All of the registered members of our Citizendium community undoubtedly have some idea of why they volunteer their time helping each other develop our encyclopedia.  In addition to any rational idea we might have for volunteering our time, we all must also have a feeling that comes with it, an emotional reason, perhaps one we find difficult to articulate.

If you were to ask Cassie Mogilner, Zoe Chance and Michael Norton, psychological experimental scientists at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the Yale School of Management and the Harvard Business School, respectively, they might tell you this:

“Many people these days feel a sense of “time famine”—never having enough minutes and hours to do everything. We all know that our objective amount of time can’t be increased (there are only 24 hours in a day), but [our] new study suggests that volunteering our limited time—giving it away—may actually increase our sense of unhurried leisure.”

Their thinking is that by giving away time, as in volunteering, you stimulate your feelings of being competent and efficient, accompanying which time seems to stretch out in your mind. You gain time, subjectively, by giving time.

Since we all live in our subjectivity, I’ll go for that kind of “time affluence”.

Get rich in time, join Citizendium, those of you reading this who haven’t already gotten such riches.

See:

PRESS RELEASE: Anna Mikulak
Association for Psychological Science

We enjoy considerable goodwill from many people. But the Citizendium is also misunderstood. This page is devoted to correcting many errors about us.

Let’s debunk some myths [edit]

Myth: we’re experts-only.

Fact: we love experts—we admit it. And we want more of them. But this is still a remarkably open project. You can be an author with no degrees and only a basic facility with English. We agree heartily with the larger “Web 2.0″ crowd on one point: most reasonably well educated people have something to contribute to a project like this. Our youngest registered members are 13, and we have some active high school students who have done good work.

For further reading, see The Editor Role, The Author Role, and our sign-up form.

Myth: we’re a top-down project, with expert editors giving orders to underlings.

Fact: no, we’re very much bottom-up. We’re a wiki—really. If you join, nobody is going to tell you what to do here. You work on the articles you want to work on, when you want to work on them. We are a strongly, “radically,” collaborative project. This means we share ownership and work together; nobody “owns” articles or “gives orders” to do this or that. Of course, we aren’t the first to use this method; it gained currency online with the open source software movement. One of the theorists of that movement was Eric Raymond, who compared communities that create free software collaboratively to “bazaars,” as opposed to the old-fashioned “cathedral” model where everyone has a specific role and function, and orders are given from the top down. (See “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” free to read online.) We, too, are a bazaar. We have merely added “village elders” wandering the bazaar. Their welcome, moderating presence does not convert the project into a cathedral; it only helps make the bazaar a little less anarchical and unreliable.

For further reading, see Group Editing and How to collaborate.

Myth: edits appear on the Citizendium only if they have been specifically approved by editors.

Fact: editors do not approve edits before they appear on the website. Once you’re signed up, you can immediately change any article (or, for approved articles, any article draft—example). You can. You really, really can. Editors are not standing over your shoulder. Nor do they want to do so. They have their own projects here. Another author is as likely to critique and edit your work as an editor. It’s like we said. This is a wiki—a real, robust, bottom-up wiki.

For further reading, see The Editor Role. There’s nothing there about approving individual edits!

Myth: we’re Serious. We accept only your most careful, painstaking work. Writing here is like writing a term paper—no fun. We take ourselves Very Seriously.

Fact: this myth is particularly damaging to new recruits, especially to younger people who aren’t sure of themselves. You’re welcome here. You really are. This is a work in progress, and we have fun! Yes, we have a lot of overeducated people here, who are regularly writing really wonderful prose as if it costs them no effort. But we also have no problem whatsoever with you making a rough start on any topic, as long as somebody else will be able to pick up where you left off. We are permanently under construction. You do not have to be painfully careful, as if you might break something and people will start screaming at you, or will freeze you out socially, if you do. We’re much more relaxed than that. We want everybody to be bold, not so careful that you never make any mistakes. If you’re not making any mistakes, you’re not participating hard enough. And you don’t have to write a whole term paper to start an article, though we have a special initiative that encourages educators to assign Citizendium articles instead of term papers. It’s OK with us if you start a relatively short article, just a paragraph or two (we call these “stubs”).

For further reading, see Be Bold, Under Construction, and Stubs.

Myth: since real names are required, nobody will participate. Maybe nobody should—participant privacy will be violated, as our bios will be accessible from Google!

