[Foundation-l] Should we offer to host citizendium?

[emijrp]

Hi all;

*In the case that Citizendium is going to close*, that I'm not sure yet, I
think that we have two debates. 1) Offering hosting to Citizendium 2)
Preserving the articles and images.

About the first question. I doubt WMF is going to offer hosting to
Citizendium. When Wikipedia passed Nupedia, it was forgot gradually, and
finally closed. I don't know if WMF has thought to revive Nupedia, but I
don't think so.

Wikipedia and her sister projects have an open design, everyone can edit.
Citizendium is not so open, it is an expert-written encyclopedia, so, I
don't think that it is a good idea to host such a project together with WMF
wikis.

About the second question. I think that there is no doubt, we (interested
people) have to preserve the data. *If Citizendium closes*, it would be nice
that WMF hosts a frozen copy of Citizendium in English Wikisource, as I
requested for Nupedia articles some weeks ago[1] (with little support). The
same for the two unique GNUPedia articles available.[2] This is part of the
human history trying to write an Internet encyclopedia. Also, we can try to
merge the contain of Citizendium into Wikipedia.

Interested people can download the current versions (not the complete
history : () of the articles here.[3] The bz2 is ok, but I can't unpack the
gzip one (correupted or not really a gzip file?).

Also, I'm downloading every single image from Citizendium, about 8000, and
their description pages which contain the license and uploader info.

Regards,
emijrp

[1]
http://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Wikisource:Scriptorium&diff=prev&oldid=2014056
[2] http://toolserver.org/~emijrp/wikipediaarchive/#gne
[3] http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Downloads

2010/11/12 John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com>

> On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 9:03 PM, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > 2010/11/12 John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com>:
> >> On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 8:13 PM, Gerard Meijssen
> >> <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> Hoi,
> >>> Providing help to an organisation that can be considered part of the
> >>> Wikimedia movement makes sense. The issue with Citizendium is that they
> >>> explicitly distance themselves from many of the basic corner stones of
> what
> >>> has made Wikipedia what it is.
> >>
> >> Which cornerstone is that?
> >>
> >
> > I think the most serious problem with them is that they do not follow
> > NPOV. Instead they follow a kind of biased-sympathetic-expert-POV.
>
> Is that systematic, symptomatic or merely evidenced in a small set of
> articles?
>
> I've seen lots of people point out specific problems with their
> content, but we have many problem articles too.
>
> > Anyway, I think it is worth helping Citzendium, but in a way to leave
> > their editorial policy freedom and clearly state, that they are not
> > going to be Wikimedia project, but they are a different approach,
> > interesting but not in line with some of our basic values such as
> > "anyone can edit on equal base" and "NPOV".
>
> I agree with everything except whether or not they are in line with
> our basic values.  They may not align with Wikipedia's values, but as
> a separate project they dont need to be; instead they need to fit
> within the core values that all our projects have in common.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Values
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Values
>
> --
> John Vandenberg
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>