User:Jitse Niesen/Proposals system report
Proposals continue to slowly make their way through the Proposals System. However, progress is still rather slow; only three proposals have completed the trip. Two were accepted in February and one this month. The successful proposal is to adopt an approval system for CZ: pages, mirroring the approval process for articles. This is now policy, explained on CZ:Approval for CZ pages. Well done, Gareth Leng, for bringing this proposal to fruition! Who will be the next one?
A number of proposals have reached the point where the relevant decision-making body needs to decide on the proposal. Unfortunately, this can take a while. For instance, the Editorial Council was out of action for a month because a new Council had to be formed. That process is now almost completed, and I'm thus hopeful that more proposals will be decided on in May.
There are at the moment 17 active proposals in the system. Some of them would have wide-ranging implications if accepted while others would have a more narrower effect. We have long talked about Citizendium in other languages than English. This discussion led to two proposals. One is simply to create a test bed for non-English Citizendiums. The other is more modest and proposes that we, as a first step, allow translations of approved articles; these translations would exist as a subpage.
Another long-standing point of contention is how to credit contributors for the work they do. This led to the proposal for a pilot to allow Citizens to take credit for pages. It looks like the Editorial Council will soon decide on the two options presented in the proposal. A slightly different approach is taken by another proposal, which gives advice on how people should cite Citizendium articles.
There is a proposal to change one of our fundamental processes, the approval process, so that authors have more of a say. Perhaps the most substantial change with current practice is that an article can in some situations be approved without any editor involvement at all. There is a proposal to make a start in writing policies for when pictures may be included under the fair-use doctrine; at the moment, this is not allowed (see CZ:Proposals/Non-comprehensive fair use policy).
Another proposal seeks to get more comments on our articles from non-Citizens by allowing some kind of external feedback mechanism. As a way to stress our commitment to reliability, it is proposed that we adopt a Self-Correction Policy, where we list corrections to our articles like many newspapers do. The Core Articles initiative has almost come to a standstill; the proposal to simplify it aims to revive this important initiative.
The other active proposals are:
- CZ:Proposals/Change to reversion policy, clarifying that large edits, including those which wipe out significant parts of other people's work, are acceptable, provided they are discussed
- CZ:Proposals/Create a page for all notable genes in the human genome, an automatic process which would lead to many pages on human genes or proteins
- CZ:Proposals/Create workgroup style guides, a proposal that all workgroup write a style guide
- CZ:Proposals/Medical Disclaimers, a proposal that we add a disclaimer saying that we are not professional doctors
- CZ:Proposals/Naming Conventions for Biographies, a long discussion on how to name articles about a person (is it "Jimmy Carter" or "James Earl Carter"?)
- CZ:Proposals/Recipes Subpage and Accompanying Usage Policy, whether Citizendium should contain recipes, and if so, how
- CZ:Proposals/Romanization, a new process for making policies on how to represent non-Latin scripts like Arabic or Chinese
- CZ:Proposals/Unified Feature-Rich Workgroup page design template, a template which ensures that all workgroup pages have the necessary information and a good design