User talk:Jim Earl

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Welcome Page

Welcome to Citizendium as a new author! We're very glad you've joined us. We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start. You'll probably also want to know how to get started as an author. Just look at Getting Started for other helpful "startup" pages, and at CZ:Home for a complete listing of help and other community pages. If you wish, just ask me to create a "personal sandbox" for you where you can test out editing and writing articles. If you need help to get going, it is a good idea to join our discussion forums. That's where we discuss policy, proposals or technical problems. You can ask any constable for help, too. Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and thank you! We appreciate your willingness to share your expertise, and we hope to see you begin actively editing and contributing to Citizendium. Milton Beychok 07:40, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

About our articles

Jim, I think it might be helpful if I explained how we rank our articles at Citizendium . All of our articles are assigned a status when initially created:

Status 4 = Articles imported from Wikipedia or elsewhere, which should be completely reviewed/re-written and put into Citizendium (CZ) style as soon as possible if not sooner. In general, we frown upon such articles.
Status 3 = Stub articles Very short, one or two paragraph articles.
Status 2 = Developing articles. This is probably what most of our articles are.
Status 1 = Developed articles ready for nomination to be approved.
Approved articles

All of our articles (before achieving "approved" status) include this comment on the main article page: This is a draft article, under development and not meant to be cited; you can help to improve it. These "unapproved" articles are completely available for any Citizen (a registered member of CZ) to edit. improve or to expand.

Once an article achieves "approved status" it is protected (locked). But at the same time a copy is created and designated as a "draft" and that draft is also completely available for any Citizen to edit or to expand. Subsequently, after the "draft" has been significantly edited/revised, the article may be nominated for "re-approval".

All of our articles (approved or unapproved) are publicly visible to the general public (unregistered members). At the moment, we have 15,880 articles at different stages of development, of which 156 have achieved "approved" status.

One again, welcome to Citizendium! Milton Beychok 07:50, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi Jim

I am a pretty new contributor to CZ myself. I hope we can collaborate on a few articles as it can be lonely to write all by oneself. I contributed articles on Coriolis force, Magnetic moment and a few other physics articles that you might find it useful to contribute to.

Best wishes, John R. Brews 15:49, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

By the way, you might take a look at some of the help pages, for example, CZ: List-defined references, John R. Brews 15:55, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Some ideas for contributions

Dear Jim, welcome aboard CZ. Milt and John have already given you some hints as to how things work here in general, and I wish to add some more practical suggestions on what possibilities you have to contribute. For a start, I just took some of the keywords from the information you supplied upon registration, and display below the current state of related CZ articles (for icon documentation, see Template:Rpl/Doc):

Rather than going to Template:Rpl/Doc, here is a simple explanation of the status icons: