Some suggestions to consider

[David Still]

Let me preface this by saying that I do not know where would be more appropriate to post this, than here. If someone can think of a more appropriate forum, please feel free to move the thread elsewhere.

Post edited for consistency with Constabulary policy against personal attacks.

That having been said, let's move on to my suggestions:

Article approval

As it currently stands, the article approval process ignores several important features that it needs to be truly effective. They are:

• Visibility
• Objectivity
• Transparency
• Pacing

The first of these is very simple: for an article to be Approved in any meaningful sense, it needs to have been checked and finalised by as many editors as possible. Very little use is made of processes already employed at Wikipedia, that allow large numbers of people to review content before considering it for approval.

So:

1. Make effective use of Category:Articles to Approve. The category should be linked to at the very least at this page -- in the text, not just at the bottom -- and on the main page itself.

Furthermore, an actual page (rather than just the cat) should list all articles currently being considered for approval, in a structured way: A format similar to the current RfA process at Wikipedia would work well, with a short(ish) comment by the nominating editor(s) and a section for comments from others. The important point here is that there would be a centralised, structured way for editors to find new articles in need of review.

2. The next point is a very, very simple one. The Approval process needs to prevent editors that contributed to an article to be significantly involved in its Approval; they should be able to nominate it, repeatedly if necessary, but little else. I believe I demonstrated the conflict-of-interest in the current system well enough in my blog post, and would suggest that Approval rest largely on editors who were not major contributors to the article in question.

3. Next, the concept of transparency. To take Biology as an example, again, we see that the review process was largely unformed and confused; it was scattered across the talk page, without clear division of opinions and information.

A better way to deal with this would, at the very least, to create a subpage for discussion. It would preferably have a consistent (if not rigid) structure, and would be linked from the talk page and ToApprove template on the article itself. As with the above suggestion, this ensures that the discussion remains centralised and easy to read, and further advertises the need for outside (read: entitled, but uninvolved) opinions on the matter.

4. Pacing is simple, too: what is the rush in Approving an article? The current policy stipulates a time of "several days to a week" for Approval, after which time an article is Approved by default unless an objection is raised. The fact is, simply, that there is absolutely no need to rush the Approval of articles -- none at all -- and the process needs to reflect this.

As such, I propose that the process be set within a consistent timeframe -- say, one week (which seems long enough) - and that the default action be to deny Approval from articles that simply reach the end of the time without comment. Approval should require active agreement on the part of multiple other editors, not tacit acceptance.

Content creation

Sanger made a very good move in unforking Citizendium, but there's much more that needs to be done to ensure that CZ's content allows it to succeed. Some steps toward that would be:

1. Produce a consistent policy regarding the use of GFDL content, and enforce it. The example of Language attrition is just one page that breaks the license despite the best intentions of the contributor; a simple {{WikipediaContent}} template would suffice, and could be advertised easily enough. No problem there.

2. Citizendium needs to worry about its current troubles before it focuses on the future. The current challenge is, and will be for the foreseeable future, to produce good content; at the moment, all else should be secondary to that goal.

To that end, projects like Topic Informants should be considered and discussed, but not implemented until such a time as Citizendium is ready for them. Regularly announcing new features of the project is wonderful, but unless they help develop content and market it to the wider world, they draw attention away from doing just that -- and hurt CZ in the process. Please just focus on getting a few, major things done (Approval, recruiting, fundraising), and worry about libel and other matters later, when they're relevant.



Those are my two sets of suggestions for now, and I'll leave it at that for the present (it being midnight, and all). For any of these suggestions, I'm quite happy to provide an example to demonstrate exactly what I mean.

[tkjazzer]

I think the approval process MAY develop slowly on its own as editors collaborate and what works and what doesn't.  I don't know if any one person needs to make an executive decision on how it should be - possibly a vote.

In terms of fund raising a recruiting - those are huge.  I'd say recruiting is the biggest things.  Is there a post explaining what we actually need money for?  obviously for servers (or whatever this runs on)... tech people? hired recruiter/head-hunter? ?

