RationalWiki:Nothing is going on at Citizendium/2013

November 2013[edit]

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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.^img Should it credit Wikipedia? Maybe, but it's at least not as clear-cut as the last one.

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Follow up to the censoring a comment three years later: The author returns and brilliantly deals with their stupidity.^img

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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.

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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.^img

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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,^img linked from the top of the article's main page.^img Outside of moving it to a subpage, not a single snarky word has changed in the article text.^img

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Two new authors have joined Citizendium.^[1]^[2] Good luck with that.^[3]^[4]

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Oh, no! The article on the Sandy Hook shootings used content from Wikipedia! DELETE IT!^img Citizendium can write a far better, more informative article.^img

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John Stephenson has created a new "subgroup" to help organise Citizendium's editors: The Transportation^img subgroup. However, across all of Citizendium, only 27 users have made even a single edit in the last 30 days.^img
ETA: This is apparently because John thought the group existed back in September, so began putting articles into it, e.g. [1]^img [2]^img [3]^img (+5 more, same date)

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Four months later, John Stephenson discovers What happened to Citizendium?^img a parody of a now-somewhat-sanitized attack article on Wikipedia^img Citizendium has, originally titled "What happened to Wikipedia?". But what should they do about it?^img
Update: "It could be deleted or, with some effort, a de-snarked and corrected version could be placed under Citizendium/Activity" - John.^img (Because he couldn't have done that without asking Anthony?)

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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^img is just one (badly-written) sentence long. But that's enough to tick it off the list.^img Great work! This isn't a one-off occurrence either: Their solution for "Teaching" being missing is, if anything, even worse.^img

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Newest article featured on the Citizendium main page: Subjective-objective dichotomy.^img It's not a terrible article. It is, however, pretty heavily based on an uncredited^[5] 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.^img

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A pair of graphs about Citizendium that ask an important question: Was Citizendium ever successful? [4]^img [5]^img (Full set of graphs here.^img Also, note Figure 4: Article creation really has remained consistently flat, despite Sanger's predictions^img.)

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Lots^img of^img tiny^img stubs^img about^img pop singers^img today. Are these really useful to anyone?

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The October Financial Report^img 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.

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Recognised gaps in Citizendium's coverage^img 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.

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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.^img 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[edit]

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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.^img^[6]

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Ukiyo-e^img 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.

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Well, what InfoBitt is has been revealed: A pagerank service for existing news articles, with competitions to summarise them.^img In other words, a for-profit news aggregator service that doesn't have to pay its writers. Clever?

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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?

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It's hard not to belabour a Citizendium talking point when Anthony Sebastian is basically vandalizing supposedly encyclopedic articles in order to promote it.^img

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"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." --<capture>Anthony Sebastian
Because that was really the most pressing problem Citizendium had?

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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^img as the Conservapedia version, because they were written by the same^img person.^img

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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."^img Because Citizendium is doing so well at attracting new users?^img

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We're halfway through October, and still no Financial Report for September.

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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.

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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... Absolutely nothing. It hasn't changed in months.^img

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"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.^img
According to its main page,^img Citizendium has only 1,124 developed articles.

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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^img EDIT: now removed^img -- Article plagiarised from.

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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.

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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[edit]

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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.

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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:^img "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."

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Holy Grail vandalism has gone unnoticed for more than two years^img.

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Citizendium is rechecking all its approved articles, and have gone through most of them. What's left? Citizendium's woo:^img Chiropractic,^img Homeopathy,^img and Vertebral subluxation.^img To be fair, though, "Chiropractic" has had a lot of work done to make it less woo-y.

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"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.^img"

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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.

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This is a bit late, but... Actual quote from the sitenotice,^img August 3 to September 6: "August donations open to all users; seeking especially users with letter 'e' in their user name."

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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.^img This may not end well.

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While the article may be very short, at least Citizendium can <capture>call a recently-come-out transgender woman by her chosen name, unlike Wikipedia.

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An entire day (7^th September) goes by without a single edit to Citizendium^img, because of a server outage.

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According to the financial report,^img 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[edit]

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The new Citizendium Council has asked^img for the new, much cheaper hosting plan to be implemented! In a few more months, maybe it will be!

