All, here is a private exchange between me and a distinguished editor. Is
anyone interested in making a page/graphic explaining our editorial process
as I've done here? I've outlined a lot of the content of a page
already...shouldn't be too hard, and it might help a lot of people.
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2008 9:30 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Help
As a newcomer and novice, I would appreciate a flow chart that goes from
article title to finished product. By the way, as a lifetime encyclopedia
editor, I learned that the best way to ensure accuracy is to have the
article checked independently. As you know, many publications have fact
checkers (eg. New Yorker). Often research librarians are great for this.
[...]
============
Reply from me:
[...]
I think that could be arranged. Our editorial process is perfectly simple,
and I think it must be, or it cannot be staffed by very large numbers of
volunteers. Anybody (in the system) can start an article on any topic; then
anyone else can edit it, move it, etc. (but only "constables" can delete
articles entirely). So the meat of the process looks like this:
Start article --> edit --> edit --> edit --> ...
then there is a step, which happens on the talk page (go to any article
page, and look for the word "Discussion" near the top of the page), where
people propose to approve a version of an article. If three editors (in an
appropriate workgroup) agree that it's ready to go, or just one editor (in
an appropriate workgroup) who was not an author of the article, then the
article is approved. The hope and request is that the editors (and others
paying attention) will do the requisite fact-checking. However, that just
means a specific copy of the article is saved and made un-editable, but the
article continues to be editable on a new "draft" page (e.g.,
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Biology/Draft).
So the full process is just an infinite linear process with epiphenomenal
"approvals" being thrown off from time to time, like this (make sure you are
looking at this mail using "Plain Text" format, or this may not make sense):
Start article --> edit --> edit --> edit --> ...
\ \
approved approved
version version
Adding more steps than this would likely bring the whole system to a halt,
and the approval step alone is (CURRENTLY) very high-friction; there are
only 50+ articles approved, out of 5800+ articles in progress. Despite it
being as simple as it is, some people already complain that it is too
complicated! But this is because we haven't automated a lot of things that
can be automated. When they are, I fully expect our approval rate to shoot
up.
--Larry
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