CZ Talk:Election July-August 2013/Referenda/4a

Managing Editor rejects this referendum

The Managing Editor rejects this referendum. It destroys a foundational pillar of Citizendium, its policy of verifying real names to protect itself from the types of mischief and harm described here.

You can't do that. This is a charter referendum, any pillar can be changed by a charter referendum. James Yolkowski 03:29, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Whatever. I've requested a formal appeal of this decision [1]. James Yolkowski 03:44, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I think Anthony has grounds to reject this referendum because it doesn't address all the points made in his original rejection. If you were to rewrite Articles 38 and 40, and preferably include some kind of privacy safeguard (like flagged revisions, preventing unverified users from emailing others, etc.), it could work. John Stephenson 10:48, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Additional comments by the Managing Editor

Article 2 of the Charter reads:

Citizenship shall be open to anyone who fulfills the basic conditions for participation as defined by the Management Council—including registering according to the real names policy—and agrees to abide by this Charter.

Your referendum would append the following:

Creating an account shall not require manual validation or approval (other than validation of an e-mail address), but accounts suspected of not corresponding to the real name of the person using that account may be suspended or other sanctions imposed, or reasonable validation of identity requested.

I interpret the first clause (“Creating an account shall not require manual validation or approval (other than validation of an e-mail address)”) a contradiction of Article 2. Without manual validation and approval Citizendium cannot know if the name submitted at application for account is the applicant’s real name or a bogus name.

The clause also contradicts the Charter’s Preamble, which reads:

The Citizendium is a collaborative effort to collect, structure, and cultivate knowledge and to render it conveniently accessible to the public for free. It is built online by volunteers who contribute under their real names and agree to this social covenant centered around trust.

Citizendium cannot honor its mandate to require its members to contribute under their real names if we don’t know they’ve registered under their real names.

Your referendum could seriously impair the quality of Citizendium, and greatly increase its administrative burden. Anthony.Sebastian 20:37, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

When CZ was founded, and when we wrote the charter, and then when we ratified the charter, the CZ community held to a fundamental view of itself as a constitutional corpus built on trust; that vision rests on the real names policy (Article 2). To dilute the real names policy is to shatter the foundation of CZ. Russell D. Jones 23:39, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

In the discussion someone posted a link to Knowino. Not having been there recently, I thought I'd have a look and see how they were getting on. I found the recent changes almost entirely concerned with spam. That was also the case with Wikisage before Guido disabled account creation, and it also formed a large part of the activity on Wikinfo before it went down. Wikipedia may have a large army of volunteers to deal with that sort of thing, but our protection is real-name verification. Or can James suggest something none of those sites has thought of? Peter Jackson 08:45, 26 July 2013 (UTC)