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)

Peter, that is a thoughtful and wise response. Perhaps, though, there are situations where both direct importation with little change, and importation with substantial modification (e.g., Anthony's proposal for a restricted-access import space) may be appropriate.

Direct import, possibly into a special namespace, may make sense for source material that supports mainspace articles, but might not be readily available. For example, under U.S. law, most research papers written by government employees must not be copyrighted. If a government employee writes such a paper and submits it to a copyrighted journal, the paper may not normally be available other than to the subscribers of that journal. Assume the paper is cited in a CZ article. In order to make it as accessible as possible, it could be wise, and perfectly legal, for a suscriber to that journal to download the copyright-free article and put it in appropriate CZ space.

This is not general "selected articles from the Web", but "selected unrestricted documents from the Deep Web, which are cited by other CZ articles."

Another area of import might involve transformation. For example, I might well take one of my NANOG tutorials, which is not copyrighted, but is a PowerPoint presentation, and with minimal content change rework it into wiki format. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:59, 24 December 2010 (UTC)