Should we encourage people to take credit for first drafts?

[Larry Sanger]

Here is an exchange from my "suggestion box."  What do you think?

==Accreditation==

I am, of course, very new here (one day to be precise!)and this has probably been brought up before nevertheless...  I moved over from Wikipedia - which I had found via my 10 year old daughter a couple of months ago - noticed the errors in what she was citing and started wading in by writing articles etc.  I quickly found the problems you are most aware of in having my article edited by almost anybody, referenced facts changed etc.  Nevertheless, I am a big proponent of free access to scientific data having written on the topic in relation to our early hominid fossils here is South Africa(which is a rather contentious area as you might imagine).  I then found you a week ago by fluke while going through a search on wikipedia looking at ways to protect some pages.  After "moving over" here today one thing that strikes me is the sheer amount of linkages and pages that need to be done and the very limited number of editors etc. It would clearly be nice to have more expert amatuers, academics and grad students on board. One way to attract academics and particularly grad students who have a wealth of information of great use here is to have the citizendium accredited as a referencable encyclopedia contribution (it may be already but as I said - I'm new here).  Thus if an academic or graduate student contributed an original article it could be citable as a paper - in my experience, nothing motivates an academic or grad student more than a citation in this publish or perish world.  One way to get around the problem of this being at its core a growing "wiki" is that on the date of submission of a citation the originating author could cite themselves as first author with first date of publication and major contributors (you'd have to figure out what "major" meant here but I don't think that would be too hard) would be listed as subsequent authors (et al's effectively).  You would also have to set a word and quality minimum - possibly via your accreditation thats already in place. I think that you would have a BIG jump in contributions if this were citable and academics could recieve credit. I presume its also in the spirit of the endeavour??  I certainly have about a dozen grad students who would spend that extra bit of time to be either authors or co-authors.  You've probably already thought through all of this anyway but I just thought I'd add my two cents in as a newbie...

[[User:Lee R. Berger|Lee R. Berger]] 07:58, 10 August 2007 (CDT)

This is an idea that we've considered before, but I'm not sure ever in quite this form.  As long as we ''don't'' change CZ's policies of leaving articles unsigned, and as long as we're convinced that this will not make CZ ''less'' collaborative, I think I might be able to get behind this.  I think you're right that this could help us get new people on board.

The way I would proceed with this is ''not'' by allowing people to assert that an article is their article, or signing their name to the article on the talk page, but instead by creating a master list of article originators.  On this page, we would list author names and link not directly to the article but instead to versions of the article in the history that contain the article as it was when started by its originating author.  I think it might help to secure against people claiming ownership and special rights over an article if we ''label'' this role as "first collaborator" or "original co-contributor" or something like that.

--Larry Sanger 08:18, 10 August 2007 (CDT)

[Robert_W_King]

Sounds like a job for the subpage template, perhaps an "Accredation" page.

[Chris Day]

Sounds like a job for the subpage template, perhaps an "Accredation" page.

I noticed on one of our article someone has already done this, except with an /About subpage.  I forget which one now.  Has anyone else seen it?

[Larry Sanger]

Well, my idea is that we studiously eliminate mention of the First Collaborator in the cluster altogether.  The info is deliberately hard to find, because we don't want to encourage people to take credit within the CZ community as originators.  Well, I could change my mind on that, but it makes me very nervous.  It's just too much like signing articles, and signing articles and otherwise enshrining credit in this way does tend to make other people less likely to collaborate.

[Robert_W_King]

Maybe then, a small, relatively unnoticed place where collaborators can just add their name to a "contributor" list, with some kind of link that computationally shows the amount of activity on that article.  Like if the article is 1024 K in size (as determined by the historY), you could find out that they contributed 512 K of it.  This would show a "weight" but does not imply ownership or origination of the content.

