Article drive strategy!

[Joe Quick]

I'm thinking having more basic articles will be more effective at helping to attract people.  I mean, it's hard for some people to take us seriously if we have an article about adipocytes (no offense to Gareth and Anthony, I hope), but none about--wait for it--cells!!!

Probably true but I think this is a very short term benefit.  I think we'll find that if we credit original authors only, we'll end up with a lot of pretty good material but not very much in the way of really high quality articles that we can show off as a way of saying, "Hey, we're striving for something better here."

And I disagree that author credits other than on the main article page will dissuade newcomers to the article from contributing.  It takes actual effort to go and check the authorship of an article on the metadata page or especially if it is stored somewhere else entirely.  The sorts of edits that we would be likely to miss out on if an article were credited to real people are not going to be major revisions but minor adjustments.  Noone will take the effort to go look up the author and become discouraged if they simply want to fix up an unwieldy grammatical construction.  They might look up the authors if they find a glaring error, but in that case, they've already involved themselves and are unlikely to slink quietly away upon learning that not only did author A start the article but author B also contributed.  In the unlikely case that someone would be put off of editing an article, author A would be enough to do the trick - authors B and C aren't going to make it anymore intimidating and they might actually make it less intimidating becasue it is clear that others are welcome to jump in.

So can we make a compromise?  Let's credit all major contributors but do it on a page that is disconnected from the article cluster so that it requires that one actually seek out the information.

[Lee R. Berger]

Reading these many replies I think synthesized in my mind what I was trying to get at by suggesting authors - I get all of the points - pro and con - that have been brought up and I am certainly not familiar enough with the "wiki" collaborative experience to weigh in on that, but I am experienced with the general collaborative experience and feel I do know how that works.

What has become clear to me is that what I am trying to encourage is getting academics and post-graduate students and experts involved.  It is my opinion, that in order to do this on any sort of scale we will need to give credit to work done in some way.  Such individuals must account for their time and what they are doing and thus that is what I think is driving my urge to push for author credits.  If we had some sort of credit system on authorship, then any author could point out to other academics (or heads of departments or promotion committees) that what they have been doing on this online encyclopedia is significant and serious work and is acknowledged by their peers e.g. a contribution to "greater knowledge" if you will. The fact that we are using what is very close to a peer review process for the approved articles means that one could even get away with arguing that these contributions are "refereed encyclopedia articles".  Joe has a good point about putting these credits on a far away page (which I think Larry initially suggested) - it would take work to find it and thus not exclude minor editors and authors who weigh in at a later date - What I am looking for is a way to "reference" work done here. If a page was created that went something like the following (I'll use "Primate" again as the model)


==Primate is an Approved article on Citizendium, the online encyclopedia==

(Article originated in 2007 by Lee R. Berger)

==Primate==

Editors:  Matt Innis and Larry Sanger (these are the approving editors)

Major Authors (these are ranked, significant contributors)

Lee R. Berger
Kim van Der Linde
Stephen Ewen
Joe Quick

Contributing authors (anyone who has made a change)

Larry Sanger
Jane Doe
John Deere
Bob Marley
George Bush
Hillary Clinton

This would then be citable as:

Berger, L.R., Van der Linde, K., Ewen, S. and Quick, J. (2007) Primate. In: Citizendium online encyclopedia (Ed. Innis, M.  and Sanger, L.).  http://en.citizendium.org.

And I would propose it would be a dynamic process (in 2009 it might read) Van der Linde, K., Berger, L.R., Ewen, S. and Quick, J. (2009) Primate. In: Citizendium online encyclopedia (Ed. Innis, M.  and Sanger, L.).  http://en.citizendium.org.

As an added thought and to answer in part Larry's question - one fundamental difference between CZ and Wikipedia is that we are asking - by and large - people to contribute who write for a living - professionals, students and experts - and this alone justifies some level of acknowledgement - an argument against just first authors being acknowledged is that I can write about 10 non-stub articles a day, but these are not of the quality of an approved article - they may very well be well written and generally content correct, but if I understand our goals correctly, we don't want users  to go to these on CZ, we want them to refer to "approved" articles - and to get a developing article to there, we need strong collaboration from other experts and writers and editors - all of whom need some reason to take the time to take a developing article, which is pretty good and thus suddenly is less of a priority because it is "there", and make it damn good.

Thats all.

[Nereo Preto]

I suppose a real problem here is that we could have people filling unbelievably bad articles just to get the points. And if some of these articles are those people search, the bad quality of those articles will speech against Citizendium.

Now, if I got it correctly, a few articles per workgroup take most of the points. What if the editors of the workgroups set a minimal standard of contents for those articles, so that to get 5-10 points, one must at least fill all the necessary content?
E.g., if the article is "Earth", and assuming we are only interested in the Earth Sciences stuff, than, in order to get the 5-10 points, the first draft must include these chapters:

- Earth as a planet (including parameters as diameter, weight, density, chemical composition, orbital parameters...)
- Vertical subdivisions of the Earth (nucleus, mantle, crust, atmosphere...)
- Plate tectonics
- The surface of the Earth (Oceans and Continents, description with links)
- A picture of the Earth
- At least 5 relevant references.

This list could be placed in the Workgroup home page, or main articles may be open, as stubs, by editors, and filled only with titles of the required chapters. Or the required material could be posted in the talk page.

