RationalWiki:Nothing is going on at Citizendium/2015

December 2015[edit]

12

Slate... you're a good magazine. Why are you linking to Citizendium?

November 2015[edit]

12

It's been almost a year since the migration to the new server (or two, if you start counting from when they first purchased the new server). Citizendium should still be treated "as a beta for now"; however, it's all working, excepting only insignificant parts of the site^img.

12

By the way, anyone else notice that Anthony, Managing Editor of Citizendium, apparently doesn't know how to do a wikilink, so just pastes in links to other parts of Citizendium? He seems to do that every single time except when linking to user pages.

12

Anthony Sebastian noticed that donations were just about equal to monthly hosting costs. So he wants to get a few more donations so they can add a second server.^img Seriously?!

12

It's worth noting that Ro Thorpe, who is a very prolific contributor to Wikipedia, is almost single-handedly propping up Citizendium from an editing standpoint, by editing the catalogs of words that only Citizendium cares to keep. He has made 95 of the 157 edits from 10/05-11/04 and on many days is the only contributor.

October 2015[edit]

12

Only four new accounts^[1] have been created since the start of 2015. Number of edits? Zero, zero, two, and four. The most recent account to actually start editing properly was over a year ago, and was blocked soon after over a "registration/account issue"^img. Probably failed to mail Citizendium his driver's licence, passport, and credit card in time.<ref>Aside: Only talk page comment of this indef blocked user: "[...] You've made a friend on the Council."

12

There were no edits on October 17th, but the next day... Citizendium welcomed its first new author since April! Welcome to a dead wiki!

September 2015[edit]

12

If you were one of the 13 people who allegedly voted in Citizendium's June election, you can rest easy knowing that the bureaucracy still works, and your ballot was destroyed 90 days later.

12

The number of active users of Citizendium has dropped to 7 6, the lowest I've ever seen it. The Active Users page is still broken since last year so for those interested, those still editing are: Martin Wyatt, ~~Greg Sabino Mullane~~, Peter Jackson, Ro Thorpe, John Stephenson, Hayford Peirce, and Meg Ireland. Remember her? I thought she quit.

Update: And then there were six.

12

No edits on September 5th, 16th, 18th... Starting to become a regular occurrence. In between two of those days, on September 17th, the new financial report showed the same exact (small) amount of donations as in the previous month.

12

Wording matters. However, that the process the wording describes is as dead as a doornail doesn't matter.

12

The citizendium.org domain name is renewed for another two years, until 2017. The question is, who's paying for it?

August 2015[edit]

12

New Citizendium project: "Wanted articles". Prediction: Just as useful as every other project.

12

No edits of any kind on August 5th, a first in Citizendium's history. Followed soon after by no edits on the 9th.

12

Two weeks on, it turns out that voting doesn't magically fix programming issues. Who knew?

July 2015[edit]

12

The council return from their one month absence! Faced with <math> tags not working, and no-one being able to fix them,^img these brave souls pass a motion... asking officially that someone fix it.^img

12

Since last month's election, the council has returned to its state of doing fuck all. Indeed, of the entire council, only Anthony Sebastian has edited since July 2nd (and even then, only once). The newest electee did best, making his last edits June 23^img the same day he was elected^img.

12

Infobitt has run out of money, and Larry asks for support to keep the project afloat. "I’ve let the programmers go, and I’m looking for a job myself."

12

After over two years of waiting, Pompeii has finally been approved! The first approval since August 2012.

June 2015[edit]

12

The election results are in!^img ...does anyone really care besides the thirteen people who voted (not that any total adds up to more than twelve...) About the only moral is that no referendum, no matter how bureaucratic and over the top, won't pass.

12

Pat tried to accept her nomination, well before the election started.^img But, "This acceptance (on a locked page) occurred after the close of the nominations period and the Managing Editor's authorisation of the ballot, so cannot now be added." Bureaucracy is god, even when you have, what, a dozen active users?

31

For the first time in Citizendium history, not a single female candidate has been considered for nomination by the June 6 deadline.

