My application for a Pseudonym

[Kurtilein3]

Hi there!

I really would like to join Citizendium, but unfortunately i cannot do it if i would be required to use my real name. Due to my activity on Youtube, i received numerous death threats and threats of violence, most of them from muslim fundamentalists, but also a few from conspiracy theorysts and christian fundamentalists. But the most substantial threat i got so far was from the church of scientology, because in addition to uploading some videos to youtube that they really didnt like, i have participated in reallife protests against the organisation in my hometown, munich.

i dont need to go into the details here, i explained it all in an email that i sent to personnel@citizendium.org , i sent the email for the first time on the 8th of october, and then i resent it two weeks later. Now my question would be: How long will i have to wait until i get a (positive or negative) response?

At the moment the amount of people that contribute to citizendium on a regular basis is stagnating, and people are voicing concerns that the whole project might turn inactive, so i really would like to get started sooner rather than later. Right now the focus should be to get more people that contribute to the project every month, and that keep doing so in spite of the increasing amount of naysayers. Search engines obviously hate Citizendium, when i search for the exact title of an approved Citizendium article i dont get any hits on the first page when searching on google or bing. I think if the project manages to survive until search engines start picking up the best articles on Citizendium, it will start growing exponentially and turn into an alternative to Wikipedia that is well-known enough to actually be an alternative to Wikipedia. On bing, you dont even find Citizendium when searching for "Citizendium". This is a very remote place on the internet, difficult to find, and thats why its stagnating. Apart from this, i see no reason why Citizendium shouldnt turn into a major success.

If there is noone doing what needs to be done at the other end of the personnel@citizendium.org email adress and making decisions there, that would be a real problem. That would be the kind of corrosion that can bring a project like this to its knees. So i hope that its just a difficult decision process, or that a response to my email is delayed because the rules when it comes to pseudonyms are currently being reviewed or something like that, i hope that someone already looked at my email. But dont keep me waiting too long, i really would like to get started.

Best Regards, Kurtilein3

[Matt Innis]

Hi there!

I really would like to join Citizendium, but unfortunately i cannot do it if i would be required to use my real name. Due to my activity on Youtube, i received numerous death threats and threats of violence, most of them from muslim fundamentalists, but also a few from conspiracy theorysts and christian fundamentalists. But the most substantial threat i got so far was from the church of scientology, because in addition to uploading some videos to youtube that they really didnt like, i have participated in reallife protests against the organisation in my hometown, munich.

i dont need to go into the details here, i explained it all in an email that i sent to personnel@citizendium.org , i sent the email for the first time on the 8th of october, and then i resent it two weeks later. Now my question would be: How long will i have to wait until i get a (positive or negative) response?

At the moment the amount of people that contribute to citizendium on a regular basis is stagnating, and people are voicing concerns that the whole project might turn inactive, so i really would like to get started sooner rather than later. Right now the focus should be to get more people that contribute to the project every month, and that keep doing so in spite of the increasing amount of naysayers. Search engines obviously hate Citizendium, when i search for the exact title of an approved Citizendium article i dont get any hits on the first page when searching on google or bing. I think if the project manages to survive until search engines start picking up the best articles on Citizendium, it will start growing exponentially and turn into an alternative to Wikipedia that is well-known enough to actually be an alternative to Wikipedia. On bing, you dont even find Citizendium when searching for "Citizendium". This is a very remote place on the internet, difficult to find, and thats why its stagnating. Apart from this, i see no reason why Citizendium shouldnt turn into a major success.

If there is noone doing what needs to be done at the other end of the personnel@citizendium.org email adress and making decisions there, that would be a real problem. That would be the kind of corrosion that can bring a project like this to its knees. So i hope that its just a difficult decision process, or that a response to my email is delayed because the rules when it comes to pseudonyms are currently being reviewed or something like that, i hope that someone already looked at my email. But dont keep me waiting too long, i really would like to get started.

Best Regards, Kurtilein3

Thanks, Kurtilein3, I'll look into this and see if I can see where the roadblock is.

[Meg Ireland]

Search engines obviously hate Citizendium, when i search for the exact title of an approved Citizendium article i dont get any hits on the first page when searching on google or bing. I think if the project manages to survive until search engines start picking up the best articles on Citizendium, it will start growing exponentially and turn into an alternative to Wikipedia that is well-known enough to actually be an alternative to Wikipedia. On bing, you dont even find Citizendium when searching for "Citizendium". This is a very remote place on the internet, difficult to find, and thats why its stagnating. Apart from this, i see no reason why Citizendium shouldnt turn into a major success.

That's not true. I just typed in Citizendium on Bing and it came up first on the results list.