Fact: the fact that we have 200+ participants every month makes it obviously false that nobody will participate in a project in which real names are required. We admit that we might get more participants if pseudonyms were widely permitted. (Note: we do permit pseudonyms for certain special reasons, e.g., political dissidents in repressive countries. We have given out ~10 pseudonyms.) As to privacy, biographies are not indexed by Google (or any other search engine that respects the “noindex” tag).

We feel that the advantages of real names outweigh the small sacrifice of allowing our work-in-progress to be viewed publicly. On the one hand, using real names makes people behave themselves more civilly; on the other hand, it makes our articles more credible, since readers know that there are people willing to put their names behind them. Besides, you’re far more likely to impress your friends and employers by posting publicly here than on, say, FaceBook, where many people do use their real names!

For further reading, see CZ:Statistics and Sanger’s “Defense of Modest Real Name Requirements.”

Myth: since this is an academic project, we are not open to articles about pop culture.

Fact: we are open to pop culture. Don’t believe us? See Dazed and Confused (Led Zeppelin song) and Metal Gear Solid. We are better described as a hybrid academic/public project. Think of it like this: we reject both the idea that knowledge belongs exclusively in the academy, and the idea that, after Wikipedia, the academy has no special role to play in explaining what we know. We think the most productive and reliable system involves the marriage of expertise with wide-ranging public interests and knowledge. So, as long as we can expect to maintain a full set of articles of a certain category, then go to town! If snobs try to shut you down, have them talk to the Editor-in-Chief, who is a confirmed “inclusionist”!

For further reading, see Maintainability or look at Category:Games Workgroup, Category:Hobbies Workgroup, and Category:Media Workgroup.

Myth: since this is an academic project, our articles will have an academic bias.

Fact: our neutrality policy specifically requires that our articles feature the full range of opinion on a subject, including opinion that is outside the mainstream of expert opinion. The important thing is that all opinion be properly labelled and attributed. Besides, as we said, this is a hybrid expert-public project, not just an academic project; the input of the general public is a necessary check on the particular biases that sometimes plague particular disciplines. So far, this problem has not been much in evidence here.

For further reading, see Neutrality Policy.

Myth: the Citizendium is just Nupedia all over again. Or: it’s not different enough from Wikipedia.

Fact: this is a really egregious error made by those familiar enough with the history of Wikipedia and Nupedia to be “a little dangerous,” but not familiar enough to be accurate. Nupedia wasn’t collaborative; the Citizendium is. Nupedia was top-down in many respects (e.g., articles were assigned); we are bottom-up. (Nupedia itself is widely misunderstood, but that’s another matter.) Since Nupedia was allowed to wither and die, the comparison to Nupedia is used to suggest subtly that the Citizendium, too, will wither and die. This is now obviously false, since CZ has produced many thousands of article drafts, where Nupedia produced only a few hundred in the same amount of time, and because CZ has accelerated its growth significantly and will probably continue to do so.

As to Wikipedia, our main differences are that we use real names, make a special role for experts in the system, and require contributors to digitally sign a “social contract.” These differences really make a difference. We have no vandalism. We have very few bad articles, and many of our articles, even our “developing” articles, are excellent, despite our project’s toddlerhood; after five years, we will probably have left Wikipedia entirely in the dust, in terms of quality. We really are a different sort of community, one that takes a commitment to professional behavior seriously. We have our disputes—what vibrant community could be without them?—but they are very rarely the sort of bizarre, Kafkaesque affairs that are so common on Wikipedia.

For further reading, see We aren’t Wikipedia, Sanger’s Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir, and “Who’s more command-and-control, Wikipedia or CZ?” (a blog post).

Myth: there is no point to the Citizendium, because Wikipedia exists.

Fact: Wikipedia has uneven quality, and is extremely off-putting to most experts—indeed, to most people, period—who might otherwise contribute to it. We believe that, in the end, a lot more people will be comfortable with and attracted to the open, yet sensible CZ model. Some of us expect a tipping point to come in the next year or two, in which CZ will be flooded with more and more people who are now firmly persuaded that we are a force to contend with. There is no danger whatsoever of our giving up. Your work here will be well used as part of a resource with tens of thousands, and then probably hundreds of thousands, of articles.

Besides, we’re sure you’ll agree that the world can use more than one “go to” source for free reference information. We are the best hope for a real alternative!

For further reading, see Why Citizendium? and Workgroup Weeks.

Myth: most Citizendium articles are just copied from Wikipedia.

