Blog post: http://tinyurl.com/2xc5sy
Contents below. --Larry Topic Informants: how the Citizendium would handle Seigenthaler and Microsoft John Seigenthaler, Sr., distinguished, long-time editor of The Tennessean and a founding editor of USA Today, made big news (in the wiki world, at least) by taking Wikipedia to task for the outrageously libellous article they had written about him. Microsoft, being a giant evil corporation, could elicit no similar howls of outrage over Wikipedia's biased articles about it; so it tried to resort to paying someone to edit articles that they perceive as biased. Closer to home, I find it frustrating that I am constantly having to go to the Talk pages on the Wikipedia articles about me to correct people, who don't know anything about me, or about the origin of Wikipedia, who are writing about me or the projects I've been involved in. It's actually led me to create a handy page on my own Web space that I can link to and tell people, "Just go look at this." Similarly, my colleague, the astrophysicist Dr. Bernard Haisch had an editorial published in the LA Times in which he complained, quite justifably, of his treatment at the hands of Wikipedians with an ax to grind. As he explains, "if there are problems [with the biography Wikipedia has written about you], you should click on the discussion page and politely argue your case there, in the hope that some other self-appointed editor will consider the merits of your case and fix things for you." Ironically, Jimmy Wales too had a disagreement with the Wikipedia article about him, although on much thinner grounds. It seems he didn't want me to have any credit for the founding of Wikipedia, and he edited his own bio seven times to deny me that credit. He thus ran afoul a rule of Wikipedia-what I, anyway, would insist is a rule-that the subjects of biographies should not edit articles about themselves. At root there's just one problem here. The people who know most about and who are most affected by articles about themselves (or about their companies, projects, etc.) have no reliable and independent way to get their perspective on the claims made by Wikipedia out there. We've had the idea for an innovative solution to this problem for the Citizendium for several months. This afternoon, we started making this idea a reality. I'd like to announce that, this afternoon, the Citizendium has started a new group called the Topic Informant Workgroup. We are at present over a dozen people, mostly Citizendium editors, and all of whom have significant publishing experience or a B.A. in a writing-intensive discipline. Our mission is to create a platform from which people may respond to articles in Wikipedia-and the Citizendium-about themselves, and also about entities and events in which they personally played a key role. Such people will be called Topic Informants. We will interview them, or accept essays from them, and publish the results, free of charge and open to read without logging in-not on the wiki, but in a special area of the Citizendium website. These essays and interviews should concern the problems with the Wikipedia or the Citizendium article about themselves and their experiences, but they may also serve as "primary sources" that our Citizens may cite. Topic Informants will absolutely not be permitted to edit the articles they are commenting on-due to conflict of interest concerns of the sort that Microsoft is now in hot water over-but they will be able to speak or write at length, and we will listen very carefully. Then our Citizens-a wiki community of responsible people gently guided by expert editors-will make sure that the perspective of the Topic Informant is fairly and sympathetically represented in the Citizendium article. Of course, we cannot violate our own neutrality policy, so the article will not become a mouthpiece of the Topic Informant. But all significant viewpoints, including the Topic Informant's, will be expressed as sympathetically as possible in the Citizendium article. Everyone will be able to benefit from the results. Microsoft, John Seigenthaler, Sr., Bernard Haisch, and even Jimmy Wales will be welcome to use our service, which will always be part of an independent nonprofit. The results should be very entertaining to read, we think. It might teach us all a lot about fairness, and about some really fascinating people. If you want to become a Topic Informant for an article that appears on either Wikipedia or the Citizendium, please send an e-mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Also, if you wish Wikipedia didn't have an article about you, and you don't want the Citizendium to start an article about you, this is the address to say so. We are not associated with Wikipedia, and so we cannot guarantee that they will respect your wishes and reflect what you have to say-but we will! We feel that if you aren't really a public figure, it should be up to you whether we have an article about you or not. After all, why should you have to negotiate with strangers about an article that represents your achievements in something billed as an encyclopedia article? You shouldn't, particularly if you aren't a public figure. Note that we cannot accept as Topic Informants just anyone who claims to be one. Here are our evolving rules on topic informants (available unfortunately only to registered users; sign up here). The Topic Informant Workgroup reserves the right to reject requests from persons to become Topic Informants on biographies about themselves that do not yet exist, or on account of remarks that they inserted into articles themselves. Such requests may be rejected on grounds of unseemly self-promotion. Also, the Topic Informant Workgroup also reserves the right to edit these remarks both for relevance to the content of specific articles, for their tendency to violate copyright and libel law, and for consistency of format with other Topic Informant remarks. _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
