CZ:Getting Started

Welcome to the Citizendium pilot project!

This is a general orientation to contributing and becoming part of the community, 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).

If you want a general introduction to the project, not just to contributing, see our introduction.

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.

Er...what's going on here?

For folks who haven't had experience with the software that runs CZ, called "Mediawiki," here are some helpful tips. See how many you already knew:

• The red links lead to blank pages. Click on one and you can start a new article.
• When you're looking at an article, across the top of the page you see a bunch of tabs. Here's what they do:
  • article: display the article
  • discussion: the "talk" page, where you go to discuss how the article should be edited
  • history: a record of all the edits of the article; you can view every single version ever saved!
  • watch: clicking on this adds the article to your "watch" list, which you can then access via the link "my watchlist" in the upper right

Need to finish this section...pointers to left-side links

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.

How to collaborate on an existing article (and using talk pages)

Many people spend their time working on pages that other people have started. If the page creator is still hanging around, you'll have to collaborate with that person, and anyone else interested, in crafting the article.

So, how do a bunch of strangers manage to create a coherent encyclopedia article? It is one of life's mysteries, perhaps. Generally, though, it's like this: you see that a sentence needs rewording; so you reword it. Or the article needs a whole new section about something; so you add it. Or the article has much flabby prose; so you make it concise. Or you just know a lot about the subject and see much to change; so you go through and make a thorough overhaul.

In doing this, however, you have to work with others, and this often requires sensitivity and finesse. You might have deleted a sentence it took someone else five minutes to craft, so why doesn't the person become quite angry and stalk away, or abuse you? Well, such unpleasantness can happen, and on Wikipedia, it too frequently does. But it doesn't always happen (even on Wikipedia), and it doesn't have to happen. We can avoid such unpleasantness as a rule because we are all committed to working together. And we know that working together means changing other people's work, making compromises, or (far better) coming up with a solution that satisfies everyone better than either side had it to begin with. The fluid nature of the text allows for such creative, positive solutions, and the expectation of such solutions in turn allows us to avoid conflict.

To collaborate effectively, keep a few things in mind: look at the talk page regularly. Be polite and respectful. If you are angry, calm down and take a break before you write or do something rash. And if you are dealing with a person who really is unreasonable, do not "take matters into your own hands" by cussing the person out, but ask a constable to intervene. That's what they're there for--to calm folks down and come to a sensible solution to complex problems of interaction.

What's a good article like?

A good article satisfies many standards. It is an encyclopedia article, first of all, and is accurate, neutral, coherent, well-written, pitched at the university student level, not original research, family-friendly, and legal and responsible.

There are a number of article naming conventions we would like to adopt--many of them are the same as Wikipedia's--and which can (or will) be found at naming conventions. The most important is that a word in an article name should be lower case, unless is consistently written (as part of a sentence) in the upper case. Another important convention is that the common names for things should be used in preference to the recondite or obscure, although this may have a few exceptions.

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.

All of the following links are to the left.

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.

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."

To have all the latest project-wide announcements, make sure you're subscribed to Citizendium-L and, if you're an editor, Citizendium-editors. For outward-facing announcements, as opposed to more internal sorts of announcements, there's a project blog.

If you have general questions, you can ask in many places, but one place we've set aside is a certain board on the forums. Just click here and (after you've registered) type in your question.

Finally, administrative notices for people working here on the wiki (e.g., "the wiki will be going down at midnight tonight") can be found on the notice board.

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)