[David Still]

I don't know if any one person needs to make an executive decision on how it should be - possibly a vote.

Hence the creation of this thread.

[MikeJohnson]

Good post. I'll separate out my reply.

Approval

1. Make effective use of Category:Articles to Approve.

You're absolutely right. We're not using said page as much as we should. I've linked to it from Category:Approved Articles and the page you suggested. I also think it should be on the main page, but I'm unsure of exactly where to slip it in. If you find yourself inspired, go ahead and add it.

Your suggestion that a more distinct, structured place should be set aside for comments on articles up for approval also sounds good, and that actually ties in with something more sweeping we'd like to implement- threaded forums attached to articles instead of flat talk pages. I can't speak to the timeframe involved, however.

2. Approval [needs to] rest largely on editors who were not major contributors to the article in question.

I see your point (letting the same people write and approve articles looks like a textbook case of conflict of interest), but I have three responses.
     1. There is some level of oversight (one person can't write and approve the same article);
     2. The amount of oversight nominated articles get will likely improve as the wiki grows and as Category:Articles to Approve gets more regular traffic;
     3. Nupedia has taught us the costs of oversight friction. My feeling on this is that any set-up that would add significantly more hassle to approving articles would need to be justified by the existence of substandard articles that have been approved. If you've a suggestion in mind that wouldn't add any (or a minimum of) overhead to the approval process, I'd be excited to hear it.

3. The review process was largely unformed and confused; it was scattered across the talk page, without clear division of opinions and information.

I agree. I think a flat talk page isn't a good place for many sorts of discussions. The threaded talk forum would help this out a lot (there could be an official approval thread, etc).

4. There is absolutely no need to rush the Approval of articles.

I'm honestly not up-to-date on the rationale behind the (seemingly quick) article approval timeline. I've left a comment on the Approval Process talk page about it.

The default:deny change would be pretty huge, and I fear a large source of friction on getting articles approved. I think this is a wait-and-see question, to revisit if substandard articles get approved.

Content Creation

1. Produce a consistent policy regarding the use of GFDL content, and enforce it.

We do need to tackle license problems-- I think Larry is weighing some license issues right now, and we should hopefully have more direction from him on how we should do things (both in terms of policy and technology) soon.

2. Citizendium needs to ... produce good content; at the moment, all else should be secondary to that goal.

Getting side-projects going attracts more interest in the project, which leads to more recruitment and better fundraising opportunities. I think it's worth it.

Thanks for the suggestions, David. Keep em coming.

[David Still]

Good post. I'll separate out my reply.

Approval

1. Make effective use of Category:Articles to Approve.

You're absolutely right. We're not using said page as much as we should. I've linked to it from Category:Approved Articles and the page you suggested. I also think it should be on the main page, but I'm unsure of exactly where to slip it in. If you find yourself inspired, go ahead and add it.

Your suggestion that a more distinct, structured place should be set aside for comments on articles up for approval also sounds good, and that actually ties in with something more sweeping we'd like to implement- threaded forums attached to articles instead of flat talk pages. I can't speak to the timeframe involved, however.

I'm glad these points went down well with you.

2. Approval [needs to] rest largely on editors who were not major contributors to the article in question.

I see your point (letting the same people write and approve articles looks like a textbook case of conflict of interest), but I have three responses.
     1. There is some level of oversight (one person can't write and approve the same article);

On the other hand, Biology was approved by the three people that wrote the article, plus Larry (as I noted in the blog post) -- is this any less of a conflict of interest?

     2. The amount of oversight nominated articles get will likely improve as the wiki grows and as Category:Articles to Approve gets more regular traffic;

This is not something you should rely upon, especially not when you need to demonstrate the effectiveness of your review process.

