User:DavidGoodman/comments

The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.

non-commercial use of CZ

• We are not in competition with WP, nor are we a branch of WP. What we are is a separate but similar project, with the same general goal of producing a free public encyclopedia by community writing and revision, but the specific goal of producing one with controlled expert review. There are good reasons to have both, and therefore they should both be done optimally after their different fashions. We want our project to be as good as possible, so we wish to use good attributed copyright-free material from other sources, subject to our editing and review. We also want to encourage their project to be as good as possible, and therefore want them to use whatever of our material may serve their purposes, realizing that they will be subject to their processes of editing.

thoughts on expertise

The inherent problem in retaining experts is that experts have POV in their subject, and care very much about the details of their positions. They have attained their expertise by mastering the minutia and knowing the arguments. The more in detail one knows a subject, the more one realises how frail the academic consensus really is--and this is as it should be, because it is by working on the details that do not quite fit that one makes progress.

I have known many collective products, and it is always the case that the untrammeled editing by experts without the control of the more generally educated tends to lead to intellectual provincialism and ownership. But it is a little rare for an expert to accept such criticism in his own particular specialty.

The way in which I thought it was going to work here is that the editors in a broad subject field would be generally very knowledgeable, knowledgeable enough over a broad range to be able to judge the balance and subject pertinence of the true specialists who would be writing the articles.

The people who insist on ownership and heir own view prevailing in the articles they edit will not be happy in a cooperative editing project. Not everyone --however excellent they are as subject matter experts and as writers--can work successfully in a cooperative editing environment. And there is nothing wrong with them or the project; there is no reason why any particular individual need fit here. This is still a distinctive and experimental environment.