[Daniel Mietchen]

Search engines obviously hate Citizendium, when i search for the exact title of an approved Citizendium article i dont get any hits on the first page when searching on google or bing. I think if the project manages to survive until search engines start picking up the best articles on Citizendium, it will start growing exponentially and turn into an alternative to Wikipedia that is well-known enough to actually be an alternative to Wikipedia. On bing, you dont even find Citizendium when searching for "Citizendium". This is a very remote place on the internet, difficult to find, and thats why its stagnating. Apart from this, i see no reason why Citizendium shouldnt turn into a major success.

That's not true. I just typed in Citizendium on Bing and it came up first on the results list.

Bing seems to use country-specific display - when searching from Germany, I also get mainly German pages there. Haven't yet seen any possibility to get rid of this "feature", and so I don't use the machine.

A search for "Citizendium" didn't bring up Citizendium in the top 20 that I checked, though various sites that link to it.

At Kurtilein3, try "Gyrification" or "Brain morphometry" for some of the few cases where we do fare rather well.

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

Search engines obviously hate Citizendium, when i search for the exact title of an approved Citizendium article i dont get any hits on the first page when searching on google or bing. I think if the project manages to survive until search engines start picking up the best articles on Citizendium, it will start growing exponentially and turn into an alternative to Wikipedia that is well-known enough to actually be an alternative to Wikipedia. On bing, you dont even find Citizendium when searching for "Citizendium". This is a very remote place on the internet, difficult to find, and thats why its stagnating. Apart from this, i see no reason why Citizendium shouldnt turn into a major success.

That's not true. I just typed in Citizendium on Bing and it came up first on the results list.

Bing seems to use country-specific display - when searching from Germany, I also get mainly German pages there. Haven't yet seen any possibility to get rid of this "feature", and so I don't use the machine.

A search for "Citizendium" didn't bring up Citizendium in the top 20 that I checked, though various sites that link to it.

At Kurtilein3, try "Gyrification" or "Brain morphometry" for some of the few cases where we do fare rather well.

#1 in the U.S.

[Meg Ireland]

Search engines obviously hate Citizendium, when i search for the exact title of an approved Citizendium article i dont get any hits on the first page when searching on google or bing. I think if the project manages to survive until search engines start picking up the best articles on Citizendium, it will start growing exponentially and turn into an alternative to Wikipedia that is well-known enough to actually be an alternative to Wikipedia. On bing, you dont even find Citizendium when searching for "Citizendium". This is a very remote place on the internet, difficult to find, and thats why its stagnating. Apart from this, i see no reason why Citizendium shouldnt turn into a major success.

That's not true. I just typed in Citizendium on Bing and it came up first on the results list.

Bing seems to use country-specific display - when searching from Germany, I also get mainly German pages there. Haven't yet seen any possibility to get rid of this "feature", and so I don't use the machine.

A search for "Citizendium" didn't bring up Citizendium in the top 20 that I checked, though various sites that link to it.

At Kurtilein3, try "Gyrification" or "Brain morphometry" for some of the few cases where we do fare rather well.

#1 in the U.S.

I'm not sure what you're doing Kurt but on Bing, Citizendium articles are overall doing quite well. The 'Brain morphometry' article is #1 on Bing, 'Gyrification' is #2. These are pretty good results.

[Kurtilein3]

Bing seems to use country-specific display - when searching from Germany, I also get mainly German pages there. Haven't yet seen any possibility to get rid of this "feature", and so I don't use the machine.

A search for "Citizendium" didn't bring up Citizendium in the top 20 that I checked, though various sites that link to it.

At Kurtilein3, try "Gyrification" or "Brain morphometry" for some of the few cases where we do fare rather well.

Daniel is right, the problem is that bing limits you to one language and one country. And the search engine also appears to be quite buggy. When i choose the united states as my home, citizendium does come in second, after the wikipedia-article about citizendium. But when i choose germany, i dont get it anywhere near the first page. When i limit the languages of search results to english and german and search for "citizendium english", it still doesnt show up anywhere near the first page, but the articles about citizendium on the german, english, italian, french, dutch, and polish versions of wikipedia show up on the first page. So the problem seems to be that the bing search engine is still a beta and often just doesnt do what you would expect.

I just noticed that i dont get the citizendium article on the first page when i search for the exact title of an approved article, i didnt try that many, now i tried some more, and searching for "Ancient Celtic music" on google actually gives the citizendium article as the first result, "Flash Evaporation" ranks third on google. So its not as bad as i considered it to be.

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

Bing seems to use country-specific display - when searching from Germany, I also get mainly German pages there. Haven't yet seen any possibility to get rid of this "feature", and so I don't use the machine.

A search for "Citizendium" didn't bring up Citizendium in the top 20 that I checked, though various sites that link to it.

At Kurtilein3, try "Gyrification" or "Brain morphometry" for some of the few cases where we do fare rather well.

