is a great example of "the highest standards of writing, reliability, and comprehensiveness". <vote poll=cz83 closed="yes">Larry Sanger: Ignorance is blissful... <vote poll=cz82 closed="yes">Larry: "My final idea is that the governance system as defined by the charter is too top-heavy for such a small group of people, and that therefore we should completely scrap it and revert to a looser, more informal sort of organization." Well, once the horse has bolted, you can close the stable door... <vote poll=cz81 closed="yes">Updated financial report! Larry is now making a generous $100 contribution every month until the situation stabilizes. Given Larry's donations, the Citizens are not far off their goal of $319 a month, and the imminent death of Citizendium has been delayed for a while. <vote poll=cz80 closed="yes">Ever since donations started going directly into one of Larry Sanger's private accounts in late August, after he was voted treasurer, noone seems interested in donating anything. Given his gross financial mismanagement last time he was in charge of funds, can you blame them?

September 2011
<vote poll=cz79 closed="yes">Citizendium founder and current project Treasurer Larry Sanger, whose prophecies have come back to haunt him ("I think we'll probably have at least 100,000 {articles} by 2011"), predicts doom for the world's biggest social network: "Facebook really has to take a hard look in the mirror. Their latest two developments have been disasters. They're going to implode." Right analysis, wrong project. <vote poll=cz78 closed="yes">It is proposed that Citizendium reach out to academia in the fashion of Wikipedia's Public Policy Initiative. The result? A debate over which council has jurisdiction. <vote poll=cz77 closed="yes">Citizendium is five years old. Daniel Mietchen interviewed for Wikipedia Signpost. Includes one of LArron's lovely graphs. <vote poll=cz76 closed="yes">A good start for the next round of Citizendium elections: the election committee's site-wide start date announcement is off by a month, which goes unnoticed for a couple of days into the process. It takes another month to elect people. And there are questions about whether candidates have to be seconded or not, thanks to confusing instructions; so candidates may self-nominate, second themselves, and then accept their own self-nominations? <vote poll=cz75 closed="yes">Citizendium has less than two months of hosting fees left, and probably won't last the year. But Hayford Peirce knows what the real priority is: Discussing an awful article he dealt with in 2007.

August 2011
<vote poll=cz74 closed="yes"> Milton Beychok resigns from the Management Council. Time for a special election: the tree of bureaucracy shall be renewed with the blood of article writers! <vote poll=cz73 closed="yes">Citizendium's Forum discusses whether the project has "Second Amendment" protection. Lock and load, Citizens! <vote poll=cz72 closed="yes">Having "resigned" from Citizendium every day for more than a week, Mary Ash is finally shown the door. <vote poll=cz71 closed="yes">Jealous of RationalWiki's Russian language service, Citizendium takes the first tentative steps to creating its own. <vote poll=cz70 closed="yes">Citizendium needs support from donations! Shame then that donations have been disabled for a whole month while they wait for Larry to get his act together. Jury is out as to whether he has forgotten he works there again, or is experiencing delays setting up a Swiss bank account to accept your gifts. <vote poll=cz69 closed="yes">We should definitely keep pseudoscience out of Healing Arts and use only things for which there is scientific evidence! Finally, Citizendium sings from the RationalWiki hymn sheet? Alas not! A CZer claims that intercessory prayer works... <vote poll=cz68 closed="yes">King of class, Hayford Peirce, pisses on the still warm corpse of dearly departed Howard. Paraphrased: "I banned him, sure, but he was shit at writing articles anyway. So that's okay!" (What's it say on the front page of CZ again? "Our community is collegial and congenial.") <vote poll=cz67 closed="yes">Unsatisfied with the constitutional crisis caused by his last untimely resignation Joe Quick returns like a thief in the night to see what havoc he can wreak upon Citizendium's "core" of approved articles. <vote poll=cz66 closed="yes">Citizens wondering why edit numbers are down. If only there were an article on RationalWiki listing the problems. <vote poll=cz65 closed="yes">Stay classy, Hayford. Having permabanned the most productive user of the site, compare him to Al Capone. <vote poll=cz64 closed="yes">Wikipedia's vision: the sum of all human knowledge for free for everybody. Chunbum Park's vision: Citizendium as censored encyclopedia to sell to the government of Singapore for $2,000-$4,000 a year. FREEDOM! <vote poll=cz63 closed="yes">Putting the fox in charge of the hen house? (Larry's been made treasurer) <vote poll=cz62 closed="yes">Still having problems with copyright? [http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=File%3AMontage2.jpg&action=historysubmit&diff=100774891&oldid=100753120 Just delete the note saying there's a problem. That'll make it all go away.]