Fact: wrong. While we do allow people to copy Wikipedia articles here, we keep careful track of them, and by far most of our articles are completely original. Besides, many if not most of the articles that are sourced from Wikipedia are not counted in our CZ Live article count (currently 7,000). We strongly encourage people who copy their articles from Wikipedia to work on them here; we generally prefer that people start over, in order to give the public “added value.” If someone copies a Wikipedia article here without changing it, we won’t take credit for it, and we are more than willing to let others start over from scratch on the topic.

For further reading, see How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles and Introduction to CZ for Wikipedians.

Myth: our experts are called “constables.”

Fact: no, our experts are called “editors.” Constables are community moderators, who are mainly tasked with letting people into the system, and (only occasionally) enforcing our Professionalism policy (which says, basically, to be polite). Our constables are, as it turns out, some of the kindest and most welcome people here.

For further reading, see CZ:Constabulary.

Some other interesting facts you might not have known about us [edit]

Here are some more assorted facts that are not common knowledge, but which might put us in a new and exciting light for you:

• Despite being an active and open wiki, we have no vandalism, and little if any “trolling.” What other wiki can say that?
• Our well-developed articles feature subpages (here’s a list), which cover many other kinds of reference information you might want. An encyclopedia article, plus supporting reference material, is called a “cluster.”
• CZ articles are intended to be coherent narratives, not random grab-bags of facts.
• The person who led Wikipedia in its seminal first year, and designed many of its fundamental policies, is also leading CZ. Suffice it to say that he learns from his mistakes.
• It is easy to get a quick start. In our sign-up procedure, we don’t actually ask that much information about you. A human being will review your account request, and let you into the system typically within 24 hours, but often within just a few hours. Once you’ve signed up, it is easy to start a new article.
• We have a neutrality policy, which we have a better chance of living up to than the Other Place.
• Our Citizens are bound by a social contract. It’s not called “the Citizens’ Compendium” for nothing!
• Editorial policy decisions are settled by our Editorial Council, not by some bogus, and impossible, “consensus.”
• Larry Sanger has declared, when he first announced the Citizendium in September 2006, that he would leave his position as editor-in-chief within two to three years, in order to set a positive precedent. He is not “dictator for life.”
• We are not a Silicon Valley for-profit business. We are a non-profit, civic project that uses CC-by-sa as the license for our content, and our Citizens are essentially co-owners of the project.

Why all the errors about CZ? [edit]

So, why have there been so many errors passed around about CZ? And why are so many of our interesting innovations largely unknown? There are probably two reasons.

First, this is a genuinely innovative project. Nothing quite like it has ever existed before. The expert-public hybrid model and several other innovations are quite simply new. But most people are not able to take such novel things on board easily, because they think in terms of prototypes or examples. Therefore, to them, we are like a traditional academic project, like Nupedia, or like Wikipedia. In short, most people naturally think in terms of stereotypes, and so we have been stereotyped. No doubt that’s been the fate of most real innovators. This means only that we need to educate people–which this page attempts to do.

Second, a lot of Web 2.0 advocates, whose online temples are websites like Wikipedia and YouTube, are philosophically opposed to our basic policies. They tend to be radical egalitarians and closet anarchists. Therefore, they hate the idea that we ask people to take responsibility for their contributions and that we make a special role for experts. So it’s easy for our opponents to create straw men which they proceed to knock down. Here, the proper strategy is to answer criticisms quickly and show them to be, indeed, attacks on straw men.

This is from http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Myths_and_Facts

From our new “Quick Start” page

Just arrived?

Want to get started, but don’t know how?

Well, don’t panic!^[1]

If you’re new to Citizendium, we’d love you to dive “write” in, whether you’re an author or an editor. We don’t want you to be discouraged, but you may imagine we have extremely high standards. Certainly we aim for high quality, but we also want participation to be easy and as fun as possible. We know that Rome wasn’t built in a day.

What is the first thing you should do after you join? While you can do whatever you like (it’s a wiki!), we recommend two things:

1. Start an article. How? Pick a topic. Then think of a good title for an encyclopedia article about that topic. Then go to Start Article, handily linked on your left–and do it the Easy Way™! Just write a paragraph or two introducing the topic neutrally, beginning with a definition of the concept, or a description of what a thing is notable for. We don’t mind very short articles, as long as they have a couple of sentences. They’ll be expanded later, trust us. Then…
2. Edit someone else’s article. How? Find an article on a topic you are interested in or know a lot about. You can use the search box, or navigate alphabetically, or enter via “top articles” or workgroups. When you’ve found an article you want to edit, press the “edit” tab. Add a few sentences. It’s OK. They just have to be a reasonably helpful addition. They don’t have to be absolutely brilliant. Brilliance happens later.

