CZ:Getting Started

Welcome to the Citizendium pilot project!

This is a general orientation for new contributors. This is a comprehensive summary, but it is just a summary; there are links to pages with more detail interspersed below (right now, many of them haven't been started).

What makes us different?

We're glad to have you here and hope you'll join our friendly little (but growing!) community as an active contributor. What makes us different? Well, for one thing, we're all contributing under our own real names. We take responsibility for our own work, and we like to think we're a bit more civil than your average Internet community. For another thing, there are editors working right alongside authors. Editors can make decisions about articles in their areas of expertise, but for the most part, we collaborate just as folks do on Wikipedia--only with more collegiality. Editors also have a special task here that doesn't exist on Wikipedia: they can approve articles.

We aren't Wikipedia. On January 20, we started an experiment. Although we started the pilot project as a fork of Wikipedia, we decided to try "unforking," i.e., deleting all the inactive articles, leaving us with only articles that we'd worked on. We want to develop our own community, with our own rules and guidelines that might, in fact, be quite different from Wikipedia's. A few differences, apart from the real names requirement and the presence of editors, are that we do not use "in group" abbreviations like "POV," and we really do take our neutrality policy seriously. Also, we don't permit user boxes on user pages; nor do we permit essays linked from user pages. Finally, our project governance, which is still under rapid development, will be quite different. We have a number of non-negotiable policies, and new policies will not be adopted by an impossible "consensus" but by vote of democratically selected representatives.

Be bold!

One of the first things you must realize is that you've got to be bold if this project is going to work. It is natural to be cautious about editing stuff that other people have written. The fact that there are many highly-educated types here makes some people afraid to touch the wiki, period. But this is a huge mistake. We want and need the participation of a wide array of people. This isn't an experts-only project in the least; most of our registered contributors are, in fact, authors, not (expert) editors. Also, keep in mind that most people here are quite friendly. So far, anyway, we've had very little unpleasantness here.

So, please, be bold about contributing. Want to start a new article on a subject? Please do! You don't need to ask anyone's permission. Want to fix someone's spelling or grammar? Dive in, this is a collaboration. Want to add a new section, or revamp a bibliography? Add, revamp, and edit away!

But before you edit an article that seems pretty far along, have a look at the article's "talk" page (press the "discussion" tab at the top of the screen) and check for comments that people might have made. On the use of the "talk page," see below.

Under Construction, or, it's better to add something editable than nothing at all

The Citizendium, like Wikipedia and virtually all wikis, could have an "under construction" sign on every page. Wikis are not conducive to instant perfection; high quality is achieved iteratively, gradually, over time and usually after quite a bit of interaction with others.

What does this mean? It means: go ahead, add something. It doesn't have to be perfect, it only has to be editable. In other words, if someone else won't have to delete what you've added in order to make progress on the article, then add away.

This means that we will tolerate what are called "stubs" or "stub entries." These are short entries, just one or two sentences. Just please don't go around creating lots and lots of stubs. If you're motivated to do that much work, please focus on just a few articles.

How to start a new page!

If you've never edited a wiki before, here's how to get started. It's easy--trust us. If you want to follow along, open a new window or print out a copy of this page first.

• Let's make a test article, not a real article. Start in the Sandbox. Notice the "edit" tab near the top of the page? You can click that. Go ahead and click it. That big text box that pops up is where you can edit the page, about as easily as you edit an e-mail.

• To create a new article, all you have to do is type "test article" (or the name of the article you want to create), but place [[ and ]] around it, so you get something like this: [[test article]]

• Then look (or scroll) down below the text box you're writing in. Look for the "Save page" button. Press it. Voila, you have edited the article! You have also created a link to an as-yet nonexistent article. On the article, look for the text you added. It should be there as a red link.

• Click on the red link. This pulls up another text box, just like the one you saw before, except that it is completely empty. So now you can go to town writing your new article.

For more details about the ins and outs of editing wiki pages, see How to Edit the Citizendium.

Get plugged in to the community

If you really want to have fun here, and you want to stay motivated, you need to get plugged in to the community. To do that, you need a few pointers about where "the action" is going on.

First, the serious fun of wiki-watching consists largely of following developments on the recent changes page, linked on the left under "project pages". Virtually everything that goes on on this wiki can be observed from a God's-eye perspective there. You can see what articles other people are working on. You can see if articles you have been working on have been changed. You can see who has been active (and when!). And as a result of all this, you can join in with others! If you see an article on a topic you're interested in under development, you can add your wisdom. See the fine art of browsing the recent changes page.

Second, follow what's going on on the CZ forums. This is the big community discussion area. There are hundreds of categories of topics; you're bound to find something of interest, and someone who will discuss it with you (there are about 500 members as of January 2007). If you want to see the latest posts, scroll to the bottom of the front page and look for the little link titled "View the most recent posts on the forum."

Third, make sure you're subscribed to Citizendium-L and, if you're an editor, Citizendium-editors.

Some faux pas to avoid (but remember that "be bold" business!)

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Note to persons editing this page: when finished, if you have created any links to any new/planned project page, make a link to that planned page from CZ:Project Home. If the link goes under the "Policy" section, then add it also to CZ:Policy Outline. --Larry Sanger 16:39, 21 January 2007 (CST)