User:Anthony.Sebastian/Proposal to recruit academics

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Draft proposal begins here.

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Introduction

This draft proposal aims to develop, within Citizendium main space, a private space where academics, and other agreed-upon specialists, could, individually or in collaborative groups of their choosing, contribute to Citizendium individual articles or groups of related articles. Those articles would remain closed to editing by other uninvited citizens. The articles produced by those academics/specialists will appear as Main Articles in clustered format, i.e., with subpages.

The articles produced by those academics/specialists will be subject to approval status through peer-review by appropriate Editors (n=3), including external non-Citizendium experts if deemed necessary. Until approved they will be labeled as "preprints", or "article in progress".

An appropriate banner will head those articles, the banner indicating author, academic/specialist position (e.g., Jon Smit, Professor of Cognitive Science, University of California, Berkeley). If a collaborative group writes an article, all contributors will be named with title and affiliation.

The banner will indicate that the article is closed to editing by uninvited Citizens, who otherwise may ask questions, make comments, suggestions on the Talk page. If technically feasible, a second Talk page could be provided for exclusive use of the academics/specialists, for discussions among themselves.

What advantages does this offer over existing "Signed Articles" subpages?

Academics/specialists would feel more honored if their contributions appeared as main articles. Existing signed articles appear as an appendage to the main article, as they live within an already existing article cluster. Moreover, there may be no main article suitable for an academic/specialist to append her/his articles to.

Also, in developing their article as a main articles, the academic/specialist can exploit the full potential that the subpages offer for enhancing their article.

Why can the academics/specialists not write their articles as other Citizens do?

They could if they so chose, accepting edits by any registered user. In general, academics do not work that way, and undoubtedly wouldn't want to, though most would be open to questions-comments-suggestions, as discussed above. Many will write their articles offline, submitting them as finished products. If they revise them, in response to comments by Citizens, they might do so offline, resubmitting them as a revised version.

What if one or more Citizens wanted to write an article on the same topic?

Nothing restricts any Citizen(s) from preparing an article on the same topic. If the two articles had exactly the same title, one would be named Topic (academic/specialist), Topic (wiki authors), or some other such way to distinguish them.

Search would lead the user to a Disambiguation page that would inform the user of the two versions, with appropriate commentary about each article.

What types of articles would we want the academic/specialist to submit?

We would need to consider whether we want to exclude certain types of articles. Among the types of articles we might encourage:

Encyclopedia-type articles with pedagogic value on a given topic;
Review articles;
Hypothesis articles of high-quality, as found in numerous mainline journals;
Articles listing and discussing unanswered questions in a topic;
Original research articles;
Articles discussing the implications of recently published papers;

What advantages does this proposal offer academics/specialists?

A free online knowledge depository gives them a potentially large audience who can readily access/discover their work.
They can publish their work free-of-charge, unlike other open-source venues.
They can edit their work whenever new ideas and information become available; their work becomes a living thing.
They can satisfy their need to reach out to teach what they know.
They can have their work published (a) without review, as a 'preprint', or, (b) as 'peer-reviewed', as an approved article.
They can have their articles online for their collaborators to work on with them. Thus, they can work in a wiki mode with an exclusive group of collaborators.
They can allow their readers to print PDFs of their work without paying for a subscription.
They can their work freely distributed/reproduced with the proviso that it cannot be altered.