12

Referendum 1:^img "the Approved Articles system is clearly not working due to the lack of active Editors".
Referendum 3:^img "Under these new proposals [...] [a]n Editor with the appropriate expertise must be involved in any approval".
Citizendium: If it's broke, don't fix it.^TM

12

Referendum #2:^img "In the past, people have actually talked about not using real names here! Let's stop this heresy by making sure debate is well and truly stifled! Thinking outside the box to fix the complete lack of interest in our site? Bah! It's HERESY! HERESY I SAY!" ETA: Managing Editor Anthony Sebastian appears after a two-week absence^img to support the measure,^img making his eleventh and twelth edits for the year in the process.

May 2015[edit]

12

While we're talking about the election, how about looking at a detailed solution being proposed over in the referenda section?^img This well-thought-through solution will surely fix the problem!^[2]

12

It's election season again!^img So far, there's only one person nominated, and that person has <capture>only edited seven times this year, with the last edit being in March.^img This does not bode well.

EDIT: Two new candidates have been put forward, one of whom edited four times this month!

12

Latest Ed Poor "bitts" on Citizendium sister-site Infobitt include "President Obama blames our current malaise on everything except for his own failed policies." and "Tammy Bruce accuses liberals of deliberately creating an illiterate underclass who can't help but vote for the failed liberal policies that keep them down." Fair and balanced reporting, courtesy of Infobitt and the Washington Times.

12

April 2015 had the least donations since May 2012: only $45 was collected out of the needed $111.95 hosting fees. Prediction: Stops collecting any significant donations by end of 2015, dies in 2016.

CZ council members' edits, July 2014 to March 2015.

12

In all of April, there was only a single edit from any member of the Citizendium council. And the leadership hasn't been leading for a long time - see chart, right.

12

Continuing the Ed Poor saga on Sanger's other site, Infobitt, here's one from today:

Tea Party bigwig Judson Phillips said: Many conservatives are shocked to discover tolerance isn’t what the homosexual rights movement wants. It wants tyranny.
- There is no tolerance for religious beliefs from the homosexual movement nor the radical left (i.e., the Democratic Party). If you dare to stand up for your religious beliefs, you will be bankrupted.
- American Christianity and the Party of Treason are now on a collision course. Only one will survive.
- The Christians are tolerant while the Party of Treason, the name real Americans have for the Democrats, wants complete obedience to the leftist orthodoxy.

It's one of the top stories in the "Opinion" section. Source? Some mad tea partier.

April 2015[edit]

12

As Citizendium moves ever further towards ruin and irrelevance, Anthony Sebastian wants us to know that Citizendium is STILL being set up on the new server, and to "treat it as a beta for now".

12

It's all going wrong over at Infobitt as the cranks start to show up. Out of today's top ten stories, seven have been contributed by Ed Poor, and two have to do with Global warming denialism. What "news" sites are used as the source for these? Why, The Daily Caller and The Daily Mail of course. Image

12

Sanger's new project, Infobitt's quite hard to link. But check out the fair-and-balanced reporting being written by Larry Sanger personally:

Hillary Clinton has been sounding very liberal, like Elizabeth Warren, in an effort to shore up the Democratic base.^[3]

Source: The Christian Science Monitor. Mangled a bit.

Update: Ed Poor puts in an appearance. Infobitt's 'Leaderboard' (needs login) shows him as the most active participant this week.

12

Infobitt was deemed too insignificant to have its own Wikipedia article.

March 2015[edit]

12

Old, but well-hidden: Citizendium began to try to move to two servers, and were paying for both from September 2013... which makes this comment from Anthony Sebastian^img rather horrifying: "After a long delay, the Citizendium server migration is actively being worked on as of October 29, 2014. Barring too much difficulty, it is anticipated to be done within a week or three." - if it wasn't being worked on before, what the hell was happening?

12

Wikipedia: Piece of shite, right? Citizendium would never be manipulated by anyone.

February 2015[edit]

12

Milton Beychok mostly seen on CZ updating the Fundamentals of Stack Gas Dispersion article has died.

12

Updates!

Progress on allowing people to sign up for the site, at least theoretically avoiding an inevitable decline? Fuck all.
Progress on configuring the site after the hosting update? Questionable.^img
Progress on not being a laughably awful encyclopedia? Bwahahahaha!
Progress on shittily cataloguing differences between the U.K. and America? The most commonly edited pages of the last month appear to be British and American English and its talk page.

