User:Martin Niemann

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

Hi!

I am a 33 year old economist who is here to contribute to the economics articles.

I have a degree in economics from Copenhagen University.

I am mostly interested in things related to mathematical economics though I should be able to contribute to anything related to economics.

Why I joined

I have been editing Wikipedia for a while, writing articles and doing trivial stuff also called WikiGnome stuff in Wikipedia language. I have joined because I find Larry Sanger's vision and ideas very interesting. By starting over and learning from the mistakes made on Wikipedia I believe we can build an encyclopedia that will be free of many of the problems haunting Wikipedia. Also, I must admit there is a certain excitement about being on board from the beginning.

Things to do

• First of all the articles need to cleaned of Wikipedia-specific code. Most notably the templates and interwiki links. This should be easy to do. Everyone should be able to help out with that.
• Images. This appears to need work. This is something that Wikipedia has been very good at. We should make use of that rather than waste time trying to reinvent the wheel.
• New templates. Most notably navigational templates to lead readers to other related articles and to show off what we have already accomplished.
• Portals. This may not be relevant right now with the relatively low number of authors but this will be a great way to welcome researchers into the community. We need a strong sense of community and that feeling of trying things for the sake of trying them. You don't know if something works unless you try it!
• A manual for writing using the MediaWiki software. Most researchers will already be familiar with TeX and perhaps HTML. They just need a decent manual on how to write good looking articles. The citation syntax and image syntax can be a pain. I will be working on a manual for that.

I should be able to help out with all of the above.

First and foremost... BE BOLD! We won't get anywhere if people spend too much time thinking about what to do and not enough time actually contributing to Citizendium. It is a bit like writing a thesis or even just a journal paper/working paper. You won't get anywhere if you aren't prepared to make mistakes. The revision control system ensures that anything can be reverted anyway so there is no risk!