Personal statement

[Nick Gardner]

 I have decided to stop writing new material for Citizendium and await convincing evidence that what I have written is being read. Until then, I will react to initiatives taken by others but take no initiatives myself.
Nick Gardner

[tkjazzer]

Here are some of the articles that nick created. 

Can someone go through and copy these to make them hyperlinks to the articles so they get more views?

    * economics
    * gross domestic product(approved)
    * microeconomics (approved)
    * macroeconomics
    * comparative advantage
    * competition
    * supply and demand (incomplete)
    * economic efficiency
    * elasticity
    * antitrust
    * competition policy (approved)
    * EU competition policy
    * history of economic thought
    * politics (incomplete)
    * political party (incomplete - abandoned)
    * price index
    * terms of trade
    * international economics
    * financial economics
    * welfare economics

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

Well, I feel a bit guilty here. At least, today I made some small changes to International Economics and nominated it for Approval.

[Joe Quick]

I, at least, have been paying attention to your articles.  And it looks like others in the community have too.  I don't think anyone else except maybe Richard Jensen has been a key player in creating so many approved articles!

As for the general public, I can't really say but I expect there is a lot more traffic than many of us realize.  Larry has cited the page hits for the site in several places (none of which I can find at the moment) as being really quite a bit higher than one might imagine by browsing our articles.

I think a lot of people are feeling sort of isolated because we haven't reached a critical mass in many areas of inquiry.  I know I've been less motivated to work on some areas in which I have a bit of knowledge because there are so few cultural anthropologists around to pay attention.  But the upcoming workgroup weeks initiative should help to rectify that problem.  We should see many more people flow into the project in all areas of human knowledge very soon.

See here for more on workgroup weeks.

[Paul Schächterle]

Hi, I’m new to Citizendium. I am very interested in economic issues, so I will definitely read some of the articles and try to contribute. Greetings, Paul

[Denis Cavanagh]

Hi Nick,

Don't lose faith man! I read through your history of economic thought article and enjoyed it! It'll take a while for the public to take us seriously as an educational resource; who can blame them, we only have 6,000 articles, and about 40% of them are stubs 

Consider this place more like a construction site. The difference is that instead of an ordinary site, where people are paid to work full time and concentrate their efforts and work as efficiently as possible, here people do what they like, as its a hobby. There's nothing wrong with that. Really, I think you should reconsider your decision.

[J. Noel Chiappa]

I have decided to stop writing new material for Citizendium and await convincing evidence that what I have written is being read. Until then, I will react to initiatives taken by others but take no initiatives myself.

Is this 'I want to make sure that Citizendium is being used', or 'I feel kind of lonely working on an area with nobody else contributing much there'?

If the latter, don't fret about it - we have quite a few contributors who are beavering away single-handedly in their own areas (e.g. Milton Beychok in Chemical Engineering). It's not that the rest of us don't see/know what you're up to (quite a few of us watch Recent Changes, for a variety of reasons, and we see all the stuff you've done), it's just that we're all busy doing our own thing, in our own areas, often in an equally solitary way.

As to the former, well, what can I say? We're all working here in the expectation that some day it will be useful to a lot of people, but clearly that doesn't happen instantly - and there's the chicken and egg thing with content. I have to admit the Alexa traffic ranking it's very great, but then again, we only have 6,000 articles, of which only a handful are approved.

Neither Rome nor Wikipedia was built in a day... And CZ will likely grow slower than WP did, because it's growing in an environment with powerful competition (WP). When WP started, it had an ecological niche to itself, with no competition.

Noel

[Nick Gardner]

  Thank you all for your encouragement.  I think I owe it to you to explain myself more fully. You see, I have long hoped for collaboration with some of the 58 others who are listed as economics authors, especially as some of them are operating professionally in areas  in which I have no experience. This has so far turned out to be a vain hope.  I didn't realise it at first but, as far as I can tell, none of them has taken part in the economics forum or workgroup, and no more than  three or four of them  have drafted any articles on economics subjects.

Anyway,  none of them has  responded to my pleas for comment on what I  have written (although some others have). I don’t think that is how the creators of Citizendium  intended it to work, and I am sure they are right. In areas outside of my professional experience, I have had a fascinating time reading and summarising the literature, but what I do cannot without help  is distinguish between important findings and mere intellectual curiosities. I have set the  stuff  out as carefully as I know how but, as far as I can tell,  without  anything like the proper balance. 

So perhaps it is better that  I should take a breather and wait until some fellow-economists can find time to participate, rather than  continuing to  pre-empt future contributions by  blundering further  into areas that are outside my professional experience. 

Anyway,  my sabbatical  will hopefully be only  temporary - because I do enjoy the research.

Nick

[RJensen]

The excitement of CZ for me is learing new things. A wise professor told me as a graduate student that you learn the material by teaching it--and he added, you really learn it by writing about it.

[Robert_W_King]

Nick I can definately appreciate your position--it does not feel great to have the feeling that you're working in a vacuum or that your efforts go into a black hole, but one thing that might help is that the work you're doing will have a lasting impact on generations (we all hope) and certainly at some point someone else may stumble upon your work and improve on it.

(written with good hand; forgive the typing)

[Denis Cavanagh]

The excitement of CZ for me is learing new things. A wise professor told me as a graduate student that you learn the material by teaching it--and he added, you really learn it by writing about it.

I can certainly vouch for that. The research before writing an article is brilliant when it comes to exams and essays. ~~~~

[Hayford Peirce]

Like everything in the world, I fear, there are always two sides to the question (or more). Two of the greatest old-time mystery writers were Raymond Chandler and John Dickson Carr, who, of course, wrote very different sorts of mysteries. After Carr had trashed Chandler's "The Long Goodbye" in a lengthy NYT review (it's generally considered one of the highpoints of mystery fiction), Chandler wrote a long, embittered letter to a friend in which he trashed Carr for saying, in a New Yorker profile about him, I believe, that he *hated* the writing of his books but *loved* doing the research. Chandler was astonished by this: how could a person who called himself a writer hate the actual writing? I can't believe that Chandler ever did much research for any of his own books, other than once cramming up sparingly on a so-called "Brasher Doubloon" coin, and I doubt if he enjoyed it much. On this, my own sentiments are with Chandler -- I kinda like the writing, but I hate the research. Geez, research is work! I used to tell people (jokingly but also pretty accurately) that I did my research for my first novel, ''Napoleon Disentimed'', by glancing at the 1940 E.B. article on Nappie and drinking a bottle of Napoleon brandy....

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

I follow Carr, in this story: I love research and hate writing 

[Hayford Peirce]

I actually don't really enjoy writing until it's in the third or fourth draft and I'm just putting a high sheen on things and admiring myself for how clever I seem to have been in getting to this point....

[Aleta Curry]

Yeah, well--you're both right--because writing is *hard*!!!

Of course I'm the most brilliant person in the world when it's third draft time....

I fail to understand why my husband doesn't get this.  Cardinal rule is, when Aleta's fingers are flying across the keyboard, LEAVE HER ALONE!!!  He *will* insist on asking me if I"ve seen his wracket--what in twelve types of instant pudding is a wratchet and why in the name of five different brands of quick-drying cement would I know where yours is and WHY ARE YOU BOTHERING ME WHILE I'M WORKING HUH--WHY??!!!