CZ:Nomination page/Editorial Council/Nick Gardner

Over the past sixty years I have worked as an engineer and as an economist in two industrial companies, a research establishment and four government departments; and served as economic adviser to four cabinet ministers. Now retired, I spend much of my time researching and writing articles for Citizendium. In the course of the past two or three years I have initiated, and served as the principal contributor to, over sixty articles, some on politics and history but most of them on economics. In doing so, I have learned things about the power and potential of the Citizendium wiki that could be better explained than they are now.

That - to come to the point - is one reason for my acceptance of this nomination. But the main reason is concerned with the content of CZ articles, especially those that are about controversial subjects. I would argue that CZ articles must be honest, objective, useful and user-friendly - and there are specific points that I would want to make about meeting those requirements. To be useful, for example, I would argue that the reader should be given both the consensus view and the views of its main opponents, but should not be burdened with the views of the flat-earth fringes. I would argue that objectivity, to take another example, requires the exclusion of opinions or tendentious statements except those that are attributed directly to recorded statements by recognisable persons, and also the exclusion of factual statements that are not linked directly to authoritative sources (indirect links via journalists' reports do not qualify).

Those are the aspects of CZ articles that would concern me as a member of the Council, and I should be content to defer to others on questions of presentation and format.