July 2011
<vote poll=cz61 closed="yes"> The money is running out. Outgoings are $320/month (and sysadmin Dan Nessett says it's hard to go lower), income for the last three months has been $72, $34, $97.

June 2011
<vote poll=cz60 closed="yes">Management Council election results: Larry Sanger returns to Citizendium. CZ's Steve Jobs moment! <vote poll=cz59 closed="yes">Voting has started for the Management Council. Meet your candidates.

May 2011
<vote poll=cz58 closed="yes">The Editorial Council tries to remove one of its members on the grounds that he is banned by the Constabulary. Presumably members of Congress should now worry if they are arrested by a cop: they will be kicked out of office without trial. (So much for presumption of innocence and separation of powers.) <vote poll=cz57 closed="yes">The Constabulary bans Howard. This saves on that "due process" stuff that's the excuse for the top-heavy management structure, and will definitely bring the wiki vibrantly to life. <vote poll=cz56 closed="yes"> The Management Committee appoints itself as "independent" election auditor. Are they reading the North Korean "Guide to democracy"? <vote poll=cz55 closed="yes">Just in case you didn't think the project was moribund enough or broke enough: Larry Sanger is running for the Management Council. <vote poll=cz54 closed="yes">Maybe there's hope for CZ after all: MB-E is blocked indefinitely. <vote poll=cz53 closed="yes">According to Martin, everybody except him is marching out of step. <vote poll=cz52 closed="yes">Hey! The beta phase (which has been running since the project's public launch) is over! Note how there's no link? Yeah, there was no announcement. Here, have a new logo, or something. Given CZ's current state, it's not a big deal, really. Not even sure when the switch happened anymore.

April 2011
<vote poll=cz51 closed="yes">It's election time! The Management Council are having an election and there's some controversy about whether to use first-past-the-post voting or something a little more up-to-date. Perhaps they should have a referendum like the United Kingdom... <vote poll=cz50 closed="yes">The Editorial Council have now published an exhaustive review of Howard's editorships including contributions from a subcommittee of inquisitors. There are plenty more deckchairs to arrange before the iceberg hits. (RationalWiki gets mentioned too.) <vote poll=cz40 closed="yes">Uncle Ed's fame doesn't appear to have spread as far as CZ: they actually expect him to finish something he started. Or at least make it less of a DADT polemic. <vote poll=cz39 closed="yes">Martin Baldwin-Edwards's pot calls David Finn's kettle black.

<vote poll=cz37 closed="yes">Bureaucracy subsection 1 declares the charter suspended and asks bureaucracy subsection 2 to directly oversee bureaucracy subsections 3 and 4. <vote poll=cz36 closed="yes">User: I'd like to make a point about the way we debate. Asshole: You're wrong. User: You seem to have only read the first line of my response. Asshole: You talk too much. User: See, this is exactly what I was talking about. Asshole: You're an idiot, and I have 26 years of experience being an asshole. <vote poll=cz35 closed="yes">You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. <vote poll=cz34 closed="yes">In the never-ending bickering of "Howard versus the rest," Berkowitz is now requesting his Talk page be locked and deleted as he doesn't want other users to talk to him with it. So much for an open collaborative project... Simply deleting comments isn't permitted by the Constabulary.

March 2011
<vote poll=cz33 closed="yes">The Management Council releases a financial statement. At $319.90/month, they have the money to keep the lights on until September. Having had no success with external donations, the current plan is to keep asking the contributors to put in the running costs.

February 2011
<vote poll=cz32 closed="yes">Weeks after it was reported here, and discussed on the Citizendium forums, Citizendium hasn't managed to actually make not violate copyright. It's the lead image on one of their approved articles. Dozens more copyvios can be found with a simple search.

January 2011
<vote poll=cz31 closed="yes">The Editorial Council, apparently unaware of the concept of double jeopardy, considers yet another anonymously-submitted proposal that is a thinly-veiled attack on Howard Berkowitz. Meanwhile, less important issues—like copyright violations, fringe bias, and a lack of authors—are yet to be dealt with. <vote poll=cz30 closed="yes">Citizendium has a major long-term image and file copyright problem. Many have no documentation at. There appears to be no effort to check/verify uploaded files on the project for copyright issues. <vote poll=cz29 closed="yes">Daniel Mietchen, Citizendium's "Managing Editor", cops flak for unblocking David Finn after nearly two months of no action on his appeal. So much for the "right to a fair hearing".