Here are some responses to various Editorial Council member remarks
From k kay shearin:
This proposal piles pretension on top of pretense. No matter how you
slice it, participating in CZ is a hobby, and the decision to list
hobbies on your résumé at all says more about you than whether you list
stamp collecting or working with retarded children. The only
significant difference between claiming some title (such as "scribe"
or "jongleur") in the Society for Creative Anachronism and the title
of "editor" in CZ is that anyone who cares to can review (the quantity
and quality of) your participation in CZ on-line. (I picture a
situation reminiscent of the "but then you STRENUOUSLY objected" scene
in "A Few Good Men" with a potential employer wanting to hire someone
based on their being a CZ editor and then deciding not to because
they're labeled "inactive.") For its leaders to pretend that CZ is
anything but an avocation will do more to undermine its credibility than
to bolster it: (a) Does it harm or enhance Harvard's reputation when
someone who didn't go there claims to be its graduate? (b) Not being
able to distinguish reality from rôle-playing is not only a liability,
instead of an asset, when seeking employment/advancement/recognition but
also (and probably because it is) a symptom of a mental problem.
Kay makes the contention that the title "Editor" is merely a hobbyist title, and not therefore important. I agree that it is a title for a role that is probably merely a hobby for most, but it does not follow from that that the label is not important for CZ as a project. The openness of the degree of participation is not what matters; what matters is that our list of editors is hugely misleading, and when people discover, as they often do, that most of the editors in a given workgroup are inactive, they come away turned off and disillusioned. I and I am sure most of our participations have no illusions that this is not merely an avocation; that is a (rather puzzling) straw man. Whether someone is an active editor, as opposed to someone who signed up with the project many months ago and has since done nothing, is a very meaningful and important distinction to us.
From Gary Giamboi:
I have the following concern about placing quotas on editors: (BTW, the following is based upon my assumption that the editor's must make edits as editors and not just make edits which anyone can make. If I am mistaken, please tell me.) Some of the categories do not have enough articles in them to warrant placing a quota on the editors. For example, as of this moment, there are no articles waiting for approval in my category, Sports; and, there is only one draft article. There are nine editors. If all nine wished to keep their status, how many of them would be forced to edit the same article(s) in a short period of time? Also, in very broad categories, there may not be enough articles in the specific area of expertise of each editor to make this limitation justifiable.
Indeed, that's mistaken. We count any edits toward an editor's "active" status.
If there are some workgroups that have no active editors, so much the worse for those workgroups. Presenting a list of editors, for a given workgroup, who are in fact inactive will not help that workgroup, I think. In my opinion, if we can show two editors as active, we will create more goodwill and interest than if we show 20 editors all of whom are inactive.
I would rather see some kind of measure of an editor's (or any position's) contributions as a whole used as a measure of worthiness. I consider this similar to giving an author, musician, etc. a contractual deadline to produce X amount of work. It will only insure Quantity, not Quality.
Well, such a measure would be aimed at solving a different problem from the one I'm trying to solve. I'm not trying to increase quantity or quality of work except indirectly; I'm merely making sure our editor lists reflect reality. Whether an editor is called "inactive" is a statement of simple fact, not a "measure of worthiness."
If a particular work group has an unjustifiably large number of articles waiting for an editor to do something and nothing is getting done, then the editors in that group should be evaluated. So perhaps we need a committee to keep tabs on the article queue and editors in each work group.
Perhaps, but remember that this is a volunteer project. So the question about any such proposal will always be: OK, but who does that? We can't mandate that people do anything, because one can't generally order volunteers around!
Andrew Fleisher proposed to rewrite the resolution as follows:
Whereas, the position of Citizendium Editor should indicate a desire to contribute to Citizendium rather than merely the effort to create a Citizendium account;
Whereas, Some Editors have not contributed to the project;
Resolved,
That a Citizendium Editor shall be deemed to be active if they have either edited CZ in the previous three months, or performed more than 500 edits in the previous year.
That if a Citizendium editor is not active, any Citizen may change the Editor's "CZ Editor" categories to "Inactive CZ Editor" categories.
That the Editor-in-Chief can review and/or reverse such actions at his discretion under rare circumstances.
That an Editor will be empowered to delete the word "Inactive" him- or herself, once he or she has edited CZ.
For instance, the category on an editor's user page might be changed from Category:Chemistry Editors to Category:Inactive Chemistry Editors.
The rewriting looks fine to me. It doesn't change any of the substance of the proposal. The process for revising a resolution is to move to amend. In the future, I would recommend doing that and asking for the amendment to be passed by acclamation (since nobody will object to it).
Comments on the proposal:
1. Has the term "Citizen" been formally defined? If it has not, we should not use it in the Resolution, or should define it.
2. This resolution will facilitate a person who has deceased no longer being an "active Editor". What process do we have in place to have an account deleted due to long-term inactivity, which could indicate death (or other situations I guess)?
1. I actually don't know if we have ever formally defined "Citizen." We have debated this (what are the real qualifications for citizenship) and when the question has come up, there is usually strong support for making anyone with a member account, who has not been blocked from editing, a Citizen. If there are any gradations in citizenship, we might say that a "full citizen" is a person who is qualified to serve on the Editorial Council (since the E.C. rules define someone who has been active). But nothing like that is a definition of "citizen" tout court.
2. We have no process for deleting an account due to long-term inactivity. The current proposal might be all that is needed. Someone who is deceased will be inactive. It is useful to keep the person's user page still, because we expect people to take responsibility for their contributions even after they're no longer with the project (for any reason). We generally don't delete user pages of people who have ever been very active; that creates red links in page histories, which we don't like to see (but which one can sometimes find, even now, I'm afraid).
