User talk:Tom Ruen

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! Robert Tito 10:45, 3 February 2007 (CST)

What is this for?

I'm unsure how it can compete with Wikipedia, sure it can not compete on breadth, and so I see it can only maybe have a chance to compete on depth in specific fields by experts. The only incentive for experts to come here over wikipedia is a feeling of safety - that edits will not be corrupted by anonymous users and such.

The ideal for me might be a place where experts feel comfortable in offering their published work that could be reviewed and improved by others. This would make much more printed works available online.

The secondary ideal would be a place where experts could offer their prepublished work for feedback, which could ultimately affect what is published. This is where Wikipedia can not tread, while I don't know of the Citizens' Compendium can.

My not so secret agenda would be to convince experts to move their online publishing from personal sites to a place like this. They could do this if they felt comfortable others would be watching over their pages, and consulting them with changes.

Anyway, I've not read enough here to know if this is a hopeless goal. I only offer it as a possible vision to fill a needed gap.

Tom Ruen

Tom, welcome--I wish I didn't have to start our interaction with a correction, but user pages are for bios, not for essays about the project (or much of anything else, for that matter). As you can see, we are not as permissive as WP is about what people may do with their user pages. On the proper use of user pages, please see CZ:How to get started with the Citizendium pilot.

As to the content of your comment, CZ might prove quite able to compete with WP on both breadth and depth. It is already making excellent progress toward this aim; it will merely take time. See this post for my reasoning. Further discussion is best done at http://forum.citizendium.org/ --Larry Sanger 11:54, 3 February 2007 (CST)