Citizendium Blog

Here are our first logo submissions, in no particular order. I dare not make any critical remarks except to say I see some good stuff here. Notes:

• These are thumbnails. To see the full-size item, click on it. (And if anyone can tell me how to make WordPress display the original size instead of the thumbnail, that would be great–I know about toggling between “Using Thumbnail” and “Using Original” but this doesn’t seem to help.)
• Not only do you have to click through to a separate page to see a full-sized image, you have to click on that to see something even closer to the original. I have no clue why WordPress does this.
• These may not be the same file type as what was submitted (e.g., one person submitted tifs), which means that the results may not be high-quality. The committee will be able to look at the originals submitted.

From Ryan McCue:

From Doug Tinney:

From Kay Shearin (who says “anyone, especially anyone with more artistic ability than I have, is welcome to fool around with this concept”):

A few months ago I was interviewed by CBS Sunday Morning News about Wikipedia and the Digital Universe–this was actually before the Citizendium was even announced. Finally they’re running the segment this coming Sunday morning, early. We’ll cross our fingers hoping for a mention of CZ.

UPDATE: There will be a mention of CZ on the program. Starts anywhere from 6 AM to 10 AM tomorrow.

UPDATE 2: Hey, not too bad. A whole sentence about CZ and a screenshot of the homepage.

UPDATE 3: The text of the story is online.

UPDATE 4: And here’s the video.

We’re announcing a contest to design the Citizendium logo.  CZ needs an upper-left logo, something that looks good in 135px by 135px.  Here are the rules and guidelines:

Rules 

(1) Submit as many logos as you like.  Mail logos to admin [at] citizendium.org.  Please give us some identifying information about yourself (not to be published without your explicit consent), such as where you live and your occupation.  If you want a short bio about yourself posted with your logo, send that with the label “public bio.”

(2) We will post logos here to this blog.  All logos will be visible via the “logo” category.

(3) On January 2, 2007 the Executive Committee will vote on the logo.  The committee will be instructed to pay attention to comments, if any, made about the logos here on this blog.

(4) The name(s) and, if desired, an appropriate weblink for the designer(s) of the winning design will be posted in the Citizendium FAQ, in our second press release, and here on this blog.  This might end up being good publicity for the simple reason that we expect lots of publicity when we launch CZ public in early 2007.

Logo guidelines 

(1) The logo should be simple and elegant and easily reproducible in black and white.

(2) Our tagline, ”The Citizens’ Compendium”, is probably important to include at this early stage.  The current logo has the tagline wrong.  It’s not “The Citizen Compendium” and also not “The Citizen’s Compendium.”

(3) What feelings, concepts, etc., should a simple and abstract logo convey?  In no particular order: curiosity, intellectual excitement, knowledge, wisdom, precision, reliability, credibility, solidity, collaboration, explosive growth (we can hope!), interconnectedness, freedom…probably not all at once!

Thanking you designers in advance!

It’s now Dec. 1.  I consider the amount of work we have to do in terms of setting up hardware and writing policy (to mention two of the biggest hurdles).  I doubt we could responsibly plan to finish this by the end of this month.

I also consider the fact that it’s December, and so many academics are very busy with final exams and papers, and then with the holidays.  I remember that work dropped off on Nupedia and Wikipedia in Dec. 2000 and 2001, and we had poor luck doing recruitment then, and it’s likely to be similar now.  Since one of our main purposes with the launch and press release is to attract well-qualified (and not-so-well-qualified!) contributors, we would be better off doing this after the holidays are over.

For these reasons, I think we should postpone the launch until early 2007.  Hopefully January sometime.  This means we should probably focus as much as we can on “mission critical” items in the next month.  What are those?  I’ll outline them in later communication.

I’d say we’re doing pretty well:

• 390 real-name invitees (applicants) with read/write access to wiki (total)
• 130 Ph.D.-level editors (subset)
• 425 articles in progress
• Avg. ~200 edits per day
• 450 Citizendium-L subscribers
• 370 Citizendium Forums accounts
• A half-dozen fairly active discipline workgroups (mostly in the sciences)