Citizendium Blog

One of the nice things I like about writing or editing for Citizendium is the availability of ‘subpages’, complementary pages attached to the Main Article.  The subpages give you the opportunity to extend the content of the Main Article without unduly interrupting the narrative flow of the article.

See: en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Subpages

A ‘Bibliography’ subpage lets you extend the references to the in-text citations of the Main Article with a list of annotated further reading items—books, articles, etc. Your annotation of a book, say, could take form of a mini book report, or a discussion of how the book relates to the issues discussed in the Main Article.

A ‘Related Articles’ subpage lets you list, and link to, articles in Citizendium that relate to the topic of the Main Article.  It integrates the topics of the encyclopedia that widen the scope of the Main Article.

An ‘External Links’ subpage lets you list and link to Webpages related to the topic. You can arrange them by category, and annotate.

A ‘Talk’ subpage is a page for authors and Editors to discuss the contents and composition of the Main Article and its other subpages, including questions, suggestions, and critiques.

Those four subpage types are generated by default when the Main Article is inaugurated and are reached for viewing and editing by clicking on tabs in a horizontal menu bar just under the title of the Main Article.

It should not be difficult to appreciate how those default subpages extend the Main Article’s value without disrupting it narrative flow or rendering it unduly long.  But Citizendium does not stop there.  It offers the author a wide variety of optional subpage types to employ for special purposes related to the topic of the Main Article.

Guess what the optional subpage ‘Filmography’ would add to the topic of an appropriate Main Article.  Or a ‘Timelines’ subpage, or ‘Videos’, or ‘Tutorials’, or ‘Addendum’, or ‘Advanced’.

So, as an author or collaborative group of authors, your Main Article takes the form of what Citizendium calls a “cluster”. The cluster renders the topic multidimensional, and gives the reader a multidimensional learning experience.

Neat!

One of the nice things I like about Citizendium is learning the identities and backgrounds of the people with whom I’m collaborating with during the course of developing an article.  Because all of our authors have registered with their real names, and have provided a short biography of themselves, I never have the feeling that I’m working with strangers wearing masks, hiding their identities for reasons unknown. They are real people. Soon you get to know them as colleagues with their particular talents and passions.

I find it difficult to imagine how I could develop a sense of community, of common goals, with a group of anonymous entities. Yes, ‘entities’, machines, say, ghosts of some kind.

Collaborative writing inevitably takes on a social aspect, warming the project, a little family, usually happy, and if not, always uniquely so.  What a lonely cyberworld it would otherwise be.

On April 7, I posted the text of a report I made to the FBI to the EDTECH mailing list, in which I stated that, in my opinion, the Wikimedia Foundation may knowingly have posted “child pornography,” by which I meant “obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children.”  In short, the Wikimedia Commons “Category:Pedophilia” page hosted images with realistic and disturbing drawings of child molestation.  The Register reported on this and it snowballed from there.  Among other venues, it was discussed on Slashdot, where I posted a reply which I put in my personal web space.

I think CZ isn’t an appropriate place to discuss this, so I’ve disabled comments from this post.

The well-known librarian newsletter, Cites and Insights, has mentioned the Citizendium, as it has several times in the past. It had the following interesting comment:

Why do we love monopolies so?
That’s a question that comes to mind when discussing Wikipedia alternatives and in quite a few other areas. I’ve sometimes asked why librarians seem to love monopolies so much, but it’s not just librarians.

So, for example, when Citizendium started up, it faced a huge amount of fairly vicious commentary,
and you could trace much of the viciousness to it not being Wikipedia. Didn’t matter whether it might offer an interesting alternative: it could potentially threaten The Great Source of All Wisdom.

How many of you vary your default search engine so you look somewhere other than Google? How
many of you would seriously consider an alternative general-purpose web search engine?

The article goes on to quote me discussing Knol and Medpedia, and then has a whole separate article called “Catching Up with Citizendium.” (How refreshing to encounter a writer who is fastidious about how to capitalize article titles!) I’ll have to comment on the article later, if I can get some time. It is very long, interesting, idiosyncratic, and detailed — but, I’m afraid, not entirely fair.