Citizendium Blog

Logos continue to roll in.  Here are some from CZ editor William Weaver, who apparently thinks a religion whose famous doctrine is “no mind” is an appropriate theme for a compendium of knowledge:

Meanwhile, Paul Hitchmough knocked himself out, perhaps in more ways than one, creating these interesting ideas:

He kindly did up a few “CZ brand”-type logos:

And stole from a previous submission (we’ll give joint credit if we use this):

Note: this may be the last posting possible until the end of the year, as I will be quite busy with family stuff over the next, say, nine days or so.

Here are some nice animated gifs.  Click on them to see the animated versions:

I’ve put the second (looping) one at the bottom of http://www.citizendium.org/

Thanks to Paul Hitchmough of Manchester, England. 

Not to prejudice our choice or anything, but I had an idea for a logo concept.  Since we’ve been referring to the Citizendium as “CZ”, it seems to me that some “brand” (in the old-fashioned sense, like a cattle brand) using “CZ” might be a nice idea.  The Czechs may not love us for this, though.

Here’s an introduction to and discussion of the Citizendium from the Canadian Tyee: “Beyond Wikipedia.”  This article is probably the longest and most thoughtful discussion yet, in “the press,” anyway.

More logo submissions, saved up from the last few weeks.

From David Guilbert, first a few “for fun”:

From David G. again:

Some cleaner versions of previous submissions by Ryan McCue:

More logos from Douglas Tinney:

Several of the submissions we’ve seen so far are good, and quite acceptable.  Thanks to the artists–and bear in mind, more submissions are very welcome.  The deadline is January 2.  Send submissions to admin at citizendium dot org.  For purposes of displaying your submission on this blog, JPG or GIF format preferred.  For purposes of submission, submit in any format you think right.

By the way, a nice animation would have the words ”Citizens’ Compendium” merging (using “Citiz” from the first word and “endium” from the second) to form “Citizendium”.  I’d like to see such an animation, if anyone wants to give it a try.  If it looks at all decent we’ll use it somewhere right away.

I didn’t notice it until just now, but there’s an article online from Information World Review about the Citizendium.  It’s a pretty good one, although I didn’t always sound coherent. 

To the best of my knowledge, I was first described as co-founder of Wikipedia back in September 2001 by The New York Times.  That was also my description in Wikipedia’s own press releases from 2002 until 2004.  With my increasing distance from the project, and as it grew in the public eye, however, some of those associated with the project have found it convenient to downplay and even deny my crucial, formative involvement.  In fact, in the early years of the project, my role was not in dispute at all.  These links have come to light, and they should dispel much of the confusion.

She’s always got interesting things to say, and here’s an essay I hope to comment on sometime soon.

Here are some updated stats.

• I think it’s safe to say that in the last few weeks we have moved up to the range of 300-400 edits per day, during weekdays anyway.  Many of these are categorizing edits, but many of them aren’t.
• 659 articles tagged “CZ Live”
• 1 approved article (”Biology”), 1 up for approval ;-)  (these are test articles for our new approval procedure, outlined just last week)
• 431 registered users with read/write privileges on the wiki (more coming soon as we catch up with backlogs)
• 136 editors

Here are the leading workgroups in order of number of editors:

20 Health Sciences
19 Computers
17 Biology
14 Chemistry
12 Politics
9 History
7 Engineering
7 Library and Information Science
6 Physics
6 Economics
6 Philosophy
6 Media
5 Education
5 Law
5 Literature

Here’s the complete list of workgroups (subject to regular additions and probably, before too long, the oversight of a special workgroup of editors).

I think it would be all right if these groups were to begin approving articles.  There’s been quite a bit of discussion about the new approval process and that’s where you can find the procedure outlined.  I’ll put together a wiki policy page and post the URL sometime soon.

I have to say I’m quite happy at the attention this project has received from the health sciences community.  One health sciences editor has proposed to start a conference focused on some CZ issues, and we have the attention of a very influential, highly-placed person with the British health service.  We’ve got quite a few distinguished researchers on board, too, including two on the executive committee who must be among the top five hardest-working Citizens (Nancy Sculerati and Gareth Leng).  See the health sciences editor list (link above).

The other groups are relatively low in number, I think, primarily because we’ve done very little organized recruitment.  Most people arrived at the project via tech news stories, the blogosphere (geek-heavy), and the Financial Times and Nature articles.  Social sciences, arts, and recreation are especially weak at present, but that’s not surprising because people in those areas don’t tend to be exposed to stories like CZ.  We are going to have to go out and bring them in.  That effort begins next month.  Expect our numbers to double or triple (or more) by February.

The first article approved according to our proposed approval process is the “Biology” article:

http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Biology

The nomination was by Nancy Sculerati, with Gareth Leng, David Tribe, and Chris Day concurring.  My understanding is that Dr. Sculerati did much of the writing, and it is really an excellent article, a wonderful replacement for the relatively unreadable and pedantic Wikipedia article.  As I told the contributors on the talk page:

“This is an amazingly well-written article. It does not attempt to introduce every aspect of biology equally, but by being selective–focusing on the definition and scope of biology, and then surveying its main areas via its history–it does provide exactly what is wanted from an encyclopedia article about biology, namely, a general introduction that conveys a rough general understanding. A survey of the main areas–alphabetically, say–would convey more information about those areas, but would very probably not do nearly as good a job at introducing biology as a whole. So, thanks, folks, for helping prove the viability of the general premise behind CZ.”

Here’s a description of the proposed article approval process.

And here’s a technical report on what I did actually to set up the process.

We’re still quite open to comments on this, by the way.