All, Many brief items, here. I know, I don't give updates often enough. A really big one is in the offing--this just to tide you over. ;-)
The Write-a-Thon is Wednesday! Mark it on your calendars and plan to show up to the party! We have switched over to the latest version of MediaWiki. Thanks to Greg Sabino Mullane and the other tech guys for this--a greatly needed change. This is finally going to make several important new technical changes possible. We're nearing 3,000 CZ Live articles. In case you think this means we're behind where we should be, compared for example to Wikipedia in its first year (when it created 20,000), I would like to remind you of many, many relevant factors. First, our average article length is probably several times the average length of an article in Wikipedia after this length of time. The total number of words in our main namespace might actually be more than Wikipedia's was. Second, we have many subpages that don't go in the CZ Live article count, but that's real content! Third--and this really puts the strength of our endeavor in perspective--we have been operating with one recruitment arm tied behind our back, namely, we have required people to sign up with personal information, and we have been hand-processing those applications. The latter in particular could change, and we will, with time, make it easier and easier for people to get on board. Finally, our first five months or so was a *private* pilot project, and the months after our launch have mostly been slow periods: the end of the academic year, the summer months, and the academic beginning-of-term. For reasons I needn't explore, I fully expect an explosion of growth in October and especially November. The Core Articles initiative is going pretty well. We're still listing articles and debating priorities. Thanks to all our authors and editors who have participated. But we need more people involved, so please do join in. In fact, you could contribute to the article lists during the Write-a-Thon! Regardless, let's adopt this as a goal: complete list of needed core articles by October 25. Should be more than enough time. We might finish within the next week, if people get motivated. Chris Day deserves our undying gratitude and praise for working very, very hard on the very complicated subpages templates, which combines the basic subpage functionality with workgroup categories and the checklist on a new "metadata" page of this format: [[Template:Article Title/Metadata]]. Read more about subpages here: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Subpages Also, I made this tool to help ease your way into this subpage system: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Start_article_with_subpages You can find that page via the "Start article" page, linked in the sidebar. The functionality of subpages will eventually be built into the software, I'm quite sure. Among the many things I plan to do is to call for support from institutions and corporations for a move toward a major mediawiki metadata plugin, or else a fork if that's not possible. I would like us to add a major technology partner within the next six months, and there's a very good chance this will happen. Our gratitude also goes to Jitse Niesen, who has written a bot that is converting all existing articles with checklists so that they use metadata pages and the subpage template. This is the first in several steps toward total adoption of a subpage system. The bulk of my own work this month will take the form of governance changes, as the next step in "CZ 2.0" as described last summer. I hope to make many improvements: expansion and change of the Editorial Council, Executive Committee, and Constabulary, and the creation of a Judicial Board; a fair system to resolve disputes and to rein in difficult contributors; and several other items. We plan to do a press release at some time within a month or two (not *right* away). We haven't compiled all our news yet, but there's a huge amount of it as you know if you've been paying attention. We are going to be *very* busy this month--I am, at least--as we finally take the wraps off of several initiatives and attempt to leverage this to attract many, many new people. Thanks to everyone for consistently higher levels of work in September. Regards, Larry ----- Lawrence M. Sanger, Ph.D. | http://www.larrysanger.org/ Editor-in-Chief, Citizendium | http://www.citizendium.org/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
