User:Jim Butler

Hello! I'm a licensed acupuncturist with a prior career as a chemist. I earned my Master's degree from Harvard University (1989) and worked in pharmaceutical research and development. In 1996 I decided to change careers and start a family. I studied acupuncture under distinguished Chinese doctors at the Maryland Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine, graduating in 2000, and then began a private practice. I have a son with nonverbal autism and serve as a board member of the Autism National Committee.

I've been editing Wikipedia since early 2006. I joined CZ in April '07, but (as on WP) edit very sporadically due to real-life obligations.

Regarding this site, I'd hoped for a complete fork of WP: more content, more readers. Readers are gonna read the same flawed stuff whether it's here or on WP; I think it would have been better to have forked pretty much all of it here and then set about improving it, tagging improved articles as we went (much as we do now anyway). When people can't find articles on widely-known topics like apricot, mental retardation, and Nobel Laureates, they'll just blow off CZ and go back to WP. It's unreasonable to expect CZ editors to import article after article from WP when a bulk fork would have worked better. Alas, not starting out as a complete fork of WP may well have doomed this project from the start....

Nonetheless, my experience on WP has convinced me that this site still has the potential to become the best wiki for substantive topics, especially science (unless there's already a more robust science-specific wiki someplace). WP is fine for popular culture and trivia, but for science and many other topics that fall under the purview of academia, where knowledge is not democratic, WP will never fare well due to lack of expert oversight.

Sites I own:

• Autvocate - Disabilities advocacy
• Arlington Acupuncture - My private practice