My promise: a 24-hour application turnaround
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.
I would love to see Citizendium take the place of Wikipedia as the “first choice” online encyclopedia for most people. I contributed to Wikipedia for a few months but gave up after an endless stream of vandalism and edit wars on articles I spent a lot of time on.
I’m worried to see Citizendium making the same mistake as Wikipedia by putting rel=”nofollow” on external links. You must be aware that many bloggers resent it deeply. There’s an official WordPress plugin to automatically add rel=”nofollow” to all Wikipedia links:
http://wp-plugins.net/plugin/wikipedia-nofollow/#plugin_2087
Not only WordPress, but several other blogging platforms. Citizendium will need a boost from incoming links to gain a high profile in search engines. What if all these plugins are updated to do the same to Citizendium links? If you change your policy later, bloggers might forget to modify or update their plugins. I did a Google search to find out if this has been discussed on the Citizendium site or its forums. Apparently not. Don’t leave it too late.
Some people might get the impression that Citizendium is not confident that it’s system of checks and balances is enough to thwart spammers. It’s enough to put me off applying to become an author. By using rel=”nofollow” on external links it looks like Citizendium wants to suck goodwill but not return it.
Comment by Disaffected Wikipedian — July 23, 2007 @ 8:46 am
I always thought it was a bad idea to put “nofollow” on links, but I understood why: spammers and self-promoters are just too motivated that way.
This is a perfect illustration of why CZ has the stronger model. We have all the advantages in terms of robust, open, bottom-up content development, but we also require real names and have constables who are willing to ban people for breaking the rules. For this reason, we have had virtually no vandalism, apart from the people who joined us during self-registration last Jan-Feb.
So why would we use “nofollow”?
Comment by Larry Sanger — July 24, 2007 @ 1:22 am
Hi Larry,
From your reply it sounds like you haven’t yet noticed that rel=”nofollow” is *already* attached to Citizendium external links. Maybe it’s a default setting in the MediaWiki software. Here’s an example. Select the browser menu option “View—Source”:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Immunology
I worry about it because I’m rooting for Citizendium. See also “bug 5523″ on this page:
http://trac.citizendium.org/browser/REL1_8_2/phase3/HISTORY
It says: “Exceptions to allow disabling rel=’nofollow’ in specially-selected namespaces.”
Comment by Disaffected Wikipedian — July 24, 2007 @ 2:31 am
Well, I just didn’t know. Just put in a high-priority fix request.
Comment by Larry Sanger — July 24, 2007 @ 5:03 am