[Foundation-l] Should we offer to host citizendium?

Fri Nov 12 10:03:11 UTC 2010

2010/11/12 John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com>:
> On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 8:13 PM, Gerard Meijssen
> <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hoi,
>> Providing help to an organisation that can be considered part of the
>> Wikimedia movement makes sense. The issue with Citizendium is that they
>> explicitly distance themselves from many of the basic corner stones of what
>> has made Wikipedia what it is.
>
> Which cornerstone is that?
>

I think the most serious problem with them is that they do not follow
NPOV. Instead they follow a kind of biased-sympathetic-expert-POV. The
mechanism in which they have an expert leaders who can make final
editoral decissions  made them vulnerable to these experts POV. It
produces devasting results in some humanities areas as well as some
other controversial issues. If you have diffrent POV than the expert
in charge of the article you cannot overcome that obvious POV because
you are merely a "non-expert citizen". For example see their article
about homeopathy, which is terribly pro-homeopathy biased:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Homeopathy

because the final shape of the article was in charge of the person who
is active pro-homeopathy advocate and proved to be "expert" by
providing a diploma in homeopathy issued by one of the US homeopathy
organisation. Therefore, scientific mainstream medical POV over the
issue is almost ignored.

Anyway, I think it is worth helping Citzendium, but in a way to leave
their editorial policy freedom and clearly state, that they are not
going to be Wikimedia project, but they are a different approach,
interesting but not in line with some of our basic values such as
"anyone can edit on equal base" and "NPOV".

-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html