Hi all, The Write-a-Thon went well, I think. Thanks to everyone. (And keep it up!)
We need some new nominees/action on our Article of the Week and New Draft of the Week! http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Article_of_the_Week http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:New_Draft_of_the_Week We've got some good new ones, too! I'm partial to "diaper," but I've been working on that one. ;-) http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Diaper I have another random request, which is to add relevant links copiously to articles, please! The density of possible relevant links is much higher than what I see on most of our articles. Adding links is easy and fun, and you can do it to any article, not just articles you happen to have started. This is much more important than I think most people realize. When you see an article with many wikilinks (i.e., "internal" links, links to other articles on the wiki), whether the linked-to articles exist yet or not, it's more exciting and interesting. When someone reads an article with many links, the natural reactions are: "I could learn more about this, or that, or that; what a wealth of knowledge!" and "Oh, they don't have an article about this; I could write something up quick." Meanwhile, an article without wikilinks, or with only a few wikilinks, one gets the sense that one is at a dead end. The article authors haven't facilitated your passage on to other relevant information, which is mildly depressing. "Hey," a thoughtful reader notices, "an article about such-and-such must exist, so why aren't they linking to from this mention of such-and-such? Are they embarrassed?" Wikilinks are crucial to building the wiki. Along these lines I should reiterate a point I've made before. Some people say they don't like copious wikilinks, even if they are relevant, when the linked-to articles don't exist yet, because links to nonexistent articles are "ugly" and potentially confusing. Well--not really, not enough to matter. If you say this, you evidently weren't there when Wikipedia got started. In the early days, most of our links were "red links." Indeed, we were bothered by those links. But instead complaining about their lack of aesthetic appeal, we were motivated to create new articles. Red links were instrumental in building Wikipedia. CZ must follow the same strategy if we are to succeed. By the way...is anybody going to be bold and declare a decision, over on the forums, about a new color for article-less links? :-) Many people don't like the grey. Well...sorry...I won't be doing so. It is wrong that I have to make a decision in order for it to be "official." That shouldn't be! After all, this is a collaborative, community project. So I've decided: if you (somebody, anybody) doesn't boldly take responsibility, it won't get done...we'll be stuck with the present grey. If I keep taking responsibility, it prevents you from doing so, and I end up having far too much to do! :-) --Larry _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
