Approving History articles, and the need for a new editor

[Denis Cavanagh]

It must get tiresome for Richard to be the only History editor at CZ. Take that into account, despite the great quality of some of the articles he has played a major role in or finished by himself, he cannot approve his own articles. Approved articles, to my knowledge, are what seperates CZ from Wikipedia - Articles that reached the approval of an expert and thus considered 'reliable' for personal information. I think there are at least ten history articles battering about that deserve approval, probably more. Are there any history editors still about, other than Richard? Anyone currently active who might meet the criteria?

[Robert_W_King]

I thought Martin was a history editor? Nevermind he's Economics.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

I can deal with some of the areas in Politics or Sociology that overlap with Richard's interests, but we do need more editors.

[Hayford Peirce]

Well, I just went to the History Editors page at:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Category:History_Editors

And there are apparently 13 of them signed up.  Only a couple of them, however, appear to be at all active.  It's sort of like the Sports Editors situation.  I checked there yesterday and there are, I think, 7 or 8 of them.  None of them are at all active.

Personally, I wonder if there shouldn't be some device (or policy) to remove completely inactive Editors.  I suppose it's possible that some of them will pop up again someday, but in the meantime, after 6 months of inactivity, say, what purpose do they serve?

For instance, there are 3 Visual Arts Editors -- I emailed all three of them a couple of weeks ago asking them to look over an article I (and others) had done for possible approval. One replied, saying he wasn't qualified.  The other two never replied.  And haven't been active since last April, I think. It's a waste of time having them signed up....

[Robert_W_King]

I think part of the problem is that asking someone to look over an article is essentially proofreading and editing; unless someone was being paid to do it, I'm not sure there's enough motivation to want to review articles.

Maybe there should be some kind of work statement associated with the Editor role.  Is the current editor role clearly defined?  Maybe instead of editors we should be looking for Fact-checkers...

[Hayford Peirce]

Well, this is really just a simple matter of definitions. I suppose one should always make one's request 100% clear. For instance, a while ago Steven Ewen asked me to *copyedit* the Butler article. But when I asked the 3 Visual Arts Editors to look over my article, I made it clear that I was asking for advice, comments, and suggestions, BUT that it was basically asking them to either vet it for possible approval or to out-and-out approve it themselves. I certainly wasn't asking them to copyedit it, although that too would have been welcome.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

The "aliveness rate" of our editors seems to be around 15% [give or take a few corpses]. I do not know why people signed up for CZ and then did nothing, and previously I have expressed my interest in understanding this. At this time, we have no mechanism to resuscitate the CZ corpse editors, although one message I sent on the editors mailing list (about a chemistry article) had a mass response of a positive nature. This implies that we need such a mechanism, rather than simply burying the coffins.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

In terms of what editors should do to approve articles, I stated what I do on another thread. Hayford might remember where it is! Basically, it is a cut-down version of what I do for academic refereeing. This is not difficult for editors, but does take some time.

[Robert_W_King]

If we had some kind of attribution system by where an editor could "sign up" to be an editor on an article (maybe through some kind of form *cough*) and it would be maintained, say, on the talk page, perhaps it would be enough to provide an element of culpability.

(edit: just for Martin )

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

cupability? This is to do with drinking or Cupid? 

I think it is more systemic: new editors don't know what they are supposed to do from Day 1, and on Day 2 they forget that they signed up.

[Robert_W_King]

Maybe if as a part of the eduzendium initiative(?) we could target history, english, journalism, library science, and research majors and somehow tie editing into their curriculum?

[Denis Cavanagh]

Some good points brought up here. Do any Colleges partake in Eduzendium?

[Derek Harkness]

I read Larry's posts about google's Knols. The difference, according to Larry, between CZ and the competition is our community of experts who guide the project. When I read that I though, "what community of experts?" The number of experts we need and the number of active experts we have is extremely wide of the mark. We have been going for a year now, I would have thought it reasonable to have received at least 1 editor per workgroup. There are still many workgroups that have no editors, not even inactive editors. If we do not solve the problem of recruiting editors then we will not have this sought after 'community of experts'. We will be just another wikipedia look alike and not anything better.

One problem I can see is that the requirements to be an editor might be putting of people who would actually be eligible to take on the role. Do we spell out clearly enough what qualifications people need to be an editor? Do potential editors think that they are not qualified for the task?

Another problem spot may be, are people realistically able to prove their expertise. Obviously the current band of editors could, but what about all the ones who didn't sign up? Are we loosing editors due to a technical requirement or misunderstanding?

[Robert_W_King]

I think it may be possible that the editor role is not clearly defined; people may not know what is expected of them when they sign up to be editors.

[Brian P Long]

I appreciate people's concern with the current lack of editors, but I think that this is something that will get sorted out with time. As it stands now, the primary need at CZ is for people who will do a lot of writing, and I think the farther up you go in academia, the more hesitant you become to spout off random stuff. Furthermore, almost all of the professors/Ph.D. holders I know are too busy to spend a lot of time and energy writing on something like CZ. There's already a significant burden on them to do as much writing as possible, and editing CZ is not (yet) something you can put on your CV or tell your tenure committee about. Maybe eventually...

Once more of CZ gets written, I think editors will be easier to come by, especially concerning something they've worked on or know about. It's much easier to troubleshoot an article that's already been written than to do the writing yourself; you can just point the writer of the article in the direction of a journal article by so-and-so. The potential for CZ to be an actual scholarly community is immense, I think.

I think it's also important not to underestimate the generational component to all of this. From what I hear, that other wiki is sort of a dirty little secret of academia-- professors read it surreptitiously, students use it (no matter what their professors say), and the big beneficiary is the lay reader. As the internet gets older, and projects like CZ mature, a new generation of students and scholars will have grown up with wikis and more clearly appreciate their potential.

More practically, it might be helpful if there was a differentiation between fact-checkers and editors. It might be useful if there were a group of people who aren't full editors, but who are (at the very least) recognized good copy-editors and proofreaders. It's worth remembering that having a Ph.D. in a given field does not necessarily mean you are able to write clearly. (There's also a difference in tone and audience here, too-- maybe it would be helpful if there could be different CZ articles for different audiences)

What's not clear, of course, is how far along the development curve of this kind of knowledge project CZ is. It's hard to say whether CZ is doing enough, or is too restrictive, or whatever. Time will tell...