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

[Tomasz Ganicz]

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.

Yes, of course But the difference is that we normally do not block
articles at the stage which was decieded by the expert to be perfect.
Homeopathy is their official "approved article". Anyway when I
randomly examined their approved artices they are in general OK. No
more biased than on average in Wikipedia. Cleaner and more consistent
the the ones in Wikipedia but usually no so detailed and having quite
often  kind of summary at the end, which tends to be an "expert final
essay about the issue".



> 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.

So, if our core value is NPOV understood as being independent from
political or religous POV i think they are with some their fixations
which is the result of their editing mechanism, not due to their
general intention. In fact I can agree we have similar problems,
although IMHO there is more hope to solve them due to our opennes  :-)

If our core value is to be open for editing by anyone - they claim
they are, but in fact they are rather not. We claim but in fact we
usually (not always, see the list of blocked articles or revised
versions) are :-)

With all other core values - i.e providing knowledge to all for free,
open licence policy, being independent from govermental/bussiness
influences - they perfectly fit with us.



-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html