User talk:George Swan

Welcome!

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. You'll probably want to know how to get started as an author. Just look at CZ:Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. Be sure to stay abreast of events via the Citizendium-L (broadcast) mailing list (do join!) and the blog. Please also join the workgroup mailing list(s) that concern your particular interests. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forums is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any constable for help, too. Me, for instance! Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun! Larry Sanger 14:35, 18 October 2007 (CDT)

What's this?

I.e., this? Stephen Ewen 22:48, 19 October 2007 (CDT)

Anyway, I think you just made a mistake. If not, let me know. It can easily be undeleted. Stephen Ewen 23:26, 19 October 2007 (CDT)

A very quick reply to your query

Thanks for your message on my Talk page. Unfortunately, I cannot reply in detail because I am about to catch a plane. I will be back in Greece on Tuesday and we can have some discussion after then. I think there are three issues related to what you are asking about, and all three need to be dealt with simultaneously. The first is the issue of neutrality, and as you can see some editors are not entirely happy with how the concept is played out. I am almost certain that this will be a problem for your topic, although in my view it should not be.

The second issue, is that of "no original research". As with WP, we have a prohibition on it here. I can understand the reason for that, but there are borderline cases, which may be your situation.

The third issue is that of relevance or appropriateness, as I understood you had a similar problem on WP. The reason that this comes up is that pure factual details do not of themselves tell us much about what is going on. Therefore, we need some analysis and interpretation of these facts, which people can then claim is actually original research and disallowed under the rules.

I hope that we can devise some framework within which you can put the material. I am aware through my own work how governments behave, and I follow the critical investigations and research on your topic quite carefully. However, there is a degree of conservatism about many of these things on CZ, and you should expect a lot of opposition to what is actually nothing more than intelligent and unbiased interpretation of all available data. People's ideas about their country, and how the world is run, go deep and tend to overbalance rational discourse rather too often -- in all walks of life.

Anyway, good luck and i will be available in a few days. --Martin Baldwin-Edwards 08:22, 27 October 2007 (CDT)

Well, thanks for what is really a very detailed reply for someone about to catch a plane.

Concerning neutrality, when I first read about the wikipedia's neutrality policy I remember it seemed like a goal one could approach asymptotically, but never fully acheive. Concerning neutrality here -- I am the newbie, and, to the extent I end up participating here, I will do my best to conform the majority consensus of what citizendium neutrality means. Among my choices are to pick selectively from among the material to which I am the sole author, only that material that uncontroversially fits here. It seems like there may be fora where these policy issues are still being shaped. Complying with the current concensus shouldn't prevent me from engaging in the dialogue and voicing opinions about how policies might be modified though should it?

Similarly, as a newbie I will do my best to conform to the citizendium's current consensus on original research. Sorry if I left the impression with you that I would allow myself to inject any of those private conclusions I shared into any of articles. I was careful not to on WP, and would be careful not to on CZ.

As I have read the introductory documents I have wondered how people reconcile neutrality to providing a gentle introduction suitable for undergrads. It seems to me the latter really does require the contributor making interpretations that could stretch neutrality to the breaking point and beyond.

Maybe no one has requested this before, but what I was hoping might be possible would be for me to get some help looking at the exising CZ articles that most closely resember those I am considering porting, and then developing a proposed outline of what I suggest porting. The proposal could contain some representative examples of candidate CZ versions of articles I adapted from my work on WP.

When I developed that material on WP I did so piecemeal, as I came across sources, without a plan. Porting it, from a plan would be better. I could start with the parts least likely to raise a controversy here.

More later.

Nice to meet you.

Cheers! George Swan 11:52, 27 October 2007 (CDT)