12

Now that Citizendium's hosting costs have reduced to just over a quarter what they were, Citizendium should be doing pretty well, right? Wrong.^img

January 2015[edit]

12

Sanger is good at a sort of goalpost-moving, bait-and-switch article. For example, in his latest blogpost on Infobitt, he provides a passionate defense of citizen journalism, and then presents Infobitt as the answer (though what he's really done is write an argument for Wikinews). Frankly, posting things to your Facebook wall is probably better citizen journalism than Infobitt, which is just power point slides based on news articles. Plus, more people will see it...

12

The optimism of accepting new accounts again from the 15th has been replaced with "less optimism^img". Given how Citizendium works, "later" probably means 2016. Because what wiki needs contributors, right? Have we mentioned that there were two edits total, one to a talk page, by the same person, on the 19th and 20th?

12

For those who haven't created an account on Infobitt to gawk at the awful, here's one of the "bitts" - his term for a unit of news, or, "news", more accurately - that Sanger is trumpeting: [1]. Note that it's A. rather strongly biased (let's put the Republican talking point riiight at the top...), B. disorganized, C. trivial make-news, D. has little connection to the underlying science, and especially note E. Sanger is an idiot.

12

Citizendium has been closed to new accounts since the upgrade. The new date to start accepting account requests is the 15th January; and even that is considered as "optimism^img". This is, by the way, the second^img time it was pushed back.

12

A new record low for Citizendium. Only one edit^img in a 24 hour period (31 December 2014), and it's not on a mainspace article either.

Footnotes[edit]

↑ Not counting election and test accounts.
↑ In case it gets deleted: "As the Approved Articles system is clearly not working due to the lack of active Editors, the Council is asked to consider what can be done to remedy this situation, for instance, by abolishing the Approved Article status altogether, or by making the requirements for the appointment of Editors less stringent while still ensuring that they are reliable."
↑
If you click on it, you also get:
- - Clinton wrote an article honoring Elizabeth Warren as one of the center-left magazine Time's "100 Most Influential People."
  - Some liberal activists have protested Clinton's presidential candidacy and urged Warren to run. Warren has repeatedly denied that she will run and even disavowed one of the draft campaigns.
  - Clinton has got advice from Warren "several times" in the last year, a source with knowledge of Clinton's plans told CNN in February, a sign of how important Warren's wing of the Democratic party is.
...But that's not what members just browsing the site see.

[1] Not counting election and test accounts.

[2] In case it gets deleted: "As the Approved Articles system is clearly not working due to the lack of active Editors, the Council is asked to consider what can be done to remedy this situation, for instance, by abolishing the Approved Article status altogether, or by making the requirements for the appointment of Editors less stringent while still ensuring that they are reliable."

[3] If you click on it, you also get:
Clinton wrote an article honoring Elizabeth Warren as one of the center-left magazine Time's "100 Most Influential People."

Some liberal activists have protested Clinton's presidential candidacy and urged Warren to run. Warren has repeatedly denied that she will run and even disavowed one of the draft campaigns.

Clinton has got advice from Warren "several times" in the last year, a source with knowledge of Clinton's plans told CNN in February, a sign of how important Warren's wing of the Democratic party is.
...But that's not what members just browsing the site see.

[4] Clinton wrote an article honoring Elizabeth Warren as one of the center-left magazine Time's "100 Most Influential People."

Some liberal activists have protested Clinton's presidential candidacy and urged Warren to run. Warren has repeatedly denied that she will run and even disavowed one of the draft campaigns.

Clinton has got advice from Warren "several times" in the last year, a source with knowledge of Clinton's plans told CNN in February, a sign of how important Warren's wing of the Democratic party is.

[5] Clinton wrote an article honoring Elizabeth Warren as one of the center-left magazine Time's "100 Most Influential People."

[6] Some liberal activists have protested Clinton's presidential candidacy and urged Warren to run. Warren has repeatedly denied that she will run and even disavowed one of the draft campaigns.

[7] Clinton has got advice from Warren "several times" in the last year, a source with knowledge of Clinton's plans told CNN in February, a sign of how important Warren's wing of the Democratic party is.

[1]

[2]

[3]