Are you still worried? Seriously, there is no need for that. Let’s cover some main worries.

(more…)

For immediate release

University Assignments Going Cyber

Citizendium Announces “Eduzendium” Initiative

January 24, 2008 – In a striking departure from traditional methods of teaching, a new way for students to gain course credits is emerging. As with so much else this decade, it is all down to the Internet.

Traditional teaching saw students laboring to produce essays that to them felt onerous and oftentimes pointless. Once read by the lecturer their writing was generally consigned to the dustbin.

For some students, that situation is now radically changing.

In a never-before-seen new initiative, the online reference encyclopedia project Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org), in collaboration with expert teachers and lecturers, has launched Eduzendium. The Eduzendium project allows students to write their assignments online on the Citizendium on a given topic allocated by their teacher.

Read the whole thing.

It seems that everyone is talking about Google’s new Knol project — the Citizendium has got a tremendous amount of press as a result.  So I wanted to add another note on the topic.

At the Citizendium we are motivated by one thing only: to become the best knowledge base that Earth has ever seen.  We believe we have, over the long term, a better chance at this than any other project.

If Knol were to reveal a genuine expert contributor that was not already an expert editor on CZ whom CZ would approve as an editor, it would be my pleasure to welcome that person to become part of our new knowledge society.

What our expert editors discover is that the expert-guided collaborative environment on the Citizendium is unprecedented, remarkably productive, and really without parallel.

Delivering one’s expert knowledge with the input from a general knowledge community helps all our editors to assess — and improve — the ways in which their knowledge is stored and communicated.

Only the Citizendium does that.

We are by no means complacent, and we intend fully to watch Google’s new Knol project.  We will utilize constructively any contributor that will genuinely add to the world’s knowledge store by inviting them to join us a CZ contributor.

Creating a new knowledge society is what the Citizendium is doing and every genuine expert should be an editor on CZ.  Moreover, everyone who wants to work as part of an open, public project shoulder-to-shoulder with such experts should join us as well.

UPDATE (evening): 500 edits in six hours, well over 50 articles today (it might be more like 75), and I’ve received dozens and dozens of mails from people who said, “Sorry, I’ll start contributing soon.”  It’s really great to have confirmation of so much deep support for what we’re doing here!

A huge number of new people, or newly-active people, arrived following my mailing to thousands of people with Citizendium accounts.  Apparently, they just needed a reminder.  (This isn’t a sort of reminder I’ll send regularly, though, trust me.)  Right now, there are more unfamiliar names than familiar ones on recent changes – that’s just how I like it.

Actually, I separated accounts into five categories:

1. People with bios who had made an edit
2. People with bios who hadn’t made an edit
3. People with well-formed usernames and blank userpages who had made an edit (there were some)
4. People with well-formed usernames and blank userpages, who hadn’t made any edits
5. People with poorly-formed usernames

(Actually, I’m about to send out #5 — with no small amount of nervousness.  )

Here is the letter I sent to #1:

(more…)

This is an early Thanksgiving.  It occurs to me that I have not thanked people enough, especially the hardest-working people.  I thank people all the time, but it is usually for over-and-above stuff, and when people first show up.  So, at the risk of embarrassing them, I’m going to thank a whole bunch of people.  I hope you don’t mind, folks.

But I should add something, because I don’t want this sort of attention to go to anybody’s head, either — I mean, frankly, I think it’s a little ridiculous that praise from me would go to anybody’s head.  Most people aren’t that way and they realize that I’m just this guy, so big deal.  But, you see, I’m worried and I speak from experience.  In listing these people and their useful work, I do not mean, in any way shape or form, to be establishing something like a project aristocracy.  I can imagine that some people might be puffed up by this sort of attention, and think that such recognition gives them rights in the project that others do not have.  That would be very wrongheaded.  In fact, not to malign them unjustly I hope, but certain Wikipedians seem to carry about their titles and achievements and “barnstars” and whatnot as so many bludgeons that they can use to get their way.  Damn me if that ever happens on the Citizendium.  I have sometimes accused Wikipedia of being egalitarian in a bad, utopian way, but in this regard I would like CZ to be *more* egalitarian than WP.  I would like us to settle content disputes by kindly, rational compromise first, by reference to expert knowledge second, and by fair, open, law-governed dispute resolution processes last — but NEVER by a presumption that “I’ve been here
longer, I’m a Big Shot, so you gotta listen to me and my friends, or else!” We should always be a freer, more open, and indeed more equal community than that cliquish, competitive attitude implies.

