Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Citizendium Porting

The following discussion is an archived proposal of the WikiProject below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the project's talk page (if created) or the WikiProject Council). No further edits should be made to this page.

The resulting WikiProject was created at Wikipedia:WikiProject Citizendium Porting

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Wikipedia:WikiProject Citizendium Porting

Description

A project to import content from Citizendium's Approved Articles (and possibly other levels of articles if there is sufficient manpower) into the corresponding Wikipedia articles and periodically resynchronize when the Citizendium source articles are modified. Cybercobra (talk) 09:21, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Started!

Since we have at least the recommended 5 now, I'd say the project's started! Yay! Check out the

• Official WikiProject page

--Cybercobra (talk) 21:55, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Support

Please specify whether or not you would join the project.

1. Cybercobra (talk) 09:21, 24 June 2009 (UTC) [would join]
2. I'd absolutely join. – Toon 22:27, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
3. Taku (talk) 23:25, 25 June 2009 (UTC)
4. I like it. Fingerz 13:12, 27 June 2009 (UTC)
5. As a (rather inactive) contributor to Cz [1], I would certainly be interested now that the licenses are compatible. DGG (talk) 21:07, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Discussion

What do you think of once the main goal of importing CZ articles is done, we attempt to rewrite them so that they can be relicensed under the GFDL aswell? 189.105.109.94 (talk) 20:44, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

No, I think rewriting them would be quite a waste of effort. CC-BY-SA > GFDL anyway, so why bother? After the initial importing, the project will track newly Approved articles in Citizendium and import them, and will periodically check whether the Approved articles have been updated and pull in those changes. --Cybercobra (talk) 22:53, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

• How do you propose to maintain quality while merging articles? I compared their wheat article with ours - both articles are decent, neither is great, and while they are fairly similar (since theirs is, in origin, a fork of ours), they aren't similar enough that you can just cut a paragraph of text out of one and insert it into the other. And it's going to be more difficult if the articles don't share a common history.

I never said the project would be easy. It obviously requires skillful editing to do such a merge. --Cybercobra (talk) 18:22, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

• On a similar note, how do you propose dealing with situations in which the two articles do not agree?

Well, if one was cited and the other was not, the cited one should win. Otherwise, treat it as another POV to present. If the dispute is purely factual, the one with a better source wins (or present both, depending on the situation). More generally, Wikipedia's NPOV and RS policies apply. --Cybercobra (talk) 18:20, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

• The third issue is NPOV. Citizendium has a top-down system that allows "experts" to control articles. Vertebral subluxation is one of the articles on the list. The CZ article is managed by a chiropractor, which creates concerns when you're dealing with a controversial field.

Again, Wikipedia's policies apply when doing the merging (as mentioned on the draft project page). One should not do these merges completely blindly, although I don't think most articles will be subject to the same level of potential bias as that particular case. --Cybercobra (talk) 18:25, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Just wondering if you've thought about issues like these. It's hard to evaluate the viability of a project like this without seeing its guidelines for dealing with issues like these. Thanks. Guettarda (talk) 18:07, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

I am in fact one of these "experts", (whom they call editors, as distinct from contributors), for the Biology workgroup there--and I have in fact approved several articles, and sent back others for minor or major changes. When there is doubt, these decisions are done jointly, & there's provisions for resolving disagreements. Approval means something different than our Good Article -- it means also that the article is the proper approach to the subject, over other possible ways of doing it, and sometimes there is major disagreement about that.

The process for approval is extremely cumbersome, and I would not assume that articles that have not yet been approved are not of very good quality. Whether one can assume that their approved articles are satisfactory articles here, must be judged according to our rules, which are different, but they usually would be. I say usually, because some of the topics here which have the greatest dissension have similar problems there, & alternative medicine is certainly one of them--the Subluxation article [2] was approved by a separate "Healing Arts" workgroup [3]. distinct from the ones on Health Sciences,[4] which covers conventional medicine. On controversial topics experts are no more likely to agree than anyone else, and are prone to extremely tedious academic quarrels--which is one of the reasons why I almost entirely work at Wikipedia. (Others are the tedium of their approval process, the tendency of the approval process to lead to OWNership, the more interesting community here, the Cz policy of being Family Friendly rather than NOTCENSORED--I was in fact threatened with expulsion if I continued to challenge Larry Sanger on that, and, especially the former incompatibility between the licenses--I had hoped initially to write for both simultaneous.) DGG (talk) 21:37, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the project's talk page (if created) or at the WikiProject Council). No further edits should be made to this page.