     3. Nupedia has taught us the costs of oversight friction. My feeling on this is that any set-up that would add significantly more hassle to approving articles would need to be justified by the existence of substandard articles that have been approved. If you've a suggestion in mind that wouldn't add any (or a minimum of) overhead to the approval process, I'd be excited to hear it.

You already have discipline workgroups, which would ideally provide an acceptable level of expertise for specific articles. All that needs to be done is for each workgroup to dedicate a subpage (or perhaps even a template that could be substituted as necessary) to nominations within their domain; a handy example of how this can be done well is the running list of deletions kept by many WikiProjects at Wikipedia, like this.

Of course, this adds a minimal extra level of maintenance to the whole process. On the other hand, it allows editors to keep an eye on running nominations that they would be qualified to oversee, where no such thing is possible now.

3. The review process was largely unformed and confused; it was scattered across the talk page, without clear division of opinions and information.

I agree. I think a flat talk page isn't a good place for many sorts of discussions. The threaded talk forum would help this out a lot (there could be an official approval thread, etc).

There's nothing wrong with the format, in my view, but some attempt needs to made to organise it consistently and readably -- and that would extend to refactoring the discussions we've already had. Again, check out any of the ongoing processes at Wikipedia for an example of how lengthy discussions can be effectively formatted readably in MediaWiki.

4. There is absolutely no need to rush the Approval of articles.

I'm honestly not up-to-date on the rationale behind the (seemingly quick) article approval timeline. I've left a comment on the Approval Process talk page about it.

Cooloh.

The default:deny change would be pretty huge, and I fear a large source of friction on getting articles approved. I think this is a wait-and-see question, to revisit if substandard articles get approved.

My rationale is simply that an article cannot truthfully be said to have been "approved" if nobody actually corroborated one person's nomination. That the default should be to deny approval without active support is, frankly, obvious.

Content Creation

1. Produce a consistent policy regarding the use of GFDL content, and enforce it.

We do need to tackle license problems-- I think Larry is weighing some license issues right now, and we should hopefully have more direction from him on how we should do things (both in terms of policy and technology) soon.

I notice a new checkbox at the bottom of the editing window. That at least makes me hopeful.

2. Citizendium needs to ... produce good content; at the moment, all else should be secondary to that goal.

Getting side-projects going attracts more interest in the project, which leads to more recruitment and better fundraising opportunities. I think it's worth it.

Can this be demonstrated? I seriously doubt that trying to institute things like Topic Informants helps to make Citizendium more efficient than it currently is.

[MikeJohnson]

Hi David,

I do expect our approval process to undergo moderate to major revision as editorial workgroups (and the Editorial Board Larry just announced a CfA for) get up to speed.

If I may bring in a general point on approval (and this goes back to an earlier discussion we had), we simply must strongly trend toward lightweight processes which involve trusting people because those are the only processes that will result in a vibrant wiki. As Wales has said,

Basically what I think works in a wikis is to trust people to do the right thing, and trust them as much as you can possibly stand it, until it hurts your head and makes you scared for what they're going to break. Because that is what works.

As the editorial workgroups and board and others discuss approval I'm sure there'll be positions on both sides, but that's where I personally stand.

I think the suggestion that workgroups have a one-stop place to list nominated articles under their domain is good, and your reference to more readable MediaWiki discussion formatting sounds interesting. I'm not the best person to handle either of these things but leaving notes on relevant talk pages has a good chance of getting results.

[David Still]

Since nobody has expressed any disagreement with my idea of creating a running, chronological list of articles to approve, I've gone ahead and done it (in the spirit of {{sofixit}}). We'll see how it goes.

The page I've created can be found here, along with a largely-automated method of creating subpages including all the information I think would be necessary. I've used Biology as a sample page, so you can see how it works. If this is fine, please link it appropriately (or you know, tell me I should do it).

One possible addition would be to include a tag on each subpage, denoting the workgroup to which the article belongs -- this would make it much easier for editors to keep track of nominations within their area of experience. Additionally, each workgroup could keep track of relevant nominations in much the same way that the various WikiProjects at Wikipedia keep track of "their" deletions.