And if you would never dream of being that way — well, clearly, I’m not talking about *you*.

That said in preface, here’s the rogue’s gallery from the Citizendium’s first year, in alphabetical order, and what I honor them for.  And I’m very sorry if I left anyone out, or if I failed to mention some shining achievement of yours — I’m just going based on what I remember and what I had personal experience with, and the project is already bigger than I can always personally track.  But yes, I do actually know all these people and am at least somewhat acquainted with their work for the project!  I am sure I must have left out some hard-working people, some may have slipped through the cracks, and I’m sorry that I did…

Click through to the list.

UPDATE (7/23): caught up. 

UPDATE (7/21): we’re in the process of catching up, adding dozens of new accounts and recognizing many new editors.  We should also be installing a new automatic account approval system, written by programmer and student Aaron Schulz, as soon as early next week.

I am hereby pledging personally and publicly that, beginning now, anyone who applies to become a CZ author or editor will receive a reply within 24 hours. I will do this personally if we cannot find (or motivate!) enough constables and editorial personnel administrators to do it.

If you appreciate this sentiment and want to pitch in, you might become a constable or editorial personnel administrator. Constables approve author applications; EPAs approve author applications.  Constables should have a bachelor’s degree (or equivalent training) and be at least 25 years old. Editorial personnel administrators must be CZ editors.

Please e-mail me personnally at sanger /at\ citizendium.org if you are interested.

Let’s take full advantage of the ongoing and very encouraging interest in CZ, by getting people on board and motivated to work as soon as possible.

What follows is a mail I posted to the Citizendium Editorial Council, in hopes of kicking off a discussion of parliamentary procedure — something essential to the fair operation of a genuinely democratic body.  Does anyone know of precedents in which wikis, mailing lists, and/or Web forums were used to replicate something like Robert’s Rules of Order?

More generally, does anyone have any comments about this?  Please give us your thoughts — either on the Forum, if you’re a Citizen, or else here, if not.

(more…)

Our launch, which happened about a month ago, was a tremendous success. It generated well over 200 mentions of CZ in the press (by the Google News count), but more importantly, we ballooned from 820 authors just prior to launch to 1504 as I write this – almost doubling our numbers. For this we have our wonderful constables, such as Robert Tito, David Tribe, and Sarah Tuttle, to thank. Our editor pool has grown from 180 to 228 (and, as usual I’m afraid, a long backlog waiting to get in). The number of “CZ Live” articles has grown from 1100 to 1550 — a respectable rate of about 15 articles per day, and certainly a higher rate than we had a few months ago. Actually, the number of articles we’ve created is higher than that, because while doing the Big Cleanup, we have removed many “CZ Live” tags from articles that were mistagged.

Speaking of that, the Big Cleanup continues apace. Whereas we had checklisted 721 articles on April 4, we now have 1400.  That’s well over half of all the article pages on the wiki. With 23%, or 327, of these articles “Advanced” (either Approved or Developed), and another 32%, or 442, “Developing,” well over half of the articles in our database are beyond stub stage and have been significantly changed, if they were taken from Wikipedia (and many haven’t been).  More detail, albeit a week old, can be found in this very useful stats post from mathematician Aleksander Stos.

I can assure you that, after only five months, that’s excellent work. After five months, the average level of quality of articles on Wikipedia was far below this. We’re even doing respectably compared to where Wikipedia was at this time in terms of sheer numbers of articles — despite our first four months being a private pilot project, requiring sign-up, and requiring the use of real names. Also, I suspect we have more sheer content than Wikipedia did at the time, but actually confirming this suspicion would take a lot of work.

We want to cut the response time to editor applications. So we are getting more Editorial Personnel Administrators started, including Richard Jensen, a retired history professor who has done a lot of work on the wiki lately (I recommend the Abraham Lincoln article he started); Gareth Leng, U. of Edinburgh physiologist; Nancy Sculerati, NYU medical school professor; and Anthony Sebastian, UCSF medical school professor. That’s in addition to Bernard Haisch, astrophysicist, and me. This is currently very science-heavy, I know…something we’ll remedy as we go along.