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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.

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It's been a month since Citizendium started approving new user accounts again. What are the results^img? One physics crank^img, one self-promoter^img and the remaining thirteen users did not make any contributions at all. Uh oh.

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Citizendium's $100 hosting solution has been posted^img: 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^img.

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The election results (sans the one referendum that might've saved Citizendium) are in! See them <capture>here; more analysis soon!

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With about 30 active users a month,^img Citizendium's hosting costs work out to $10.66 a user. Apparently, a $100 a month hosting solution is ready for consideration,^img but said consideration will be delayed until after the elections.

July 2013[edit]

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Edit: Fixed about 14 hours after start of voting.^img Voting is now open at Citizendium... and they've screwed up the voting instructions.^img 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).

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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^img 2^img Sadly, the sole Management Council candidate is not much better.[6]^img

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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.^[7] Start skimming from the section named "Text" here.^img

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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.^img 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.^img Notable for showing how over-bureaucratic the charter was.^[8]

3. Ombudsman election reform^img 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.^[9] Boring bureaucratic bullshit^img^[10]

6. Attempt to fix "Approved Articles" that neglects that the major problem is there being no active constables.^img^[11]

7. Throw out the current system of approved articles.^img Replaces it with just keeping a good revision off to one side, while letting all articles be edited.

9. Poorly-explained bureaucratic revision.^img

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Anthony Sebastian completely misses the point: He's proposed a referedum^img 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.^img

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In a move likely to be later viewed as "the moment Citizendium assured its failure", Anthony Sebastian has rejected^img both^img attempts to reform Citizendium's broken approval system for new editors. Prediction: In a year, Citizendium will be dead.

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Article creation on Citizendium has plummeted to about one per day. Today's article? How it's possible to go faster than light.^img (Of course, it was the physics cranks that first inspired Wikipedia's No Original Research rule.)

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On the same day that a somewhat controversial referendum proposing automatic account creation^img is proposed, accounts start getting created again at Citizendium^img. Coincidence? You decide...

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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.^img Finally! Update: Now seconded by Sandy Harris and Ro Thorpe.^[12] Update 2: rejected by fiat by the managing editor[7]^img

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Mary Ash's parting shot:^img "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."

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Citizendium prepares for its biggest shakeup of the rules of governance^img 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:

Even the emergency procedure requires Anthony Sebastian to find four volunteers. Special:ActiveUsers^img 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,^img let alone get the handful the constables remember to approve to^img actually^img start^img editing.^img
~~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.^[13]

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As the ship sinks, Citizendium argues about technicalities.^img 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,^img but they still have to rules-lawyer their way to non-existence.

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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.

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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?"^img

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June donations were more than a hundred dollars short of costs. Hopefully, the aforementioned plans to reduce their excessive server costs will happen soon.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

June 2013[edit]

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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.^[14]

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A lone voice in the wilderness points out that Citizendium's idea of censoring widely-reported leaked information is probably not a good idea.

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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.^[15]

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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.

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Citizendium approves new users in batches every few months.^img 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!"

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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?)^[16] Its slogan: "InfoBitt: Let's crowdsource quality news".^img

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.

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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.^[17] Despite this, in May, only 6 users^img managed to reach even this low standard.

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After three months of Citizendium being unable to welcome new users, Aleta Curry has approved one^img. Are there others still waiting? Who knows: The number awaiting approval is secret.

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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[edit]

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The Citizendium FAQ... revised for accuracy.

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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?

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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.

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Can't get your vanity article on Wikipedia? Try Citizendium! Update: Matt Innis does something for the first time in three months.

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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.

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It appears that disgruntled ex-users are starting to notice the complete lack of active constables.

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Here'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.

Click here for the full details. There's a lot wrong.

...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.
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.^[18]
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.
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.
...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, ´.^[19]
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.
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.
...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.
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.
[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?
"[...] 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.
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?
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.
...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.
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.

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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!^[20] 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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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"^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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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.^img

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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.^img

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It's time for the grand return of <capture>only three edits to Citizendium on one day!<capture>

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While 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 something^img that annoys you.^img^[21] 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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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."

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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.

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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[edit]

12

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.

12

*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).

12

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.