** Reply to the rest of your post later, I'm being pulled away from the computer.

****

EDIT: Okay, here I go.

If I may bring in a general point on approval (and this goes back to an earlier discussion we had), we simply must strongly trend toward lightweight processes which involve trusting people because those are the only processes that will result in a vibrant wiki. As Wales has said,

Basically what I think works in a wikis is to trust people to do the right thing, and trust them as much as you can possibly stand it, until it hurts your head and makes you scared for what they're going to break. Because that is what works.

As the editorial workgroups and board and others discuss approval I'm sure there'll be positions on both sides, but that's where I personally stand.

Good quote, and well used, but it doesn't address the conflict-of-interest in a way that satisfies me. Nobody can reliably criticise their own work -- even excluding the possibility of abuse, it's the equivalent of basing a student's grade entirely on self-assessment. It simply makes no sense, because this kind of review requires a certain level of disconnection in order to be done effectively.

[David Still]

Allow me to express my profoud disappointment in Larry Sanger's response. The demonstration was rejected and moved to my userspace, and I was warned to "leave this up to the actual editors."

So what was the actual problem with it? I'm getting the very strong impression that the idea was rejected because I'm an author, rather than on the basis of its merits or failures.

Post edited for consistency with Constabulary policy against posting of personal mails and links to personal attacks.

[MikeJohnson]

I'm sorry, David. Proper channels can be very important.

[David Still]

What would they have been, precisely? I was under the (apparently incorrect) impression that the forums were for discussing new ideas; please tell me exactly where I can go with this.

[Larry Sanger]

You can begin, David, by not insulting the editors.  Next, as I told you in the one e-mail that curiously you chose not to publish publicly on your blog, "approach an editor with a suggestion, and see if you can get him or her to get behind it."  One that isn't me.

We are now considering whether to ban you from the project for posting private e-mails from me.  This is a serious breach of ethics.

[David Tribe]

I cant understand why these issues raised on the blog were not first raised on the forums, or on the talk pages of articles subject to the  approval process.

Wouldn't that be the ethical way to get the issues addressed, especially if its an issue of due process being debated?

[David Still]

You can begin, David, by not insulting the editors.

Larry, I'm sure you can see how rich this is.

Next, as I told you in the one e-mail that curiously you chose not to publish publicly on your blog, "approach an editor with a suggestion, and see if you can get him or her to get behind it."  One that isn't me.

Yes.

We are now considering whether to ban you from the project for posting private e-mails from me.  This is a serious breach of ethics.

Do you regret resorting to ageism, ad hominem attacks and elitism (of the bad kind) in a now-public communication?

Wouldn't that be the ethical way to get the issues addressed, especially if its an issue of due process being debated?

Take a look at what has happened since it was raised in the forums. Even a suggestion on the forums and simple demonstration of the most innocuous of all my proposed changes prompted Larry to claim I was attempting to engineer the editorial process (as if that were a bad thing) -- but only after he, and every other contributor to Citizendium but Mike Johnson, had ignored it for several days (and, in his case, several emails).

[Stephen Ewen]

So, Mike David, why did you not approach an editor on a talk page with your suggestion, and see if you could get him or her behind it? Don't you think that would have been a wise way to go?

[David Still]

So, Mike, why did you not approach an editor on a talk page with your suggestion, and see if you could get him or her behind it? Don't you think that would have been a wise way to go?

Err, assuming that you meant me and not Mike:

1. I had previously been in contact with Mike Johnson (the Executive Committee is that detached from goings-on?), and very soon after, Larry Sanger.
2. I then created this thread, to see if I could get someone behind me on this; moreover, I attempted several times to draw it to the attention of other contributors through the citizendium-l mailing list. No dice -- Larry even prevented me from doing the latter.
3. I then went ahead with the most innocuous part of the suggestion, to test it out and see what people thought of it. The response I got from that was surprising, to put it lightly.