Daniel is right, the problem is that bing limits you to one language and one country. And the search engine also appears to be quite buggy. When i choose the united states as my home, citizendium does come in second, after the wikipedia-article about citizendium. But when i choose germany, i dont get it anywhere near the first page. When i limit the languages of search results to english and german and search for "citizendium english", it still doesnt show up anywhere near the first page, but the articles about citizendium on the german, english, italian, french, dutch, and polish versions of wikipedia show up on the first page. So the problem seems to be that the bing search engine is still a beta and often just doesnt do what you would expect.

I just noticed that i dont get the citizendium article on the first page when i search for the exact title of an approved article, i didnt try that many, now i tried some more, and searching for "Ancient Celtic music" on google actually gives the citizendium article as the first result, "Flash Evaporation" ranks third on google. So its not as bad as i considered it to be.

Thanks, Kurt, for finding the variation. When Bing first launched, it was actually finding and ranking Citizendium more than it found Wikipedia. In general, my experience is that it finds fewer references than Google, sometimes more and sometimes less accurately.

[Arne Eickenberg]

The main bing page still sports a "beta" notice.

On the main issue: I don't see why you shouldn't be allowed to use a pseudonym, if you can show evidence during application that you've actually received death these threats. However, I submit that the pseudonym should be like a real name, e.g. "Kurt Furtwängler" instead of Kurtilein3.

On the other issue:

Due to my activity on Youtube, i received numerous death threats and threats of violence, most of them from muslim fundamentalists, but also a few from conspiracy theorysts and christian fundamentalists. But the most substantial threat i got so far was from the church of scientology

Not that I like that you're getting death threats, but these reactions obviously show that there's some truth to the things you published on YouTube. People scream when they're hurt, and what hurts most is the truth. Care to write articles on the heretic Christian origin of Islam? Luxenberg et al.? It's on my list, but I'm overloading with work atm and can't even reasonably finish my previous articles.

[Paul Wormer]

I don't quite get it. Didn't you use an alias on YouTube?  When you used your own name there,  you can surely do it here too. Our neutrality policy (plus  lack of visibility)  is such that threats are not likely to occur to us citizens. If you used an alias on YouTube, you can use your own name here, for how are your enemies to know that the person who is writing sensible and neutral articles for CZ is the same as the one who uploaded inflammable videos?

[Arne Eickenberg]

I don't quite get it. Didn't you use an alias on YouTube?  When you used your own name there,  you can surely do it here too. Our neutrality policy (plus  lack of visibility)  is such that threats are not likely to occur to us citizens. If you used an alias on YouTube, you can use your own name here, for how are your enemies to know that the person who is writing sensible and neutral articles for CZ is the same as the one who uploaded inflammable videos?

I was asking myself the same thing. I can think of several explanations, but I'd like to hear it from the OP.

[Matt Innis]

I don't quite get it. Didn't you use an alias on YouTube?  When you used your own name there,  you can surely do it here too. Our neutrality policy (plus  lack of visibility)  is such that threats are not likely to occur to us citizens. If you used an alias on YouTube, you can use your own name here, for how are your enemies to know that the person who is writing sensible and neutral articles for CZ is the same as the one who uploaded inflammable videos?

Good point.  I suppose that is one reason why we don't have as many behavioral issues here... people using their real names don't tend to say things that upset others?

From a charter perspective, is this something that we want?

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

I don't quite get it. Didn't you use an alias on YouTube?  When you used your own name there,  you can surely do it here too. Our neutrality policy (plus  lack of visibility)  is such that threats are not likely to occur to us citizens. If you used an alias on YouTube, you can use your own name here, for how are your enemies to know that the person who is writing sensible and neutral articles for CZ is the same as the one who uploaded inflammable videos?

Good point.  I suppose that is one reason why we don't have as many behavioral issues here... people using their real names don't tend to say things that upset others?

From a charter perspective, is this something that we want?

Confused..we want behavioral issues? Upsetting things?

When I was more of a Mac user, people used to scoff "even people who support viruses don't support Macs."  Now, recently, I've been making a point to create some articles that are as objective as I can make them, but that I'd thought would bring in some hot critics. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict does tend to do that.

I can't even get informed inflamed new Citizens there. *sigh*

[Matt Innis]

Confused..we want behavioral issues? Upsetting things?

I can't even get informed inflamed new Citizens there. *sigh*

Clarify:

Maybe we don't get flame wars here because we use real names.  By the same token, maybe we don't get "the other side of the story," either, because people aren't as brave when they use their real names.

So, do we want to use pseudonyms?

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

Confused..we want behavioral issues? Upsetting things?

I can't even get informed inflamed new Citizens there. *sigh*

Clarify:

Maybe we don't get flame wars here because we use real names.  By the same token, maybe we don't get "the other side of the story," either, because people aren't as brave when they use their real names.

So, do we want to use pseudonyms?

No, I don't think bravery is an issue in getting factual information.