12

Speaking of Citizendium being unable to maintain its pointless over-bureaucracy...There have been no new accounts created since February 16^img. 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^img, leaving in limbo those who have filled out the byzantine "request account" form. "Join us! It's quick and easy!"

12

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.

12

Anthony Sebastian has always had his way with words (Not a typo). Today's^img 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."

11

Hayford Pierce takes the mature approach^img 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!

12

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,^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.

11

Citizendium puts an article on their main page every week. While the policy^img 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^img. 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.

March 2013[edit]

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Two edits on the 29th^img, and three on the 31st. Not even worth writing about anymore.

12

CZ 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.

12

The CZ forums have a new post!^img The first new post since March 5th. (That's more than two weeks without any discussion.)

12

Only three edits again on March 17.^img Why is it always 3 edits, anyway?

12

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?

12

Larry's new project now has a landing page: InfoBitt.

12

Again only 3 edits to Citizendium, this time on March 11.^img, 0 of which are to actual articles.

12

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.^img Will they finally try to lower costs? Probably. Will they succeed? Doubtful.

February 2013[edit]

12

Citizendium: the Citizen's ~~Compendium~~ lizts uv mispelled werds.

12

Anthony 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"?

12

Again only 3 edits to Citizendium on February 24.^img But at least this time some articles were expanded.

12

Citizendium hits a new low, with a grand total of 3 edits on February 19^img, 0 of which are to actual articles.

12

"We need to get rid of all remnants of bureaucracy and bureaucratic thinking, and start thinking like entrepreneurs again." - Larry Sanger.^img

12

Guess 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?

12

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).

12

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?

12

Sigrid asks^img "why do we have such insanely high monthly costs for hosting?" Larry Sanger is all for^img 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)

January 2013[edit]

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Citizendium ponders getting Wikimedia to <capture>fund their vanity web ~~publishing~~ bureaucracy project.

12

Monthly donations falling short of costs again.^img Is this even newsworthy anymore?

12

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^img.

12

The 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.

12

Anthony Sebastian suggests^img 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!

Footnotes[edit]

↑ http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Richard_Pascoe
↑ http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Peter_Kauffner
↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:Sluffs
↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:Kauffner
↑ Wikipedia uses a Creative Commons license, which requires giving credit if you don't want to violate copyright. If appropriate credit had been given, Citizendium would have been fine.
↑ It doesn't flow out of the paragraph before, it doesn't flow into the paragraph after, and, in a page meant to encourage users to join the site, detailing the extensive background checks they have to go through in order to do so will not help.
↑ You're supposed to just quote a few words after "delete from", not everything you want to delete, when you've already quoted it in full.
↑ "The current text of Article 26 of the Charter restricts the nomination process for Managing Editor by requiring the Management Council to control who appears on the ballot: up to four candidates only may appear. This is open to potential abuse, since valid accepted nominations can be rejected and the Council could allow only its own approved candidates through, because Council members are also Citizens who can make private nominations. In the event that only a single candidate were permitted to stand, it is also not clear whether an approval vote by the community which went against that person would block them from the office, since there is currently no explicit mechanism to deal with negative approval votes. (An 'approval vote' is one where voters are asked to indicate 'yes' or 'no' to one candidate, rather than choose between several.) The current election method is also inconsistent with how Council members are elected."
↑ Referendum 4 is the rejected one to actually let new users onto Citizendium in some manner that doesn't take months.
↑ If you must know, requires the Managing editor to be part of all council discussions.
↑ Constables are required to set up the page protection on approved articles, and to edit approved pages. Citizendium doesn't have any active ones.
↑ On a related subject: they've had an invitation to join in their sitenotice for over a month now, without the ability to actually approve a single person they had attracted, and yet keep talking about how they need to attract more people.
↑ You know, for all the pseudo-legalese, Citizendium misses the core virtue of real legalese: precision and comprehensiveness. Sure, legalese can include obfuscation. But not for no purpose.
↑ Quote: ...there's probably little point in looking for CZ articles that are objectively better than equivalent WP articles. [...] CZ's value might be better defined not by objectively better articles, but rather by content that provide valuable alternatives to content on WP. Collected editions of Shakespeare is perhaps a good example. While much of the information in the article may already be in WP, the article presents an alternate arrangement and perspective that is not available there. Of course, pretty much all the information and far more is on Wikipedia, and it's unclear what new perspective is offered, but...
↑ Particularly bad in the case of the Shakespeare article: The problem was some core changes to the list of canonical works that were discussed, but failed to identify what was added, and which of the early publications added them - and as this is the basis for probably the biggest debate held over what should be included in the canonical list of Shakespeare plays before the 20th century, it's pretty important. A quick copy-paste of the relevant information would have fixed that.
↑ Full description of the site, in case it gets taken down: "We crowdsource content of a higher level of quality. More signal, less noise. The first application of our tool will be news. Target audience = college-educated Internet users who are probably familliar with other crowdsourcing and social networking sites."^img
↑ This works out to editing on at least 6 or 7 different days in the month, depending on whether the month has 31 days or not.
↑ 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).
↑ 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.
↑ Which would mean it'll be spending time with Larry Sanger. Must be Hell.
↑ 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.

