Dear Miss Manners,
I have been hassling the good people at
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ_Talk:How_to_convert_Wikipedia_articles_to_Citizendium_articles with questions about the attribution of an article originally taken from Wikipedia. (I'd still be interested to know the exact effect of the submission checkbox, as opposed to a readable textual notice, in some standard form, of WP-derivation.)
I'm now establishing a page on [[Galileo]], on which there's a very uneven article on WP, containing a good deal of my work. There are two ways I could handle this:
1. Import the WP article as of some date on which it was not too bad; mark it properly as a WP derivative; do the proper cleanup for an imported article, and then start hacking on the content. (This is in fact what I've done, but it could be reversed.)
2. Import just my own submissions, carefully omitting everything else down to the very prepositions and conjunctions; add enough to make it into at least a skeletal article; then start improving it further -- having noted the derivation from my own work in the Talk pages. This version would never carry the scarlet W.
(In this case the organization and form of the article would be much like the WP article; but most of the organization of the WP article is mine to begin with. The exception is one very large and venerable section that would have to be replaced completely, but that's the section that needs to be gutted anyway if the article is going to be any good.)
I see a real advantage in having as few articles as possible that make the project look like "This is a somewhat changed version of Wikipedia"; but it's a larger effort, and a slower one to reach an adequate level of coverage of the subject (absent lots of good contributions from others).
I can't ask anyone else whether the longer aproach is worth my time, but I'd be interested in any reactions to the question. If it's not seen as a substantial improvement, or there is uncertainty about whether we could completely escape any "this borrows from Wikipedia" disclaimer, it's hard to justify the extra effort.
