CZ:Charter

This page is dedicated to drafting a charter for Citizendium and should only be edited by those eight Citizens elected to the drafting Committee. The talk page is also reserved for them to discuss the evolution of the document. Other Citizens, please comment on the dedicated thread at the Citizen Forum. Non-Citizens can comment in a separate thread at the non-Member Forum. The drafting period shall end when November 12, 2009 is over all around the globe.

See also: CZ:Charter drafting/What are we?

Name

The name of the project is Citizendium (herein also known as CZ).

Statement of purpose

The mission of Citizendium is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content collaborative under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

The nature of the project

1. The ultimate goal of the Citizendium community, a global group of collaborators, is to create the most reliable and largest comprehensive encyclopedia that they can.
2. The Citizendium provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of projects and other endeavours which serve this charter.
3. If an "approved" or "certified" version of an article is available, that version will be presented to the public by default; in that case, viewing unapproved versions will require further mouseclicks for the public, and such versions will be clearly labelled as unapproved, and users will be instructed not to rely upon them. Articles will carry a reliability rating, and the most reliable version will be that presented to the public by default. The rating will come with an appropriate explanation [disclaimer?]
4. The Citizendium will be a wiki. Edits will not normally be required to be approved by editors before appearing on the wiki.
5. The Citizendium will be owned and ultimately controlled by a non-profit organization.
6. The Citizendium will not sell advertisements. There may be unobtrusive non-profit sponsorship statements, but sponsors will have no editorial influence over the project, and enforceable, adequate oversight of this rule will be in place. Similarly, no grants that make specific editorial demands will be accepted.
7. The Citizendium will be devoted to simplicity, both in presentation of content and in the organization of the community. Many features as implemented by Wikipedia, such as subject categories and so-called user boxes, may be eliminated from (or never included in) the Citizendium. Special roles will not be created without excellent reason, and bureaucracy will be kept to the absolute minimum necessary.
8. The Citizendium will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, and in perpetuity.