CZ:How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles

We can use Wikipedia articles as places to start our articles here on the Citizendium. But we should bear in mind that the Citizendium is a different project, for which we are creating a new culture. To the extent that Wikipedia articles themselves encode a navel-gazing, user-unfriendly culture that we want to reject, we absolutely must revise these articles entirely.

Should you really upload that Wikipedia article to the Citizendium?

Maybe, maybe not. Your answers to the following questions should all be "Yes":

• Is the Wikipedia article reasonably good? In other words, to create an expert-approvable article, in your judgment, it would be more efficient to edit the article than start over from scratch. If the Wikipedia article is mediocre, we would prefer that you start over from scratch.

• Do you actually intend to do significant work on the article sometime in the next hour? If not, don't upload it, or not until you actually want to start working on it. We are not creating a mirror of Wikipedia here. If you merely want your brilliant work on Wikipedia to be reprinted in another, more credible source, then you must make up your mind: are you really going to maintain the article here on the Citizendium or not? If not, stick with Wikipedia.

• Have you actually bought into this Citizendium thing at all? If not, leave well alone, please, and stick with Wikipedia until you're actually convinced. This means, among other things, that you are committed to working in a collegial, mature atmosphere, guided gently by expert editors. It also means that you are actually using your own real name; we do take that policy seriously here. More generally it means you accept our Statement of Fundamental Policies.

Improving articles stylistically

Many Wikipedia articles have certain stylistic problems. When you rewrite them:

• Make sure that the articles are well-written and unified, following a coherent, well-organized narrative, not grab-bags of unintegrated facts. The purpose of an encyclopedia article is not just to list out information about a topic, but to contextualize general information about a topic in a single readable "story," as it were.

• Craft your sentences using interesting language, not the typical vague, unadventurous, and soporific prose that some people seem to think is required for encyclopedia articles.

• Generally, keep your audience in mind. Bear in mind that articles on the Citizendium are written first and foremost for the educated person who needs an introduction to the topic--and not for the author to catalog very impressively everything he knows on the topic. More particularly, bear in mind that your audience is university-level, unless your topic itself absolutely requires a higher-level treatment (cannot be understood "at the undergraduate level"). You might have to rewrite completely those articles that appear to be written by people more concerned with showing off what they learned in their graduate seminars than actually introducing a topic to people who need an article about the topic.

Improving article mechanics

While we follow many of Wikipedia's conventions of mechanics, such as bolding titles---our own are being developed at CZ:Article Mechanics--we are stripping down many others. In particular, we are removing many templates, virtually all categories, and all interwiki links.

Templates

Templates should "pay their own way" by actually helping the user rather than distracting the user from important information.

Delete many template messages--particularly the ones that are for contributors and are self-referential. This includes timing-related messages, expansion requests, and all Wikimedia sister projects.

Other templates to delete include: requesting sources, deletion, disputes and warnings, maintenance, cleanup, and lists. Presumably, we will want to rewrite our own such templates--if we have any at all--and place them on talk pages, not on the articles themselves.

If you do retain a template in an article you're working on, for an infobox for example, then be sure to upload the template from Wikipedia. Sorry, no, we will not be uploading the entire Wikipedia template namespace; that's too much of an inducement for people to replicate Wikipedia's overuse of templates here.

Many infobox templates and navigational templates need to be completely revisited. Many are useful, but many are not.

Categories

Delete all categories that were not specifically added for the Citizendium. These include "workgroup" categories, [[Category:CZ Live]], and occasionally some other extremely well-chosen categories.

There is an excellent chance that we will replace subject categories with an in-line system of "Subtopics" and "Related topics"; see this Forums post.

Interwiki links

Delete all of these. They will be broken, and many Citizendium articles will have different titles from Wikipedia articles--in all languages.

Images

Delete links to missing images (after images have been uploaded and we've deleted the ones with questionable licensing).