CZ:The Author Role

"What's the big picture?"

As an author, you are the lifeblood of the Citizendium. You collaboratively write encyclopedia articles and help supplement them with things like bibliographies and image galleries (see CZ:Subpages for the full list of supplements). You also benefit from the "gentle expert oversight" of Citizendium editors - real-life bona-fide experts in their field - who can certify articles you help write as meeting certain approval standards befitting of quality and accurate encyclopedia articles. If you are a particularly active author, you will soon discover how you have become part of a vibrant online community where you discuss with others the best way to craft article content, debate project policies and development, and sometimes even joke around. What is more, you can do all this with a mission in mind: to help create an encyclopedia of unrivaled quality that is free to the world (see Why Citizendium?).

"Okay, I get the big picture. How do I get started?"

It's really easy, trust us.

• Begin articles! Do you know a topic enough to provide at least a starting point to an encyclopedia article about it? Then start a new article! No one assigns work to authors. It is your own interests that should guide what your authoring. Still, if you'd like some ideas, you can look over the lists of topics at our Core Articles Initiative (click along the gray tabs atop the blue box up top) or our User-Requested Articles.

• Add to articles. You can join in where others have already been at work. Part of the power of Citizendium is that we collaborate globally and produce more and much better articles that way.

If you get stuck, just ask these friendly folks for help.

"I think I'm ready to get started. Is there anything else I should know first?"

There are several things

Join a workgroup.

See Workgroups in the left-hand column, under "project pages"? (You might have to scroll up.) Click on that. You can add yourself as an author to any workgroup. If you do, please join the group's mailing list. Then you can look at the recent changes, look over the offerings so far, and--maybe most importantly--expand our content about basic topics, i.e., the most famous people, the most important events, the most fundamental concepts, etc.

Monitor project-wide recent changes.

From any page at all, look to the left, under "project pages," for the "Recent changes" link. You might need to scroll up to see it. Click that and explore the links you see. That will give you an idea of what has been going on on the wiki lately. Note that you can opt to view up to 500 changes at a time. This can be great fun: you can help others out and talk about what you're doing, either on the article's talk page or on the person's "user talk" page. (Go to the person's user page and then hit the "discussion" tab.)

Look into our latest initiatives.

We often have some community-wide initiatives going on, that you can join. Please do!

How does collaboration work?

A robust wiki is not just collaborative, it's strongly collaborative. Articles are unsigned, so new contributors don't feel they're stepping on the toes of the previous author(s). (You can still see who has worked on an article, however, in the page history: click the "history" tab.) Authors can and do take pride in their own work, but individual articles are unowned--or they are owned and managed by the whole community. Neither an author who has contributed the bulk of an article's content, nor an editor who has responsibility for content decisions, can claim that an article is exclusively his or hers. Instead, we all take responsibility, and mostly we negotiate (on talk pages) to a mutually acceptable compromise.

This system is, on reflection, astonishing. Recently, for the first time in history, global groups of people, working in "real time," have been creating content without any single person being solely responsible for it. Moreover, this content is free forever--so, if it's good enough, people will be inspired to improve it indefinitely. This is an opportunity to create vast amounts of content that represents the full spectrum of human understanding, in a way both credible and neutral. And free!

Why not just write for Wikipedia?

As a prospective author, you may have questions that we can address effectively.

One question is simple: why not write for Wikipedia instead? We don't wish to be disrespectful to "that other community," but there are some very good reasons.

• We have virtually no vandalism, and very few of the "difficult" sorts who are constantly pushing their own idiosyncratic points of view. Several people, independently, have said that we're "Wikipedia for grown-ups." That's because we require real names, at least a brief (and accurate) bio, and the contributor's agreement to follow our Statement of Fundamental Policies.
• We have a healthy, reasonable respect for expert knowledge. We make mistakes, of course--they're easy to find in early drafts, which many of our articles are--but you will find relatively few attempts to pass off guesswork and idiosyncratic opinion as expert knowledge.
• A lesser-known reason is that the Citizendium stands for readability and narrative coherence. If you're interested in writing articles that people want to read all the way through, this is the place to do it.

But, you ask, what are our prospects? They are fairly good. In our wiki's first nine months, we created about as many words as Wikipedia did in its first nine, and our wiki is about as active as Wikipedia was after that amount of time (as Citizendium Editor-in-Chief and Wikipedia co-founder, Larry Sanger, recalls). We have added nearly 3,000 articles and some five million words after about ten months (the first five being a private pilot project). And we're expanding into other kinds of reference content in ways Wikipedia has not tried.

In short, we have the better model, and arguably, we are on track to replicate Wikipedia-style growth. As in Wikipedia's case, it will no doubt take some years before our metrics are very impressive. But we're on our way. And we're in it for the long haul!

But why help create a free reference work at all?

On this question, see

What to do

So, what should you do as an author?

Write!

Got an article idea? Go to work! Or look for requested articles in Requested Articles.

Join a workgroup.

See Workgroups in the left-hand column, under "project pages"? (You might have to scroll up.) Click on that. You can add yourself as an author to any workgroup. If you do, please join the group's mailing list. Then you can look at the recent changes, look over the offerings so far, and--maybe most importantly--expand our content about basic topics, i.e., the most famous people, the most important events, the most fundamental concepts, etc.

Monitor project-wide recent changes.

From any page at all, look to the left, under "project pages," for the "Recent changes" link. You might need to scroll up to see it. Click that and explore the links you see. That will give you an idea of what has been going on on the wiki lately. Note that you can opt to view up to 500 changes at a time. This can be great fun: you can help others out and talk about what you're doing, either on the article's talk page or on the person's "user talk" page. (Go to the person's user page and then hit the "discussion" tab.)

Look into our latest initiatives.

We often have some community-wide initiatives going on, that you can join. Please do!

See also

Home

The jumping-off place for all community pages. Plus, a bulletin board.

Getting Started

Everything you need to get started.

Article Mechanics

A guide to mechanics and style. Must-read for frequent writers.

Introduction to CZ for Wikipedians

We do things differently here, but not that differently.

How to edit an article

Technical help; how to use MediaWiki.

How to use talk pages

One of the crucial tools of a wiki, where we explain edits and come to agreements.

CZ Authors

A list of Citizendium authors.

The Editor Role

So, what do those editors do, anyway?