[1] ttp://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Richard_Pascoe

[2] ttp://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Peter_Kauffner

[3] ttps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:Sluffs

[4] ttps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:Kauffner

[5] Wikipedia uses a Creative Commons license, which requires giving credit if you don't want to violate copyright. If appropriate credit had been given, Citizendium would have been fine.

[6] It doesn't flow out of the paragraph before, it doesn't flow into the paragraph after, and, in a page meant to encourage users to join the site, detailing the extensive background checks they have to go through in order to do so will not help.

[7] You're supposed to just quote a few words after "delete from", not everything you want to delete, when you've already quoted it in full.

[8] "The current text of Article 26 of the Charter restricts the nomination process for Managing Editor by requiring the Management Council to control who appears on the ballot: up to four candidates only may appear. This is open to potential abuse, since valid accepted nominations can be rejected and the Council could allow only its own approved candidates through, because Council members are also Citizens who can make private nominations. In the event that only a single candidate were permitted to stand, it is also not clear whether an approval vote by the community which went against that person would block them from the office, since there is currently no explicit mechanism to deal with negative approval votes. (An 'approval vote' is one where voters are asked to indicate 'yes' or 'no' to one candidate, rather than choose between several.) The current election method is also inconsistent with how Council members are elected."

[9] Referendum 4 is the rejected one to actually let new users onto Citizendium in some manner that doesn't take months.

[10] If you must know, requires the Managing editor to be part of all council discussions.

[11] Constables are required to set up the page protection on approved articles, and to edit approved pages. Citizendium doesn't have any active ones.

[12] On a related subject: they've had an invitation to join in their sitenotice for over a month now, without the ability to actually approve a single person they had attracted, and yet keep talking about how they need to attract more people.

[13] You know, for all the pseudo-legalese, Citizendium misses the core virtue of real legalese: precision and comprehensiveness. Sure, legalese can include obfuscation. But not for no purpose.

[14] Quote: ...there's probably little point in looking for CZ articles that are objectively better than equivalent WP articles. [...] CZ's value might be better defined not by objectively better articles, but rather by content that provide valuable alternatives to content on WP. Collected editions of Shakespeare is perhaps a good example. While much of the information in the article may already be in WP, the article presents an alternate arrangement and perspective that is not available there. Of course, pretty much all the information and far more is on Wikipedia, and it's unclear what new perspective is offered, but...

[15] Particularly bad in the case of the Shakespeare article: The problem was some core changes to the list of canonical works that were discussed, but failed to identify what was added, and which of the early publications added them - and as this is the basis for probably the biggest debate held over what should be included in the canonical list of Shakespeare plays before the 20th century, it's pretty important. A quick copy-paste of the relevant information would have fixed that.

[16] Full description of the site, in case it gets taken down: "We crowdsource content of a higher level of quality. More signal, less noise. The first application of our tool will be news. Target audience = college-educated Internet users who are probably familliar with other crowdsourcing and social networking sites."^img

[17] This works out to editing on at least 6 or 7 different days in the month, depending on whether the month has 31 days or not.

[18] 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).

[19] 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.

[20] Which would mean it'll be spending time with Larry Sanger. Must be Hell.

[21] 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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