User talk:Daniel Mietchen/PR-2010-013

There have been at least two kinds of problems

One, as you mention, clearly is formatting and style.

Another, however, is quality, which can apply both to things where one is the primary author, and is not. Sometimes "author" is blurry: a large number of articles on fairly obscure WWII ships were imported, but they had been adapted into WP from the public domain Dictionary of American Fighting Ships. They were just valuable enough that I spent quite a bit of time doing copy edit.

Far worse, however, is the case where someone decides, for obscure reasons, that CZ needs an article on some subject on which the importer is not terribly knowledgeable, and then claims it's adequate and others can clean up whatever was needed. Perhaps for the only time in history, MBE and I agreed it was a bad article.

I certainly don't see a reason why I should't reformat a PDF of a PPT, of a tutorial I gave, part 1 of 2. I also see it reasonable enough for me to ask, as a courtesy, if my colleague who gave part 2 minds if I adapt his. Both, incidentally, always were public domain. Howard C. Berkowitz 01:05, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Revised phrasing benefits CZ

The revised phrasing:

Articles originating from other sources are not allowed to be imported into Citizendium's main namespace without having been adapted to Citizendium's formatting and style, taking copyright and article quality into consideration.

That phrasing would allow us to import quality articles from open-sources after they've been adapted to our formatting and style requirements. That would enhance the value of CZ, it would seem.

I like it. —Anthony.Sebastian 07:59, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Addressing concerns

Daniel, in answer to your forum message I pointed to PR-2010-003 where the discussion of the proposal is documented. I thought that it would not be necessary to repeat the arguments in the forum.

I have expressed my view on this issue several times in the forum:
I accepted the proposal because I am convinced that CZ has to develop its own content. It is not meant to be a "selected articles from the web". Instead of importing an article, the content of this article should be used -- preferably together with other sources -- to write a new article from scratch. Simply adapting style and format is not enough, I think.

Faster growth is (perhaps) a short-term advantage -- original content is more important.

--Peter Schmitt 19:29, 24 December 2010 (UTC)