I try not closing my mind. Sometimes I get that wrong as well. I look forward to reading your middle view manifesto and the other references.

I’ve tended to believe in a community participation rule of thumb which I’ve blogged about a few times, which roughly translates to:

* For every 1000 people who join a community:
* 920 are lurkers, passive observers
* 60 are watchers, active observers capable and willing to kibitz
* 15 are activists, actually doing something
* …and 5 are hyperactive, passionate about what they’re doing, almost to a point of obsession

So I’m comfortable with the idea of a community having some people more equal than others. What I guess I’m pushing back against is the Cult of the Expert. You could say I’m “not Keen” on it.

Thanks for coming back to me by commenting at my blog. I tend to read every reference people make there in comments.

By the way, I’m not a combative commenter either, so I don’t intend a He Said She Said session. If Citizendium has managed to avoid the traditional risks of elitism then I wish it well. And I’ll post about your response rather than just leave it in the comments.

QUOTE: “Any former editor who is no longer on this list may reinstate his or her editorship by (1) adding a bio.”

I went back to look at them again. The empty ones have gone, but this one remains on the list: direct link. It looks bad. I wonder how many potential authors you’ve lost because of absent or poor quality bios.

Still, I have to agree in this case. We need more information from that particular editor.

Non-participating members of the public accessing the site to read the articles may welcome the editorial role of university academics. By contrast, contributors are surely motivated by the feeling that their in-depth knowledge about particular topics will be treated as something of real value. Too much interference by editors who also happen to be university staff, and they will depart. No one is going to pay them a salary, or offer them tenure, for putting up with editors who pull rank. Human nature being what it is, that will happen from time to time regardless of what the official policy says.

Anyone who reads PDF documents on university websites can discover major disagreements between academic experts - even in the hard sciences.

My suggestion is that, with the exception of granting approved status to good articles, editors should not be allowed to edit author-contributed content in articles under development. Official policy should limit their involvement to proffering suggestions on talk pages, with transgressions punishable by revoking their editorial status (that would NOT bar them from commencing articles themselves). Regular authors can edit questionable material added by their peers if the goal is article approval. And there are constables for backup. You have around 200 editors. If each of them produced just one article or stub each week you would have quite an impressive figure to display on your main page by now.

Take the example of a retired person like me. As a psychology student at university in the 1960s I had to regurgitate narrow behaviorist theories in answer to examination questions in order to obtain a degree. The founder of behaviorist psychology, J.B. Watson, declared that he could find no support for hereditary patterns of behavior, nor for special abilities in music, art, etc., that tend to run in families. Today, the head of the psychology department at my old alma mater is an evolutionary psychologist who believes almost the exact opposite. His armchair speculations about genetic predispositions have appeared in newspapers.

The big plus for Citizendium is that anonymous edits are not allowed. But if the editorial team try to reinforce academic orthodoxies in disciplines where indisputable facts are thin on the ground I suspect complaints will appear in the blogosphere. Now that Wikipedia has 2 million articles in English (including lots of stubs, no doubt), they could afford to change their policy and require registration. I find it hard to imagine that they will be able to rely on a dedicated core of Wikipedians to keep vandalism under control forever. In the meantime, you have the advantage of keeping out spam and spin.