2010/11/12 John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com:
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 8:13 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@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. The mechanism in which they have an expert leaders who can make final editoral decissions made them vulnerable to these experts POV. It produces devasting results in some humanities areas as well as some other controversial issues. If you have diffrent POV than the expert in charge of the article you cannot overcome that obvious POV because you are merely a "non-expert citizen". For example see their article about homeopathy, which is terribly pro-homeopathy biased:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Homeopathy
because the final shape of the article was in charge of the person who is active pro-homeopathy advocate and proved to be "expert" by providing a diploma in homeopathy issued by one of the US homeopathy organisation. Therefore, scientific mainstream medical POV over the issue is almost ignored.
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".