I suppose this is a remote possibility, but I fear we could have a "Earth" article explaining why the Earth is flat and how Columbus fallen from its edge before reaching China ( ), or -even worse- a long Earth article speaking about something else (e.g., gardening, extreme sex experiences...).

[Kim van der Linde]

Personally, I really do not give a shit about being cited or anything of that matter.

[Joe Quick]

Personally, I really do not give a shit about being cited or anything of that matter.

Actually, I don't either.  But there are a lot of people who do and it simply does not make sense to me to credit the first author and not credit subsequent contributions (major ones at least) from others.

[Nereo Preto]

I also do not give a shit being cited, in a wiki at least. Are there REALLY those people wishing to be cited? Is the problem REALLY there? Just wonder.

[Joe Quick]

I also do not give a shit being cited, in a wiki at least. Are there REALLY those people wishing to be cited? Is the problem REALLY there? Just wonder.

Yes.  They're certainly out there.  I don't recall where the discussion took place, but I remember that Stephen Ewen made some very good points about graduate students and people with Master's degrees who would be at least partially drawn to the project as a way to fill out their CVs.  Lee Berger has also made comments to the effect that he and his students (in South Africa, I think) can receive credit and even funding for contributions to this type of project.  I'll leave it to them to fill in the arguments.

[Aleta Curry]

Not going through all the arguments again.  Others may feel free to, naturally, but there are at least two other substantive--even exhaustive--threads about this.

If some of you don't give a tinker's toss, what's the problem?  Devote your energy to something you *do* care about....

[Derek Harkness]

With regards to giving credit where it's due. Why does the approval template say:

Bacteriophage
"Article approved by an editor (see the talk page) of the Biology Workgroup."

Why don't we change this to read:

Bacteriophage
"Article approved by David Tribe who is an Editor of the Biology Workgroup. (See the talk page.)"

[Larry Sanger]

That's an exercise left to the reader.  You don't really want me to bloviate on that topic, do you?   

[Lee R. Berger]

Ok - some additional reasons for at least the ability to cite a CZ article which requires some listing of authors somewhere - more citations of CZ mean greater widespread awareness - greater widespread awareness - more potential authors and editors checking in - more potential authors and editors - more chance of them pitching in.  I would like to emphasize something else (I get the point lots of you don't care) - If this encyclopedia is not citable (by academics and students) then it falls out of the realm of major reference works and that would be a shame given our goals. Furthermore, one fundamental point which does not seem to be getting through is that we are trying to attract a different calibre of author and editor than say wikipedia - it is highly unlikely 15 year olds will be editing here - even very smart ones - the people we are trying to attract are a relatively small group among the greater internet masses and I really do believe that without incentivizing them then they will go and work on different encyclopedias where they can demonstrate their contributions to "greater knowledge" to their committees, colleagues etc.  Sounds like egocentric, credit hogs?  Well, publish or perish is a reality and we are attempting to at least garner a few moments of the attention of individuals who live in that world.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

I think I mostly agree on Lee's last posting. Although there are some CZ authors who don't care about being cited, there is a sizeable number who do. It is also true that scientific articles are not anonymous, even when they are authored by 20 people! I think we need to follow up on some of the ideas about attribution which were discussed earlier [which thread I dont recall]. This really is something for the Editorial Council to get its teeth into.

[Larry Sanger]

Lee, I'm not sure why you assume that citability requires an author list?  It is possible to cite texts that lack bylines, right?

I do want to thank you and everyone here for inspiring http://www.whatsyourarticle.org/ .  Well, we still might not do that--I want to know what you all think--but if it works out, definitely you're responsible for driving in this direction.  It's not precisely what you were asking for, but it does give you at least some of what you want.

[Lee R. Berger]

hi Larry,

I do like your new concept on first glance, but let me mull over it for a few days to get my thoughts in order. I believe the "citability" of CZ is (are) (do I sound like miss South Carolina??)  a different thing.  I do not know of any major work that is not citable by author - If I contribute to Brittanica for example, I will appear, in the "contributors page" as a "contributor". A single article, not part of the core of CZ, in my opinion, doesn't buy it.  I am specifically referring to  the ability to cite "approved" cz articles as contributions to science.  As any Tom, Dick or Harry could, if they bothered,look up who had contributed by clicking on "History" what I am lobbying for (I first wrote "asking") is that these contributions be amalgamted somewhere so that an independent auditor (read referee or committee) could check the veracity of the claim. That's all, that's all the authorship notice on a refereed publication is - basically. All I am suggesting is that if we did this I'd bet (and I am betting a lot of time on this) that a lot of authors/editors  would come on board if this was widely known.

By the way - people are getting way too serious here - I did in fact quote George Bush and Hillary Clinton as co-authors on Primates example and all I got was "I don't give a s**t who is credited as an author?"  Come on - they are both experts on this specific topic!

[Aleta Curry]

Larry--I'm going to support What's My Article--haven't gotten to read the other one yet--but, no, it's not going to fix the underlying problems here.  It's actually not even close.  Completely different matter, and if I had to make a choice I'd ditch What's My Article for Credit Where it's Due in a NYC minute.

Lee--you leave poor old Dubya alone!  I actually feel sorry for the fellow after this Mandela blunder--that's just so unfortunate it's pathetic.


Y'know, I think you've hit the nail on the head, Lee:  no one wants to put his hand up as an egocentric credit hog in the midst of a whole bunch of noble, altruistic PhDs.
But that doesn't mean they're not thinking it!!
(Who's a little credit hog, then?  I am, I am!  Me! Me!)