[Stephen Ewen]

I think it is essential that CZ allow people credit for writing.  It's easy to do, since mediawiki already has a function for determining who the top four or five contributors are to an article, and it spits out the names at the bottom of the page in small print. 

This is not, and never has been "signed articles"!  It is about giving credit where credit is due to people for whom it is very important, and it is about getting work from thousands of such people that you'd never otherwise get at all.  In my mind, this has always been a no-brainer and rather ridiculous to not implement.

Do this and watch those grad students come!!

[Aleta Curry]

I think it is essential that CZ allow people credit for writing.  ...

By now you all know I'm firmly behind Stephen on this one.  We have actually talked about collaborators' lists before.

However, there is a common thread (no pun intended) that disturbs me, and that is a certain "we're not growing fast enough" fretting.  What, I ask, is so wrong about slow, steady growth?  Is this a race (and you all remember that the tortoise won that one, right?)

If our numbers showed stagnation, or worse yet, rapid decline, yes, I would worry about that.

This project has only been live since March; it's too early for panic and certainly let's not do the "WP had thus-and-so many articles by [date]"

One of our greatest strengths is the sense of community and the fact that we can get to know our administrators, authors and editors before the coming wiki-population explosion.  It also gives us manageable core groups while we're still building and implementing policy.  I intend to enjoy it while I can.

[Larry Sanger]

I think it is essential that CZ allow people credit for writing.  It's easy to do, since mediawiki already has a function for determining who the top four or five contributors are to an article, and it spits out the names at the bottom of the page in small print. 

This is not, and never has been "signed articles"!  It is about giving credit where credit is due to people for whom it is very important, and it is about getting work from thousands of such people that you'd never otherwise get at all.  In my mind, this has always been a no-brainer and rather ridiculous to not implement.

Do this and watch those grad students come!!

That was what we call a "redirect."   

What I suggested was not simply that we give people credit.  As to the idea that we list contributors based on how much they've contributed, yes, we've discussed that before.  I don't think I'm opposed to it in principle, maybe not at all--I just want us to think it through.  I didn't know that Mediawiki has the function in question.  Is it in the main software or is it a plug-in?  How does it work?  That would help focus that discussion.  (Which was where, by the way?)

But I was talking about something different.  I was talking about CZ giving explicit credit, but not on the article or article talk page, to a person who academically needs the credit, for starting a bit meaty draft (however that technical term should be defined).  In other words, we set up a process whereby we acknowledge that so-and-so is the original author of such-and-such an article, so that that person can get credit for it elsewhere.  But I don't want to encourage such people to "take exclusive credit" for the articles they start, and thereby exert special control and claim special rights.  I can easily imagine this situation happening, under the right (wrong) circumstances.

[Stephen Ewen]

Ah, I see, guess I read too quickly. 

I think its an awesome idea.  Plug it into Eduzendium?

It inspires a related idea in me, too, but it's not for the forums yet.

I'll find the author attribution info again and post it on the--let's see, where was it?--original thread on that issue.

[Lee R. Berger]

I was just looking through my CV for examples of how citations like this look - I certainly get the idea of not wanting to "sign" articles as this would be very intimidating for new contributors - but what about following the concept of "contributing editor" - If this were done in a manner on an "editors page" somewhere inside of CZ then the editorial panel could assign weight of contribution (or whoever was in charge of the page).  This would encourage (I think) new contributors to firstly get onto the "contributing editors" list for a particular article to start with - there would have to be, I suppose, some minimum level of contribution so that every edit doesn't make you a contributing editor. Then, as you added material of significance, you could "move up" the rank of editorship.  I could envision a point where an individual who was not the originator of the article became lead author - Would this create a healthy bit of competition to make an article bigger and better?  The main difficulty for a working academic is how to cite this reference - my guess is that you would cite the first time you became an editor, giving the "title page" source as the reference.  If you moved up the log towards lead author I guess you could recite the article with another date (or append your original citation).  If a log were kept of all contributions, if anyone was checking the reference they would type in the url you cited which would take them to the version that has the correct authorship (which would have a note that this is an early version and new edits have been added?).

Additionally, the same principle could follow for subject "areas" e.g. Primatology, Physical anthropology, American history etc. which have many articles under them and the main editors of these categories could be listed as editors of this section - much like multi-authored book editors are? This again might encourage specialists to work on an area of the wiki within their area of expertise and "complete" it to the best of their ability or encourage other specialists to contribute pages. Or am I going to far here?

~~~~

[Jitse Niesen]

Here is an exchange from my "suggestion box."  What do you think?

[...] One way to attract academics and particularly grad students who have a wealth of information of great use here is to have the citizendium accredited as a referencable encyclopedia contribution (it may be already but as I said - I'm new here).  Thus if an academic or graduate student contributed an original article it could be citable as a paper - in my experience, nothing motivates an academic or grad student more than a citation in this publish or perish world. [...]

In the academic world (at least in my part of the academic world), publications that are not peer-reviewed count for very little. I'm sure that many would like the articles that they contribute heavily to attributed to them and it's a good way to motivate people. However, I doubt that it will help you getting ahead in academia. I even think that putting CZ articles on your CV may easily backfire.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

The academic world is in serious crisis with the whole concept and practice of peer review, which is now more or less discredited as a serious way to guarantee quality. It is being foisted on the young generation, replete with all the propaganda needed, but established academics know that the system is a failure. It is diffiuclt to see why putting an encylopedia article on your CV would be a problem, especially as an online free version is open to scrutiny [unlike most published encyclopedias].

I am inclined to suggest that in universities where the senior staff are either too lazy or too overworked to check out the quality of their students' publications, and therefore use proxy measures like "but is it in a peer-reviewed journal that we have pre-approved?", you should question whether you really want to stay in such an unhealthy and non-intellectual environment. My conclusion about CZ? If institutional conformity is their goal, then PhD students and young academics will probably not find much benefit from writing on CZ. I think CZ needs more creative people anyway, so conformists will not be greatly missed.

[Robert_W_King]

I am inclined to suggest that in universities where the senior staff are either too lazy or too overworked to check out the quality of their students' publications, and therefore use proxy measures like "but is it in a peer-reviewed journal that we have pre-approved?", you should question whether you really want to stay in such an unhealthy and non-intellectual environment. My conclusion about CZ? If institutional conformity is their goal, then PhD students and young academics will probably not find much benefit from writing on CZ. I think CZ needs more creative people anyway, so conformists will not be greatly missed.

I think part of the problem stems from the popular opinion that Wikipedia(which a lot of people recognize) does contain questionable content and in that respect has set the tone for many wiki-based projects.  I think if we wanted to get CZ as an acceptable resource in academia, it should be priority to single ourselves out from the herd.  The message needs to be that "Yes, we are different, and do not follow the status quo." 

Given that, I think there definately needs to be some criteria that we can measure ourselves by that is respected in that community, but I think I agree that a "peer-reviewed" process may not be the answer.

[Greg Woodhouse]

Ah, I see, guess I read too quickly. 

I think its an awesome idea.  Plug it into Eduzendium?

Publications are important in the professional world, too, so making this all this part of Eduzendium is too narrow.

[Joe Quick]

What if we credit major contributors on approved articles only?  This has at least two benefits:

1) There is little room for people to feel discouraged by the presence of a name attached to an article.  At least not until it is developed to approved status, after which, the majority of future edits will probably be either (a) fairly minor or (b) the work of an expert (who would, I think, be less likely to be discouraged).

2) This is an indirect benefit, but still an important one. Any article that is listed in someone's CV will necessarily be an approved article.  This greatly increases the value of including a Citizendium article in a CV because people will not be able to include lower quality, unapproved work.  This might actually encourage more grad students, etc. to pitch in and turn out lots of high quality material.

Thoughts?