Yesterday, we finally started the Editorial Council with 39 members. On the mailing list, which is members-only but which has open archives, we’ve just been introducing ourselves; we’ll actually start business next week.

After a post calling for applications from people to fill self-designed leadership positions, we’ve had a number of submissions, most of which are still under review. Nancy Sculerati will be joining us in an additional editorial role, such as article approval director, but the details have yet to be settled. Sorin Matei, Purdue U. Communications Dept. professor, has proposed that he lead “Eduzendium,” a project that would invite student groups, under the guidance of professors, to contribute to us for academic credit. This one is low-hanging fruit so it’s likely we’ll take him up on his offer. Sorin has also proposed some more technical projects, including one that involves geocoding wiki data. There are others people and proposals, as well, but the Executive Committee, like myself, has been extremely busy. We’ll get replies out sooner or later.

Another sort of project: there is an entrepreneur who is very interested in supporting the work of CZ tech lead, Jason Potkanski, and I on a partnered Citizendium project that would make a significant new enhancement to MediaWiki — and which would use Citizendium as the test bed for this enhancement. Any such enhancements, of course, will be open to community discussion; the great thing is that basically he wants us to give him the software requirements. This is a “classic win-win,” since Jason and I need the support, CZ will be greatly improved by this software (it’s a feature I’ve wanted for a long time), and the entrepreneur wants to market the servicing of the (free/GPL) software. Details anon, pending a signed agreement.

The Executive Committee and other governing bodies are now named on a new Personnel page.  There you will notice three new additions: Stephen Ewen, one of our many hard-working constables, has agreed to act as Assistant to the Chief Constable, relieving some of Ruth Ifcher’s workload; Kelly Patterson has joined us as Fundraising Assistant; and Louise Valmoria has been busy setting up mailing lists for individual workgroups.

Speaking of mailing lists, Louise has created many lists and is putting finishing touches on them. I believe we can expect in the next week or two the announcement of a few dozen new mailing lists, focused on announcing to editors and authors new developments and policy questions that need deciding, and directing them to specific wiki pages and forum boards for further action & interaction.

I think and hope that this will prove instrumental in bringing editors and editors in particular workgroups together and focused on getting articles approved and, we hope, recruitment. The existence of the Editorial Council may help here, too. One question we will be addressing is how to improve the methods and categories of approved articles. One proposal being discussed on the forums would create a “Proof” page for copyediting. Another proposal would have us simply link to approved versions in page histories and forego a “Draft” page altogether. Another would have us designate a stricter category of “Certified” articles, which can be approved only by people with relatively narrowly-focused expertise on the topic of the articles, and open up the category of “Approved” articles in various ways (e.g., to a long-anticipated category of “assistant editors” or “specialist editors” that would give some approval authority to graduate students). Yet another proposal would have us make more prominent use of the category of Developed articles (now linked from the front page).

These are, however, just proposals at this stage. It’s pretty likely that we’ll make some such changes. As I’ve said, I’m committed to our finally adopting an approval process that allows and inspires people to approve large numbers of articles. Consider our current stock of 12 very fine approved articles evidence merely of our first baby steps in working out what the process should be. I’m going to see to it that the pace picks up.

Speaking of approved articles, we have finally approved our first Computers article, about the Linux mascot Tux. Congratulations to all involved, and especially to the 18-year-old Josh Williams who did a lot of the authoring, and the three Computers editors who stepped up to the plate. Hope you fellows can approve a bunch more now!

One Citizen has been in communication with the subject of a biography, Gilad Atzmon, which inspired us to create a new namespace, TI: (for “topic informant“). We’re going to use this namespace to place (with permission!) communications, interviews, and relevant essays from persons who can act as informants (i.e., interviewees) about topics. It seems to me the “Tux” writers also had an e-mail exchange…that would be the namespace to put it.

We have finally allowed everyone permission, once again, to move pages & their histories, a function previously restricted to constables, simply because vandals were abusing it. Now that there aren’t any vandals left (although we did have a visit a few weeks ago from a vandal who had made an account during the self-registration period), there’s no reason not to let everyone move pages themselves. Note that we haven’t even protected the main page of the wiki.

I finished an essay for online journal Edge called “Who Says We Know: On the New Politics of Knowledge.”

I’m probably forgetting some mentionables…but anyway, that’s long enough. As you can see, we’re making excellent progress, and you can expect even more in the coming months.