CZ Talk:Charter/Archive 2

This talk page and its main page are dedicated to drafting a charter for Citizendium and should only be edited by those eight Citizens elected to the drafting Committee. Other Citizens, please comment on the dedicated thread at the Citizen Forum. Non-Citizens can comment in a separate thread at the non-Member Forum. The drafting period shall end when November 12, 2009 is over all around the globe.

Getting started

According to CZ:Charter drafting committee, we are supposed to base the drafting on CZ:Fundamentals. It's first point is "The nature of the project", which I have thus pasted into the draft page in order to get things rolling. Once we have agreed on the essence of this point, it will be more easy to proceed to other matters. I also think that, to reduce confusion in the interpretation of the terms used in the document, we should add links to appropriate pages in the main or CZ namespace, and if these pages do not exist yet, we should strive to create them. Keep in mind that any other Citizen can join the drafting of these pages, thus helping to clarify matters should we be unable to do so on our own (or vice versa). --Daniel Mietchen 21:08, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Here's some useful links to CZ:Home and the CZ:Policy_Outline page for reference. D. Matt Innis 00:22, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Point 6 should go, for several reasons. First, and I will elaborate on this, it is defining CZ with respect to being not-Wikipedia. Second, it's too fine-grained to be talking about specific markup and indexing concepts such as categories. Instead, we should be thinking of functional goals, such as better knowledge navigation, rather than features.

While there are those that believe the recent Nobel Peace Prize was awarded for the accomplishment of being not-Bush, we really have to break away from the idea of being not-Wikipedia, and state what we uniquely want to do. Point 1, therefore, is a little ambiguous, because there's no definition of "encyclopedia". We may well want to talk about the attributes of an ideal online encyclopedia, before trying to make it into draft text -- such an effort need not be lengthy. Perhaps a subpage, analogous to the CZ wishlist, talking about functions would be useful here. Howard C. Berkowitz 00:45, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

That's brings up a good question. Now that I look at it, we're supposed to be drafting "based on the Fundamentals". Maybe we should not be concentrating on whether we like the specific statements, but using them to draft how to make future policies such as "How to change the Neutrality policy", or "How the EIC will be elected", etc.. D. Matt Innis 00:56, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

redacted my false start! D. Matt Innis 00:57, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

"Based on" means, to me, that the Fundamentals are a guide. After all, the Fundamentals contain the statement, "The Charter will supersede the present Statement of Fundamental Policies, and it will include information about how it may be amended."

That being said, we need not rewrite everything. It may be, for example, that we agree completely with the spirit of the Neutrality Policy, but the experience of two years can give us ideas how to explain it in a manner both more clear and more effective. Howard C. Berkowitz 01:00, 16 October 2009 (UTC)