User talk:Terence Quilpie

Welcome!

Tasks: start a new article • add basic, wanted or requested articles • add definitions • add metadata • edit new pages

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start, and see Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, our help system and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forum is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any user or the editors for help, too. Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun! - Stephen Ewen 01:25, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

Also, since I have noticed you have imported a good number of Wikipedia articles recently, let me make sure to point you to CZ:How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles before importing any more. Stephen Ewen 01:25, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

Dr. Quilpie. I have responded to your comments on my talk page. Stephen Ewen 04:24, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

I replied again. Stephen Ewen 13:48, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

Aerospace articles

Dr. Quilpie, if I may--I have no doubt that there are some really excellent articles on Wikipedia, and that you are right that it would be pointless to regenerate them here. Our experience is that the Wikipedia versions of most of the articles we've been working on have been very poor, but that does not mean that these aerospace articles are not very appropriate.

There is another set of articles someone imported from Wikipedia here, about adders, and his idea is that he would like to maintain them here. What I've told him is that we don't simply want to mirror Wikipedia, and that, while I wouldn't delete the articles he's uploaded as long as he's committed to "watching over" them here on the Citizendium, I would actually prefer that he improve them in some way so that there is a significant difference between the CZ articles and the WP articles.

If you simply put the question, "Would you feel comfortable if we were to import a few hundred Wikipedia aerospace articles?" my answer would be "Yes, if you feel that you can maintain them and improve them here." Eventually, we will have many more engineers on board--we already have quite a few. We can probably "wake them up" by an effort such as this.

If there were some way to automatically import WP articles to CZ--if someone were to write a script to do that--it would be great. Unfortunately, no one has done so yet. As to why we decided to "unfork," the original discussion was long, [1] and we recently revisited the decision and there has been widespread support. [2] I summed up the issues in a blog post. [3]

I hope this helps. --Larry Sanger 00:09, 15 March 2007 (CDT)