text:
| Someone is wrong on
The Internet
|Log in:
Citizendium ("CZ") is (was?) a free Internet-based encyclopedia project that began as a pretender to the throne of Wikipedia.[1] Wikipedia co-founder[note 1] Larry Sanger started the project in 2006 to remedy what he viewed as problems with Wikipedia. It is essentially a reincarnation of the Wikipedia predecessor Nupedia, and just like its previous incarnation, it is a massive failure.
Citizendium aims to boost its reliability by having articles vetted by experts and requiring real names for contributions.[note 2] Articles are managed by workgroups, which for several years included "healing arts," Citizendium's term for alternative medicine[2] — distinct from the workgroup on "health sciences", medical treatment that actually works. This led to the first public sign that something had gone seriously wrong, when a ludicrous puff piece on homeopathy was featured on the main page in January 2009.[3] While pseudoscience advocates have been protected by site policies, many of the recruited academic experts quickly left, driven away by Sanger and the site administrators.[4]
The project began with lofty ambitions and heavy media coverage. Participation grew through early 2008 before entering a steady decline. By June 2011 Citizendium was moribund, with fewer participants[5] and fewer edits[6] than any full month in its history, and with well over half the month's edits made by just three users.[7] It only got worse from then on.[8] By early 2014, only about 10 people made even 10 edits per month. An election held in June 2015 to fill a council seat attracted 13 voters.[9]
The project continues essentially as a hobby site for a few individuals who enjoy bureaucracy, Wikipedia-bashing, or believing, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Citizendium is significant – harmless enough in itself, though unfortunate in its wasted potential. The rise and fall of Citizendium, with issues such as micromanagement, top-heavy organization, and credentialism used to give cranks undue influence, serves as a useful warning to other projects. The site is currently hovering around the 265,000 mark on Alexa ratings.[note 3]
- 1 History
- 2 Community management
- 3 Operational management
- 4 The concept of expertise on Citizendium
- 5 Does the "expert guidance" model work?
- 6 Why Wikipedia wins
- 7 Rearranging the deckchairs
- 8 See also
- 9 External links
- 10 Notes
- 11 References
Founding and public launch[edit]
The project was founded in 2006 to create a "new compendium of knowledge" based on the contributions of "intellectuals," defined as "educated, thinking people who read about science or ideas regularly."[10] The ambition was to "unseat Wikipedia as the go-to destination for general information online."[11] It was launched with great fanfare and wide coverage in both the blogosphere and the international prestige press.[12]
Citizendium began its pilot phase in October 2006 and went public on March 27, 2007.[13] It began as a fork of the English Wikipedia under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, but by the time of the public launch Sanger had decided that starting from a clean slate was the best way to motivate writers. He therefore deleted all Wikipedia-sourced articles that had not been worked on locally.[14] This was a huge gamble, betting that Citizendium's writers would fill gaping holes in content.
Growth and decline[edit]
Sanger stated in October 2007 that he foresaw "an explosion of growth...in the not-too-distant future,"[15] and that he expected the project to triple, or at least double, in size annually.
Participation grew during Citizendium's first year, peaking in early 2008 before settling in to a long-term decline. The number of words added per day has plummeted from 17,100 in the second quarter of 2008 to just 600 in January 2014. Article creation rate increased from around 14 per day in late 2007 to 18-20 per day in 2010, falling to less than one per day by 2013. At the start of 2014 there were about 15.1 million words in 24,891 mainspace articles (a mean of 605 words/article).[note 4][note 5]
In early 2014 about 21 individuals made at least one edit per month at Citizendium, down from around 200 at the time of Sanger's "explosion of growth" prediction.[16] It is of course dwarfed by Wikipedia, which had 117,763 active editors at the start of 2014.[17] But it's also far behind even narrow, hobbyist wikis such as Muppet Wiki and Wookieepedia (the Star Wars wiki), which had 178[18] and 545[19] contributors respectively in January 2014. Or even RationalWiki, where about 300 people make at least one edit per month.[20] The project is now dominated by a small core of regulars with almost no new blood, as in fact, joining at all is still impossible (see below).
Community management[edit]
Authors and editors[edit]
Citizendium calls its contributors "Citizens." They are divided into authors (hoi polloi) and editors (the experts) — analogous to print publications. The class distinction is clear and comes from the top: if you're a mere author, your opinions are worthless.[21] (As may be expected, this has left Citizendium a wiki of editors with few authors to supervise.[22]) This contrasts with Wikipedia, where everyone is an "editor." The difference in terminology sometimes leads to confusion when discussing Citizendium.
Editors are supposed to provide "gentle expert guidance" to authors. They can referee disputes over article content and can also enforce style guidelines. But their real power lies in their ability to "approve" articles. After an article is approved it becomes the version displayed to the public and is locked from further editing. Any changes must be made to a separate draft version which can eventually be approved to replace the current public-facing version. The process is cumbersome enough that reapprovals are rare, so even obvious and uncontroversial errors can remain in articles for years.[23] As we shall see later, this also has some interesting implications for the project's coverage of fringe and pseudoscience.
Signing up to contribute[edit]
Citizendium has often been criticized for its cumbersome and intrusive signup process. Each member is required to use their real name, and for the project's first seven years they could not even use common nicknames (such as "Dicky Smith" for "Richard Smith"). In addition to their real names all contributors have to provide a statement of personal interests and education. Not just a sentence or two, but a minimum of 50 words and "preferably a few hundred words." If the statement is less than fifty words, the request is automatically blocked from being reviewed by Constables. And if the real name policy and requirement for a biography aren't intrusive enough, the project also suggests you provide "rough clues as to age and location" — a cyberstalker's dream. If you want to be an "editor" you also have to submit a curriculum vitae along with links to web materials supporting what you claim in your CV.
They actually think that it isn't a complicated process to join, even with the information provided and the number of options and applications that must be selected. Reviewing the account request page looks like a legal document for adding a constitutional amendment.
The Citizens often expressed puzzlement as to why they had so much trouble getting people to join.
After the server change in late 2014, the request account form stopped working altogether. You could still fill the form in, it just wouldn't be sent anywhere and no one would see it. A note was placed at the top of the form asking people to put all the required information into an email and send it to "citizendium-l-owner 'at' lists.purdue.edu". Yep, they even make you fill out the email address manually. To this day (January 2019) the request account form still doesn't work. Evidently allowing people to join at all is a low priority.
Sanger's role[edit]
Sanger was Editor-In-Chief of Nupedia and Wikipedia until resigning in March 2002,[24] the money having run out a month earlier. He resigned from the volunteer position because he did not have the authority from the community to deal with users he felt were being simply disruptive.[25]
Despite his early claims that Citizendium would operate on an open "bazaar" model rather than a closed "cathedral" one,[26][10] Sanger had worked out in detail how he wanted to run Citizendium early on[27] and kept it under firm control from the start. He surprised prospective contributors who were used to room for opinions[21] and serendipity with such actions as shutting down the project mailing list, thus killing the main venue for community enthusiasm at the time, because he felt it had too much traffic.[28] He was not interested in the ideas of others and tended to react to them as if they were attacks[29] on his detailed plan.[30]
When establishing Citizendium, Sanger announced that he would be resigning as Editor-in-Chief after two or three years.[31][32] In July 2009 he stepped down from active involvement,[33] to pursue paid work on the WatchKnow educational video initiative. When he tried to report Wikipedia to the FBI over "child pornography" (line art drawings of lolicon) in April 2010,[34] he used the official Citizendium blog[35] to link to his reply to Slashdot commenters,[36] suggesting he still considered Citizendium his personal site and bashing Wikipedia part of the mission. He stepped down as Editor-in-Chief after the Charter was ratified in September 2010,[37] but after a brief absence was elected to the site's Management Council in 2011.[38]
Sanger believes that any lack of participation in or readership for Citizendium is not due to his policies or the behaviour of himself or his "constables" (the wiki administrators),[39] but due to "thuggish--cretinish" Wikipedians who are "trying to beat down the underdog with lies and intimidation."[40]
Sanger offers consulting services as an expert in policy formation for online communities.[41] Everipedia is a Wikipedia competitor Sanger became involved with well after he left Citizendium.
Operational management[edit]
Fiscal insolvency: the $65,000 question[edit]
In November 2010 an accidentally-revealed forum thread[42] detailed the dire financial straits in which Sanger had left Citizendium. Sanger had told the Citizens in vague terms that more funding was needed but they were blindsided by the immediacy of the financial crisis. Available funds were down to $1800, they were shelling out $700 a month in hosting charges to Steadfast, and within a few weeks they had a payment of $1500 owed to the Tides Center, their parent organization.[43] According to their new Managing Editor they faced the prospect of insolvency by the end of the year.[44]
This revelation brought up significant questions about the project's financial management. Piecing together Citizendium's fragmentary records[45] the project had received around $60,000-$65,000 in contributions; Sanger has put the amount at "$60,000 and change."[46] In March 2007, Citizendium expanded to multiple servers (five!) with Steadfast; two of these were donated and the other three presumably were paid for out of pocket.[47] This put the accumulated infrastructure and hosting costs at an estimated $32,200 by the time of the forum post, leaving about $30,000 to account for. It eventually came to light that Citizendium had been paying the Tides Foundation at least $2000 per year for handling the project's finances plus $1000 per year for liability insurance.[48] Assuming these expenses were paid for calendar years 2007, 2008, 2009 and the first half of 2010 the total paid to the Tides Center would be at least $10,500, leaving around $20,000. By Citizendium's own records, only Larry Sanger, initial technical director Jason Potkanski, and an unnamed programmer have received any compensation for their work on the project.[49] The total paid to these individuals has not been revealed. We can make conjectures about other expenses — for example if Sanger had to travel extensively for fundraising or promotion this could have eaten up $10,000 fairly quickly. But we just don't know.
$700 a month for hosting is absurdly high. A site of Citizendium's size and traffic (comparable to RationalWiki as of 2010) could easily be supported by commercial hosting for around $50-$150 a month. That's around $28,000 wasted on over-the-top network and server infrastructure. Put another way, enough money was blown to support Citizendium for an estimated 23 years. At the end of 2010 the project took steps that reduced their hosting costs to $320 per month; in other words they have trimmed their costs from "insane" to merely "excessive."[50] The post also revealed that the major donors to Citizendium were no longer interested in supporting the project. It now relies mostly on donations from participants.[51]
Relationship with the Tides Center[edit]
The Tides Center is a major non-profit described as an "incubator" for other non-profits. Apparently, Larry Sanger entered into an agreement with them right before he started accepting large donations, with the Tides Center managing donations and providing status as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization under U.S. law. This status is required in order for contributions to be tax deductible; Sanger had said that lack of such status was a "sticking point" for many prospective donors.[52] As noted previously, this arrangement cost Citizendium at least $3000 per year. Citizendium was promised operational independence, and Sanger promised in 2007 that Citizendium would be "independent" within six months. Three years later and $60,000 poorer Citizendium was still a Tides Center project.
Although no official announcement has been made it appears that Citizendium is no longer affiliated with the Tides Center: by May 2011 there was no longer an entry for Citizendium under the Tides Center project directory,[53] and Citizendium staff had quietly deleted most references to Tides from their internal pages.[54][55]
Technical implementation[edit]
Citizendium defined itself so completely as the anti-Wikipedia that even technical decisions were made largely on the basis of being different from Wikimedia (such as using PostgreSQL rather than MySQL for the database and incompatible changes to their MediaWiki installation).[56] It was later realised that forking when one doesn't have the technical resources is not such a good idea; sysadmin Dan Nessett did try to bring the software more back towards mainline,[57] and actively contributed to MediaWiki until he left Citizendium.
Copyright violations[edit]
""Note: as it stands, this image is a copyvio because the owners of the separate images need to be credited here. Also, the montage ought to be deleted and re-uploaded to purge the system of an image which is a copyvio. Finally, the images of the tiger and the butterfly violate CZ's 'real name' policy.
|—Comment on the description page of the lead image of one of their approved articlesimg, as of 5 February 2011. Fixing it would evidently be too much work. Incredibly, it was still there as late as January 2013; as of August 2013, it appears to have finally been taken down.
In mid-January 2011 RationalWiki contributors noted extensive and long-standing copyright violations on Citizendium related to their use of images.[58] Citizendium, however, was too busy with infighting[59] and working out complicated numbering systems for their bureaucratic discussions[60] to bother with minor matters like breaking the law, and so the report was met with a collective shrug.[61] Eventually most (though by no means all) of the reported images were dealt with to some extent, but no effort has been made to deal with others, of which massive numbers remain.[62]
In November 2013, an article plagiarised from Wikipedia, Subjective-objective dichotomy,img was featured on Citizendium's main page.[note 6]
The concept of expertise on Citizendium[edit]
There's much to like in the idea of creating an environment that is welcoming to people who know what they're talking about, in contrast to Wikipedia's grudging concession that "editing in an area in which you have professional or academic expertise is not, in itself, a conflict of interest."[63] But it didn't work out too well at Citizendium.
There's expertise and then there's certification as an expert, which is a social construct made of pieces of paper and (hopefully) accredited standards. Sometimes the two don't quite overlap. In the quest for expertise — "This article is good and I can explain why" — Citizendium went for credentialism — "This article is good because I have the authority to say so."[64][note 7] But the most damaging part of the Citizendium approach was that the required credentials were inconsistent. Someone wishing to be a general editor in an academic field had to show they had a PhD, or were a tenure-track professor; if they couldn't show that, they might have been able to get editorship in a small subfield — if they had an M.A. or M.Sc, and at least three published, peer-reviewed articles.[65] But if they wanted the authority to take over articles in alternative medicine, they only had to prove that they were licensed to practice their branch of alternative medicine.[66]
Like many things on Citizendium, the concept of editors has largely been abandoned due to the catastrophic fall in the number of contributors.
Attracting and repelling academia[edit]
""My experience of CZ has not impressed me in terms of its chances of its reaching its laudable goals. People discuss and debate, but no matter what we say, Larry comes in and makes some executive decision without really consulting anyone outside of his inner circle.
|—An early (18 January 2007) expression of frustration by a Citizendium academic.[67]
Wikipedia has plenty of academics and actual experts editing — you can hardly edit without bumping into someone who knows a hell of a lot more than you about a topic. It fails utterly, however, in keeping idiots out of the experts' faces.[note 8]
So Citizendium promised they'd remedy this, and attracted a good number of established experts, such as university professors, in the site's early days. But almost all left within months — and it turned out that the people getting in the academics' faces were Sanger and his constables. Heavy-handedness, meddling in article content, censoring user comments, bullying and harassment of academic users were commonplace and extensively documented in the wider world.[4][40] Others grew exasperated over Sanger's penchant for micromanagement[68] and inability to acknowledge areas of academia he was not competent in,[69] often overruling or pushing out the very specialists he had recruited.[70]
Sanger's guidance was also responsible for driving out established fields of study while encouraging a proliferation of pseudoscience. For instance, in 2006 Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies professors began joining Citizendium. Sanger refused to recognise these as genuine fields of endeavour, saying "I do not want to make CZ 'politically correct,' i.e., appealing especially to one (largely American/Western/Left) ideology," and refused to give them any place in Citizendium's structure.[71] In contrast, he personally recruited "celebrity" homeopath Dana Ullman and gave alternative medicine practitioners their own workgroup with full control over all articles on alternative medicine.[72][73] He told members who preferred scientific evidence over other parts of the "whole dialectical landscape" that they were "not welcome" at Citizendium,[74] and decreed that Citizendium would treat both scientific and anti-scientific views on an equal footing in manufactroversies such as intelligent design and global warming.[75] When others dared question this approach, he responded:
""I am sick and tired of reference works, journalists, and professionals generally, simply instructing me what to think, when I know that there are other professionals who disagree with them and who are not given a fair hearing. There is a sort of paternalism about the acceptance of bias in expository writing that I find disturbing. It's not unlike propaganda, ultimately.[74]
Citizendium practice reflected Sanger's philosophy. The article on Intelligent design promoted it in a manner reminiscent of aSK, changing only after Sanger left. Similarly the global warming article included an extended apologia for denialism that was not pared back until after Sanger's departure.
Sanger claims academic credentials, academic expertise, academic credibility and respect for and from academia, and loves the idea of academia.[76] But he had never held a position as professor or the equivalent, and had no idea what actual working academics do for a living or how to work with them.[40] His idealized vision of academic knowledge production, in which philosophically robust propositions are put forth and formally debated,[77] bears no resemblance to reality, in which academic exchanges are more typified by snatches of hallway conversation or arguments over a beer at a conference — casual semi-social interaction the way humans have always done it. His inflexibility and the emulation of his worst behaviors by his acolytes did the rest. Having run off the recruited academics is not considered a problem by the remaining Citizens.[78]
Crank magnetism[edit]
Citizendium's expert approval was just as much a double-edged sword as is Wikipedia's open editing policy. In some cases the Citizendium approach worked fine and avoided the problems with Wikipedia's almost unguided editing that causes articles to degrade. But it also allowed people of dubious qualifications to obtain control over articles with relatively little opposition. In this way supposed "experts" could hijack articles on their pet topics and ensure that the articles are as uncritical as possible.
Citizendium's approval process meant that once an article was approved, it was locked from further editing and all changes must be made to a draft version that was not presented to the public until it goes through the approval process again. And who controlled the reapproval process? You guessed it — the same "experts" who approved the original article. This meant that once a fringe enthusiast had managed to get an article approved in their preferred version, it was very difficult for reality-based contributors to undo the damage. This locking down remained in place until late 2013, long after anyone cared about what Citizendium was doing.
It was certainly not the case that all, or even most, Citizendium contributors were cranks. Some lamented the project's reputation[79] for fringe topics and pointed out that it had driven away potential contributors.[80][81][82] But the site's policies, such as its emphasis on credentialism, made it especially appealing to cranks. Whereas actual, practicing experts tend simply to get on with their work instead of waving their credentials, cranks compensate for their lack of substance by faking expertise and working for status and perceived credibility. This means cranks will be attracted to and stay on a credentialist project, particularly if those of genuine expertise are driven out. Cranks on Citizendium were further protected by users in positions of authority who are, themselves, purveyors of "alternative medicine."
Citizendium also has a unique protective mechanism that makes it particularly crank-friendly: the rule against attacking other contributors prohibits questioning their claimed expertise. For example, an editor was banned for pointing out that Dana Ullman — a well-known and tireless advocate for homeopathy who was banned from Wikipedia for disruptive advocacy[83] but then became a Citizendium Healing Arts editor — has no medical or homeopathic qualifications and had been arrested for practising medicine without a license.[84] Even an expression of general frustration about homeopathy and other fringe topics will get the smackdown from a pro-altmed constable.[85]
Does the "expert guidance" model work?[edit]
The Citizendium process has been critiqued in detail since before the launch. The Citizens quite reasonably replied that the proof would be in the resulting product. Unfortunately, the product did not turn out so well either.[86] The project has been excessively tolerant, even deferential, toward cranks, while driving actual academics away; so it's unsurprising that far too much questionable material appears for a site that prides itself on being "authoritative, error-free, and well-written."[87][88] Even where pseudoscience is not an issue the presentation is often disorganized and unfocused, or contains obvious errors that should never have made it past a true "expert."
Citizendium's greatest pseudoscientific hits[edit]
As an example of the deference to cranks, Citizendium's horrific piece on homeopathy[89] was taken over by Dana Ullman (whom Time magazine has called a "leading proselytizer of homeopathy"[90]) at Sanger's personal invitation.[91][92] The resulting article was so badly skewed that the alt-med promoters at Wiki4CAM copied it almost wholesale to use as their own entry on the topic.[93] Likewise the article on chiropraxy[94] was "owned" by D. Matt Innis, a practicing chiropractor and acupuncturist, who as a Constable removes criticism of homeopathy.[85][note 9] Both of these pseudoscience advocacy articles were fully embraced by the Citizendium community. They are both marked as approved articles, and the homeopathy advertisement — which Sanger called "an excellent article, remarkably balanced and neutral"[95] — was even featured in January 2009 on the site's main page.[96] (This version was live when it was featured.) It wasn't until Sanger's departure in late 2010 that the homeopathy article was finally reduced to something better by motion of the project's Editorial Council. In an extraordinary overruling of the project's "expert approval" process the EC not only legislated the new version of the article but ruled that the article was such a blight on Citizendium that they forbade all editing on it for a year, after which they might allow editing again.[97] Their article on chiropractic, however, remains pure advocacy.
Some more examples of pro-pseudoscience articles:
- Alice Bailey — Puff piece on the New Age author; relies heavily on her autobiography for sources on such matters as telepathic transmission of books and the hidden "Masters of Wisdom".
- Cold fusion — Largely written by proponent and advocate Jed Rothwell. Rothwell was banned indefinitely from Wikipedia for disruption and advocacy using an army of sockpuppet accounts.[98] Remained profoundly at odds with the scientific community for over three years, with some of the most blatantly promotional wording finally being redacted in October 2011.
- Critical views of Chiropracticimg — Not what you'd think. It's actually an attack on criticism of chiropractic by the "medical establishment."
- Global warming — An early harbinger of future colonization of Citizendium by pseudoscience advocates who had tried and failed on Wikipedia. The 2007 version was a feast of climate change denial bad enough to attract the attention of experts in the field.[99] It was improved somewhat — by copying from Wikipedia.[100] It was biased enough that the global warming denialists at the Heartland Institute listed it as part of their recommended "Primer on Global Warming." The article was finally brought into reasonable agreement with the scientific consensus in early 2011, after Sanger's departure.
- Pseudoscience — The 2009 version was terrible. The current version is much improved, though written in the rambling and chatty style typical of many Citizendium articles. The article still contains a paragraph defending astrology.[101]
- Qigong — A barely readable promotion which mentions skepticism only in order to dismiss it, and concludes: In spite of the above, there are many accepted, and in the author's opinion, legitimate "Masters" of "Qigong". The promotional version had remained for almost four years; although some Citizens had edited it in the meantime, they did not alter the promotional tone.
- Reiki — A promotional article on one of the stupidest and least supportable alternative medicine quackeries. Page after page after page of promotion, then, right near the end, two sentences basically amounting to "Some skeptics don't like it" as the only balance, then the rest of the controversies are controversies within reiki. The article was in this state from late 2007 through January 2011.
- Samuel Hahnemann — Short article heaping praise on the creator of homeopathy.[note 10]
- Shang reviews of homeopathy — Uses bizarre arguments (e.g., Shang used a different pre-determined definition of "high-quality" than a study homeopaths liked), a discredited data-mining attempt by a pro-homeopathy team led by Ludtke, a letter from a homeopathic organization, and outright lies about the study's methods and findings[note 11] to attack an innovative, well-respected study. A hit piece, nothing more, and a very strange topic for an encyclopedia.
- Tests of the efficacy of homeopathy — Pooh-poohs large, respected negative studies, lists every single tiny study it can find that ever had a positive result.
- Unidentified flying object — A highly unskeptical article based mainly on the claims of UFO proponents.
- Vertebral subluxation — A pseudoscientific article on chiropractic, written mostly by an unpublished author without any verifiable medical background. That this is one of the site's "approved" articles is especially damning.
Wikipedia, of course, also has lots of pseudoscience. But apart from having many more contributors to help better approximate reality, Wikipedia does not have mechanisms in place that actively promote pseudoscience; to the contrary, its policies forbid its advocacy and mechanisms are in place to allow it to be identified and fixed (at least in principle). Meanwhile, Citizendium considers alternative medicine qualifications as signs of expertise, which allows a user to take over an article, and has neither policy nor sufficient numbers of motivated people to keep these supposed experts in check.
The Scientology article has been heavily edited by at least two well known members of that organization. On 1 May 2007, the article "Scientology" was moved first to "Scientology (the philosophy)" then finally to Church of Scientology. The word "cult" was deleted, as well as any mention of Scientology being banned in a number of countries, and the term "adherent" replaced with "parishioners" by Terry E. Olsen, a public member of Scientology well-known for his Internet advocacy on its behalf as "Terryeo" on Wikipedia[102] and elsewhere.
Shortly afterwards Steven Ferry joined Citizendium. Ferry did not declare his membership of the Church,[103][104] nor his previous position working in public relations for the Church,[105] prior to editing and purging the article of criticisms.[106][107] Ferry was subsequently elected to the Citizendium Editorial Council unopposed in 2008,[108] leading to claims the project had been successfully infiltrated by the Church of Scientology.[105] Ferry ceased contributing in mid-2008 and the article was gradually cleaned up over the next two years.
Thank goodness for gentle expert guidance![edit]
""Welcome to Citizendium, an endeavor to achieve the highest standards of writing, reliability, and comprehensiveness.
|—Citizendium's Main Page as of January 2012.[109]
Even on less contentious topics the supposed expert guidance appears worryingly absent at times, with poorly written articles and basic errors that many a non-expert would spot.[110]
- Atomic hypothesis — Appears unable to tell the difference between a hypothesis and a theory in scientific terminology. A hypothesis is a proposed explanation that can be tested. A theory, on the other hand, is a body of knowledge and principles that have been found to (approximately) explain observed phenomena, such as "gravitational theory." Nowhere is it mentioned that in the time since Dalton's proposals the atomic hypothesis evolved into a theory supported by experimental testing. It stops with Dalton and goes no further - it's stuck in the 18th century. IUPAC,[111] Encyclopædia Britannica,[112] World Book and Wikipedia all use "Atomic theory".
- Biology — One of their approved articles, it consists mainly of a rambling, disorganised history of biology. Contains a single paragraph on evolution, while giving disproportionate space to outdated curiosities such as the homunculus. Essential concepts like dominant and recessive genes, chromosomes, mitosis and meiosis are never even defined, just mentioned offhand. There is an enormous amount of irrelevant verbiage, random philosophical musings, and, just for good measure, a see-also link at the top of the article to the one on "healing arts" - Citizendium's term for alternative medicine. Anyone with the slightest understanding of biology could crank out a better article in half an hour.[note 12]
- Cat — For four years used the redundant scientific nomenclature for the domesticated cat, Felis silvestris catus. The accepted nomenclature is Felis catus, see for example ITIS taxonomy. Note that silvestris is a wildcat ancestor, not domesticated cat. Encyclopædia Britannica, Tree of Life (TOL), Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), and Wikipedia all use Felis catus for domesticated cat. Has since been corrected.[note 13]
- Compton effect — The article defines: "The Compton effect is the name for the primary manner in which energy is absorbed by matter." Thus, the Sun heating the oceans and their beaches is the Compton effect? Arthur Compton, and all textbooks after him, define the effect as the elastic collision of a photon with a nearly free electron. No free electrons on the beaches or in the oceans: absorption of energy by sand and rocks is by exciting lattice vibrations; the oceans absorb energy primarily by water molecules gaining kinetic energy. No Compton effect in sight.
- History of the United Kingdom — A Conservative editor[113] had rewritten British history by removing all mention of Labour governments from the timeline. The vandalism went uncorrected for over six months.[114]
- HTML5 — For quite a while, the second half of the article was not shown because of an ordinary bug (the MediaWiki parser crashed on the tag <source>). Either the Citizens that worked on it were too sloppy to preview to the end, where they would have noticed the bug, or they did not know how to fix it. Shortly after someone did manage to fix it, two new errors were introduced. The syntactically correct <audio> <source /> <source /> </audio> was "corrected" to the syntactically wrong: <audio> source / source / </audio>.[115] Why would an expert make such a WP-type correction? Isn't an expert somebody who knows when they don't know?
- Jupiter — Claimed for two and a half years that Jupiter has a surface. Gas giants don't have surfaces. Remained uncorrected despite complaints mailed to the project.[116]
- William Bonham, William Bonham (outlaw) — Claim Billy the Kid's name was William Bonham, a name mentioned in no existing source. The alias most famously used by Billy the Kid was William Bonney. Uncorrected from July 2009 until, apparently, August 2013.
When errors are detected, more often than not they are detected by people outside of the project (such as RationalWiki) — bringing into question how qualified these CZ experts are[117] and whether CZ's expert oversight procedure can be claimed to work in practice at all.[118]
The great Wikipedia killer shows its strength[edit]
To be even minimally useful, an encyclopedia needs to have information on subjects people would want to know about. Here is a list of articles which do not exist on Citizendium as of May 2016, and, given the moribund nature of actual editing on Citizendium, as opposed to pointless bureaucracy and elections, probably never will.
- Most of Shakespeare's plays, including King Lear, Othello, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, Anthony and Cleopatra, Much Ado about Nothing, and Twelfth Night. Luckily, no one ever studies Shakespeare.
- Basic parts of the body, like organ, bladder, diaphragm, uterus, or testicles. In addition, skeleton and bone are less than 10 words each.
- Historical figures such as Marco Polo, Hannibal, and Cleopatra.
- The Boer War, the Spanish-American War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Bosnian War, and much of the rest of military history.
- Many famous scientists, including Linus Pauling, Rachel Carson, Jacques Cousteau, Heinrich Hertz, Lise Meitner, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, J.J. Thomson, and Robert Oppenheimer. Max Planck at least gets a one-sentence stub.
- Many spaceflight pioneers, such as Buzz Aldrin, John Glenn, and Alan Shepard.
- Critically acclaimed film directors including Michelangelo Antonioni, Billy Wilder, Quentin Tarantino, and Andrzej Wajda, and classic films such as Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, Solaris, Ran, L'Avventura, If..., Jaws, and E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial. Also classic or critically acclaimed TV shows such as Game of Thrones, NYPD Blue, Roseanne, Bewitched, Murphy Brown, Barney Miller, and True Detective.
- Visual artists including Donatello, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Edouard Manet, Jasper Johns, and Mary Cassatt.
- Composers Giacomo Puccini, Claudio Monteverdi, Joseph Haydn, and George Frideric Handel. Benjamin Britten and Giuseppe Verdi each have less than 50 words of text. In popular music there is no article on Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles, Herbie Hancock, Diana Ross and/or The Supremes, Velvet Underground, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo, Deep Purple, Morrissey, or Duran Duran, but at least there's no article on Ted Nugent.
- Capital cities including Warsaw, Bucharest, Santiago de Chile, Port-au-Prince, and Reykjavik. And other important geographical features Lake Titicaca, Lake Baikal, River Thames, and Kalahari Desert.
- Geological terms including mantle, subduction, granite, gneiss, lithosphere, and quartz. Geographical terms including watershed, plateau, village, cartography, climatology, and continental shelf. Ocean, volcano and geological fault have articles of less than 25 words.
Why Wikipedia wins[edit]
Wikipedia is far from perfect, but it is one of the most successful volunteer-driven projects on the World Wide Web, and that makes it hard to compete with. Any other wiki needs something that differentiates them from Wikipedia in order to lure people to them rather than Wikipedia. The successful ones, such as Conservapedia, RationalWiki, and all the various wikis devoted to analyzing video games, television shows, and so on, have a particular focus that does not overlap with Wikipedia's, allowing them to carve out a unique niche. Conservapedia, for instance, caters to right-wing nutjobs. RationalWiki snarks about pseudoscientific topics from a skeptical and scientific perspective. Muppet Wiki has over 33,000 pages (more than all of Citizendium) covering everything anyone might want to know about the various Jim Henson shows, movies, and characters. Whether due to special focus, intentional bias, tone, or obsessive detail, these wikis provide something that Wikipedia cannot.
Citizendium, however, exactly duplicates Wikipedia's focus of being a general encyclopedia. Its major difference is an organizational one, which only affects editors, not readers.
The one area Citizendium can make a somewhat fair claim to beat Wikipedia is in its "approved articles", which have (allegedly, at least) met certain standards and undergone some form of peer review. According to Citizendium itself, such articles are "tentatively declared to be of reasonably high-quality and so are locked to prevent further editing."[119] As such, they can be seen to be "complete" and "accurate" in a way it is hard to ensure any Wikipedia article is at any given time. At this stage, these articles can theoretically be said to be more in the vein of traditional encyclopedias. This might indeed be a strong point in Citizendium's favor over its rival, were it not for the fact that as of March, 2013, there are only 165 such articles in the entire project (out of over 16,000 total). Disregarding the fact that even these articles have not always been of the highest quality, it is only in these very specific handful of subjects that Citizendium can make any claim to be superior to Wikipedia. If one is looking for information on air pollution or fossil fuels (on which there are a disproportionate number of approved articles), Citizendium might be a good place to visit. On almost any other subject on earth, they can't even pretend to offer anything Wikipedia doesn't (except a smaller amount of random vandalism). Thus Citizendium bears more resemblance to Wikipedia's failed predecessor Nupedia than it does to Wikipedia itself.
Even worse from a competitive standpoint, Citizendium's content is available under a Creative Commons license - meaning that Wikipedia can import any content it deems good enough. And Wikipedia has done so, setting up WikiProject Citizendium Porting, a group dedicated to reviewing Citizendium's approved articles and adapting them for use on Wikipedia.
Some statistics:
- At least 23 of Citizendium's 156 approved articles either were taken from Wikipedia, or both Wikipedia and Citizendium's versions were written by the same person. Of the ones taken from Wikipedia, this was often done without attribution.[120]
- Approximately 150 articles on Wikipedia incorporate some text from Citizendium,[121] though in some cases this was as little as two words.[122]
- Many of Citizendium's approved articles were considered too low quality to use on Wikipedia, either in whole or in part. For instance, the Citizendium article on DNA was considered "a degraded version of the Wikipedia article that tries to deal with too many subjects at once"; and Tux, as in the Linux mascot, has the note "Strongly against porting any more. A little information added from a low quality article." The Citizendium-approved articles on homeopathy, literature, chiropractic, and World of Warcraft, among others, were all considered completely unsuitable for Wikipedia.[120]
- The Citizendium articles on Scarborough Castle, wheat and cypherpunks were singled out for praise. And were copied wholesale to Wikipedia under the terms of the mutually compatible Creative Commons licenses of the projects.[120]
This importing does have some benefit to Citizendium, since each imported article will link to the Citizendium one in perpetuity. But in a bizarre twist, while Citizendium's license allows its material to be freely used elsewhere, the project's Editorial Council has expressly forbidden the importation of articles from any other source, including Wikipedia. Thus when a Citizendium article is better than its Wikipedia counterpart, Wikipedia can use the better one, but when the Wikipedia article is better, Citizendium must make do with whatever it has.
With its best content also available at its much larger competitor, which also has much more user-friendly registration procedures, and with Sanger's behaviour costing Citizendium the initial good will of the academic community, it will be very hard for Citizendium ever to become a viable competitor to Wikipedia.
Rearranging the deckchairs[edit]
Citizendium has so far utterly failed to make the bold moves necessary to regain the ground it has lost. Instead, much of its effort has been wasted in petty bickering[123] (some of which has taken place on this very wiki)[124] and in byzantine governance procedures that are inappropriate for such a small project.
A Citizendium Charter was mentioned in the project's inaugural press release of October 2006[11] and intended to be implemented within the first twelve months. The charter was at last voted in on 23 September 2010.[125] The approved version contains 55 Articles that set up a seven-member Editorial Council, a five-member Management Council, and the three "ancillary positions" of Managing Editor, Constabulary, and Ombudsman — all for a project with less than 10 contributors on an average day.[126] (Note Article 24 promises "a minimum of bureaucracy.") It has obvious typographical and grammatical errors and some of these, when taken literally, reverse the intended meaning of the text.[127] But the committee assigned to create the charter was disbanded,[128][129] the former members seem pretty burnt out on the process,[130] and personal sniping between them remains a regular feature of the site forum.[131]
A month after the elections for the Management and Editorial councils one of the members of the Editorial Council resigned, citing his frustration with fighting "absolutely pointless bureaucracy":
""It has been like the scene from Douglas Adams' Hitch-hikers' Guide to the Galaxy where they task the hair-dressers with discovering fire, so they form the Fire Discovery Subcommittee who then decide they need to do consumer focus groups to decide how best to market fire... Look at any successful open source project and you'll find few if any committees or Councils or quorums or any of that faff. That is a feature, not a bug. I'm not saying we don't need those things. But we don't need them now. What we need are sensible, mature people who can make a decision without drama and bickering.
|—Tom Morris, "Citizendium Editorial Council: resignation statement"
While some progress has been made since the charter passed, the fundamental problems remain. The homeopathy article was finally replaced with something reasonably sane by Editorial Council fiat, overriding the vaunted "expert approval" process and implicitly admitting its failure.[132] The Healing Arts workgroup — consisting of alternative medicine practitioners — was disbanded;[133] but according to that decision, no healing arts editor licensed to practice their craft will lose their editorship, instead automatically gaining the right to register as Health Sciences editors, where they can do even more damage. (Dana Ullman is still listed as an editor,[134] though not yet attached to Health Sciences or any other workgroup.) Such spot fixes do nothing to solve the wider problem: many promotional articles on the same level as the old homeopathy article still exist, including "approved" articles such as the one on Chiropracticimg.
Even if these issues can be overcome, the charter itself is deeply flawed, to the point it may actually hinder Citizendium's progress. The document[135] seems to violate every possible principle of parsimony and practicality, comprising 55 Articles, some of which contradict other articles (with Article 24 promising "a minimum of bureaucracy", and then detailing an overly detailed bureaucratic structure [136]). It makes constitutional the real names policy. It fails to mention Citizendium's objective as an encyclopedia. It shows absolutely no awareness of the problems that killed participation in the first place, and several users have taken objection to the bureaucratic structure.[137]
Even worse, Citizendium's most crucial problem — its failure to attract and retain members — has been actively exacerbated by the Editorial Council. For example, when a member of the Editorial Council pointed out one of his friends chose not to join Citizendium because he felt the questions being asked were too intrusive, another Editorial Council member responded:img
""Your friend may be the world's leading expert on whatever subject you say he is, but he's also the world's leading imbecile. And you may tell him that I said so, and use my name as well. What a cretin! And if all the other myriad people you tell us about share his feelings (which I seriously doubt, by the way), then they are cretins too. And we are better off without them.
And then, the Editorial Council itself fell apart in late 2012 due to not having enough members to participate. Not only did approvals of new users start to take months - if the e-mails sent to the constables aren't accidentally deletedimg - but when bureaucracy limped back together enough to hold an election in late 2013, all attempts to fix this with a saner registration process were not only rejected by the one remaining bureaucrat before voting was allowed to happen (1img 2img), but the attempts resulted in a backlash insisting that real names must be verified by methods "as foolproof as practically possible".img
Welcome to Citizendium.
See also[edit]
|For those of you in the mood, RationalWiki has a fun article about Citizendium FAQ.
- RationalWiki:What is going on at Citizendium?
- Conservapedia
- New World Encyclopedia
- Crank magnetism
External links[edit]
- ↑ Wikipedia says so, this week. The question is more than a little contentious, however.
- ↑ Going so far as forbidding its editors from uploading free-to-use images and photographs from elsewhere if the artist works under a pseudonym and can't be convinced to reveal his or her real name: User talk:MGA73, Wikimedia Commons. (Note that they asked the wrong person, no less: The file in question is w:File:Russian_Blue_001.gif.)
- ↑ For context, we're at around 16,000, and Conservapedia is around 75,000.
- ↑ The mean being much larger than the median suggests the distribution is strongly positively skewed: many very short articles and a much smaller number of long ones.
- ↑ By the way, the mean article length is comparable to Wikipedia's, which was 580 words in January 2010.
- ↑ Wikipedia uses a Creative Commons license, which requires giving credit if you don't want to violate copyright. If appropriate credit had been given, Citizendium would have been fine. Wikipedia article: Subject–object problem Comparison of text: [1]
- ↑ Or as one Citizendium Editor put it, "when I politely inform you that what you have written is unbalanced and does not represent mainstream academic views, kindly do not ask me for citations."
- ↑ And everyone's faces, really. Summary of the summary: People remain a problem.
- ↑ Although in fairness, Innis has been a long-term dedicated participant in Citizendium in general, and insightful concerning its problems.
- ↑ Lists among its references a page from an online merchant of alternative medicine; hardly the type of source material one would expect for a site with Citizendium's aspirations.
- ↑ For example, "In the final analysis, the researchers included only the 8 largest studies" - that's completely and totally false; the whole point of the study was to see how things changed as study size and quality increased, and those 8 studies are the large, high-quality studies used in the highest rank of the comparison, not the only ones considered.
- ↑ Due to page moves (and possibly server moves), the article's history is very confusing.
- ↑ Thanks to us: RationalWiki edit; Citizendium correction.
- ↑ Their main page
- ↑ CZ:Healing Arts Workgroup.
- ↑ http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=CZ:Article_of_the_Week&diff=next&oldid=100440824
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Wikipedia founder's scholarly web venture plays host to a war of words (Times Higher Education, 2009-01-22)
- ↑ Chart: Editors at Citizendium per month
- ↑ Chart: Edits made at Citizendium per month
- ↑ The exact figure is 56.5%; see this chart.
- ↑ Citizendium statisticsimg
- ↑ "Citizendium Council election". http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:ElectionJune2015. Retrieved 23 June 2015.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge (longer version) (Larry Sanger, 2006-09-15)
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Larry Sanger. "Co-Founder to Launch Edited Version of Wikipedia: Pilot Project for the Citizendium to Launch This Week", Citizendium.org, October 17, 2006.
- ↑ CZ:Press Coverage (archived)
- ↑ Citizendium Press Releases > Mar272007
- ↑ [2] Citizendium forum thread, "Would you contribute more if the wiki were blank?" (January 2007)
- ↑ Larry Sanger: The Citizendium one year on: a strong start and an amazing future
- ↑ CZ:Statistics, graph Editing users.png
- ↑ Thirty-day running totals at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics.
- ↑ Wikia Statistics - MuppetWiki
- ↑ Wikia Statistics - Wookieepedia, the Star Wars Wiki
- ↑ Active Editors at RationalWiki
- ↑ 21.0 21.1 http://web.archive.org/web/20110929203742/daveydweeb.com/2007/02/07/citizendium-isnt-interested-in-your-opinion/
- ↑ http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,3299.msg31250.html#msg31250
- ↑ "My personal observation of the articles I have been involved with is that their quality varies enormously... This includes some of the population elevated to 'approved' articles, an ossification process that simply makes any revision of their infelicities impossibly bureaucratic." Citizendium Forum post, 21 September 2011.
- ↑ http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/My_resignation--Larry_Sanger
- ↑ The Hive: The Cunctator (Marshall Poe, The Atlantic, September 2006)
- ↑ [3] "How similar is this project to open source hacker culture, and how similar to the culture of academia?" Citizendium FAQ, as of 23 December 2010
- ↑ Sanger, L. 2005-04-19. "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia, Part II." Slashdot. This article sets out the basic ideas that he attempted eventually to put into practice as Citizendium.
- ↑ Citizendium — A study in momentum killing (Terrell Russell, blog post, 2006-10-13)
- ↑ "I won't point out the various examples of spuriousness but instead keep it to one observation: someone that inclined to perceive hostility where it isn't evident is not going to be a good community manager." (Response to a Larry Sanger blog post)
- ↑ [4] "I can tell you in two words why it failed: Larry Sanger. I found I had moved from anarchy to absolute monarchy. After two or three encounters with Larry's autocratic rudeness, I departed."
- ↑ http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/02/citizendium.ars/3 'No dictator for life'
- ↑ http://news.softpedia.com/news/Wikipedia-Co-Founder-Ready-to-Launch-New-Project-120175.shtml
- ↑ https://lists.purdue.edu/pipermail/citizendium-l/2009-July/001418.html
- ↑ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/09/sanger_reports_wikimedia_to_the_fbi/
- ↑ Reply to Slashdot about my report to the FBI (Larry Sanger, Citizendium Blog, 11 April 2010)
- ↑ http://www.larrysanger.org/ReplyToSlashdot.html
- ↑ The Charter Ratification Vote is Over (Larry Sanger, citizendium-l, 23 September 2010)
- ↑ Citizendium Ballot for the Management Council, June 2011.
- ↑ http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Constable
- ↑ 40.0 40.1 40.2 University may be given the keys to Citizendium (comments) — quite vicious analysis in the story comments from academics burnt by Citizendium, with frankly bizarre responses from Larry Sanger and senior Citizendium constables.
- ↑ Consultingimg (larrysanger.org)
- ↑ Screen cap of forum post
- ↑ Citizendium Forum thread, "Message to the Citizendium Community"
- ↑ Citizendium Forum thread, "New hosting solution"
- ↑ Citizendium Donor List ( screencap)
- ↑ [5] Comment by Larry Sanger posted to Wikipedia Review. Interestingly, Sanger's most forthcoming discussion of Citizendium finances appears on a site outside Citizendium.
- ↑ Citizendium press release
- ↑ Citizendium Forums thread, 12 November 2010
- ↑ Citizendium Personnel
- ↑ Citizendium form post: A major reorganization of our server farm
- ↑ Citizendium's financial report
- ↑ [backPid=115&cHash=db6cf0927d0b217ff33f1e45791700bc]
- ↑ Project Directory at the Tides Center web site
- ↑ Edit to CZ:FAQ by the project's Managing Editor, describing material on Tides Center partnership as "outdated."
- ↑ Edit to CZ:We aren't Wikipedia by the project's Managing Editor, removing reference to Tides Center
- ↑ A look at Citizendium's Backend (Network Performance Daily, 2007-06-11) — "First, to be different from Wikipedia." (Link down, quoted here by Domas Mituzas of Wikimedia.)
- ↑ Upgrading the MW extensions on the live wiki (Dan Nessett, forums)
- ↑ First RationalWiki report and second RationalWiki report of said violations.
- ↑ Citizendium's Editorial Council engages in its second thinly-veiled attack on the same one of its members.
- ↑ ...the text of passed motions is available under a link of the form EC:I-2011-004 consisting of the namespace "EC:" followed by "R-", "Rec-", "D-", or "I-" (for Regulation, Recommendation, Decision, internal decision), the year "2011" and the number of the ruling "-004"... etc ad nauseam.
- ↑ http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,3792.0.html
- ↑ Search for images with "unknown" attribution or copyright status.
- ↑ Wikipedia:COI
- ↑ Larry Sanger, Citizendium, and the Problem of Expertise (Clay Shirky, Sep 2006)
- ↑ Citizendium Editor Policy
- ↑ Citizendium Editorial Council decision PR-2010-017
- ↑ [6] Citizendium forum post by Professor Russell Potter, 18 January 2007
- ↑ ProfRAP (Russell Potter), blog comment
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20070214071513/http://www.kalital.com/archives/2006/11/racism_and_sexism_at_citizendi.html
- ↑ http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Talk%3ACitizendium&diff=627280&oldid=627218
- ↑ A first hand account by Kali Tal of her experience on Citizendium.
- ↑ A NEW and GOOD Alternative to Wikipedia,especially on homeopathy! (Dana Ullman, otherhealth.com forum post)
- ↑ Talk:Homeopathy > Draftimg (revision as of 22:26, 14 September 2010)
- ↑ 74.0 74.1 Citizendium forumsimg
- ↑ Citizendium forumsimg (multiple posts)
- ↑ http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/09/an_expertfocuse.php#c20557
- ↑ Detailed dispute watch rules and procedures (screencap)
- ↑ Citizendium failure Aleta Curry: "Do you realise that, the people spouting off on the talk pages you quote are, for the most part, disgruntled and vindictive ex-CZers and, unlike your respectable self, (and with a couple of notable exceptions) hiding behind pseudo anonymity?"
- ↑ Lessons from Citizendium (Slides and notes for HaeB's talk "Lessons from Citizendium" at Wikimania 2009)
- ↑ [7] Citizendium forum comment by Tom Morris, 26 April 2009
- ↑ [8] Citizendium forum comment by Howard C. Berkowitz, 1 October 2009
- ↑ [9] Citizendium forum comment by Daniel Mietchen, 9 May 2010
- ↑ Dana Ullman ban announcement
- ↑ Discussion of Dana Ullman's complete lack of any of the qualifications they claim experts are required to have, leading to the user pointing out the issues, Adam Cuerden, being banned by Hayford Peirce.
- ↑ 85.0 85.1 Comment removed by D.Matt Innis from Talk:Memory of Water at 20:39, 20 September 2010 The offending words were "Oh, how I wish homeopathy [i.e., the homeopathy article] and its spinoffs would go away. I may just deal with the frustration by leaving Citizendium, as long as this is the main area of discussion. Desperately waiting for the Charter, hopefully ratification, and the Editorial Council..."
- ↑ On Citizendium
- ↑ http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:FAQ#What_is_Citizendium_trying_to_achieve.3F
- ↑ http://reinderdijkhuis.com/wordpress/2009/02/12/citizendium-the-encyclopedia-only-pro-homeopathy-editors-can-edit/
- ↑ Homeopathyimg (now-archived version from January 2009 which appeared on Citizendium's main page)
- ↑ "Is homeopathy good medecine?", Time magazine, 25 September 1995
- ↑ A NEW and GOOD Alternative to Wikipedia,especially on homeopathy! (Dana Ullman, otherhealth.com forum post)
- ↑ Talk:Homeopathy > Draft (revision as of 22:26, 14 September 2010)
- ↑ "Homeopathy", article at Wiki4CAM.org
- ↑ Citizendium:Chiropractic
- ↑ http://mail.citizendium.org/pipermail/sharedknowing/2009-February/000110.html
- ↑ Citizendium main page, January 28th 2009
- ↑ http://ec.citizendium.org/wiki/EC:DR-2010-006 Citizendium Editorial Council decision]
- ↑ User:JedRothwell block log
- ↑ Citizendium: cr*p or what? (William L. Connolley, Stoat, 2007-05-14)
- ↑ Citizendium is still doomed (William L. Connolley, Stoat, 2008-09-10)
- ↑ 'From http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Pseudoscience#Astrology: "Astrological researchers often complain that they cannot receive a fair hearing in scientific circles, and find it hard to have their research published in scientific journals. They claim that their scientific critics have wrongly dismissed studies which do support astrology. An example would be Michel Gauquelin's purported discovery of correlations between some planetary positions and certain human traits such as vocations." - What the hell, Citizendium?
- ↑ User:Terryeo block log
- ↑ Truth About Scientology: Steven Ferry
- ↑ Scientology discussion
- ↑ 105.0 105.1 Scientologist infiltrates Citizendium (Operation Clambake Message Boards)
- ↑ http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Church_of_Scientology&diff=prev&oldid=100247397
- ↑ http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Church_of_Scientology&diff=prev&oldid=100314730
- ↑ 2008 Council Members
- ↑ http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Welcome_to_Citizendium&oldid=100789411 Welcome to Citizendium
- ↑ Citizendium approved errors (HaeB, Wikipedia)
- ↑ Atomic theory Encyclopædia Britannica
- ↑ Nick Gardner worked as an advisor to John Major's government.
- ↑ http://184.108.40.206/~wikipede/index.php?showtopic=25658
- ↑ HTML5 audio.
- ↑ RationalWiki edit; Citizendium correction.
- ↑ http://modernityblog.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/hagiography-and-citizendium/
- ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Some_notes_on_Citizendium
- ↑ http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Approval_Process
- ↑ 120.0 120.1 120.2 WikiProject Citizendium Porting
- ↑ Figure obtained by counting the number of uses of Template:Citizendium, which is used to notify users that some text in an article has been taken from Citizendium. This figure is likely a bit high, since no attempt was made to subtract non-article usages.
- ↑ WikiProject Citizendium Porting, note for John Logie Baird: "two words ported, citizendium article based off of wikipedia, but sans references"
- ↑ For a sample of this petty squabbling see the Citizendium forum thread entitled Appeal of block 1549 ( screencap)
- ↑ See the WIGO:CZ talk page archives one through six. Note how it escalates quickly.
- ↑ Charter vote (Matt Innis, Citizendium forums)
- ↑ Citizendium Statistics: Daily contributors Accessed 22 March 2012.
- ↑ Citizendium Charter. A couple of examples: Article 5 is mostly a long, convoluted sentence that includes the wording "upon complaint of the aggrieved Citizen, the punishment of which may include..." This literally says that it is the "aggrieved citizen" who will be punished. In Article 12, what is "dispute resolutions should be resolved" supposed to mean? And so on.
- ↑ Citizendium Forums: Comments on "final version"
- ↑ Citizendium Forums: Comments on "final version"
- ↑ Citizendium Forums: Comments on "final version"
- ↑ Post to forum thread, "Openness & the public record", 11 March 2011; reply ( screencap)
- ↑ Citizendium Editorial Council decision
- ↑ Citizendium Editorial Council decision: Healing Arts Workgroup
- ↑ Category:CZ Editors ( screencap)
- ↑ CZ:Charter (revision of 23 September 2010)
- ↑ [10]]
- ↑ What if we cannot fill all of the positions? (forum thread)
|Welcome to the Wikisphere. Please proceed with caution:
|A Storehouse of Knowledge - Anarchopedia - Conservapedia - CreationWiki - EvoWiki - Infogalactic - Knowino - Metapedia - New World Encyclopedia - PESWiki - Palaeos - Psiram - RationalWikiWiki - RationalWikiWikiWiki - RationalWiki (français) - Rightpedia - SourceWatch - TV Tropes - TruthWiki - Wiki - Wiki4CAM - wikiFactor - WikiIslam - WikiSynergy - Wikipedia


text:
Contact Us for Your Lock & Builders Hardware Needs 1-800-621-6869 |
Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates about our products.
We respect your privacy.
Success! You're now one of the insiders who will be one of the first to find out about new products and updates about Pamex!

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Expert Q&A: Benefits - Weds 23 October, 3-4pm
Our next expert Q&A will be on the topic of benefits. It will be hosted by Lauren from our Knowledge Services team. She'll be answering your questions on Wednesday 23 October between 3-4pm.
You can either post your question >here< or email them to us at email@example.com and we'll be happy to ask them on your behalf.
Bi-Parietal Atrophy???
Discussion in 'Younger people with dementia and their carers' started by Sara-Jane, Aug 31, 2005.


text:
Monday morning is not usually a great time. The phone rings non-stop. My own "to call" list is a mile long. This Monday, temperatures started to climb into the 90's, so I had to water the garden more than usual before starting my day. I didn't have time to swim laps before heading off on an appointment I'd made a few weeks ago, with my neighbor Ann Daniels.
But how quickly a "Monday mood" can change. At Ann's house, I was enthusiastically greeted by her chocolate lab Bagley. I immediately thought of her late father, Worth Bagley Daniels, who brightened this street and many parts of Baltimore for many years.
Ann's daughter came cheerfully down the steps and said hello before Ann and I took off to our alma mater, Roland Park Country School. There we were met by Beth Drummond Casey, executive director of the citywide Middle Grades Partnership, and by Maria Hampton, dean of students for the middle school at Roland Park Country and site director for its Middle Grades Partnership program.
Although I'd heard about the program from Ann, Beth and Maria before, I'd never seen it in action. Nothing makes a week start off any better than seeing something working well in Baltimore City and something that changes lives for the better.
This summer, eight seventh graders, 13 eighth graders and 11 ninth graders from Garrison Middle School, plus 28 high school students — who are or have been in the middle grades program — are participating in a summer session at Roland Park Country.
I saw only one-third of that program Monday morning, but it made me want to see the other two-thirds and the high school students participating in them. One program in science is at Loyola University Maryland. The other, in architecture, is at Morgan State University.
What I saw at Roland Park Country made me wish I could attend such a program, and made me wish even more that girls who are middle school students at Paul's Place, where I volunteer, could participate.
The simple, but powerful, centerpiece of this particular partnership is a garden at Garrison Middle. During the school year, the garden is tended both by Garrison students and their counterparts from Roland Park Country, where the experience for Garrison students continues in summer with art, dance, reading, writing, science and math.
Today, I saw silver and gold papier-mâché frames made by the girls around canvases they'll soon paint. I saw a math teacher talking in terms of home ownership and mortgages. In science, middle schoolers were about to encounter soil samples, compost and worms. Some would use herbs in different ways from their school garden.
In reading, the books were a springboard to language, to each girl learning more about herself, to setting goals and supporting each other to achieve those goals.
The girls had made cereal boxes for a new cereal, "True Believer," with ingredients for success written on each box. In writing class, taught by Brenda Tilghman, the site director from Garrison Middle, diamond poems (one word at the beginning, four in the middle and one at the end) would focus on a garden element.
Still stiff from too many weekend hours in my own garden, I sat down in each classroom. I was reluctant to get up and leave. I want to try the diamond poem sometime myself or make a papier-mâché picture frame.
As Ann and I left, we watched a dance class. A former Middle Grades Partnership student, who's just graduated from the Baltimore School for the Arts, led a dance that was smooth and jazzy. It was clear that these middle school girls, while learning dance and choreography, were feeling good about themselves and having fun together.
Riding back to our street with Ann, whom I met in her childhood, I thought about the academic enrichment the Middle Grades Partnership provides. I also thought about the self-confidence, lasting bonds and sense of community that strengthens these young women in middle school and as they take their seats at Western High School, Baltimore Polytechnic, Virginia Commonwealth University and theUniversity of Pennsylvania.
An added boost on Monday was knowing that the Middle Grades Partnership includes eight other partnerships, like Garrison Middle and Roland Park Country, around the city. That gives me hope for the rest of the week, and for our city.


text:
Air Canada announced 12 new US cities routes starting this May 2016. All routes are year-round with the exception of Toronto-Portland and Vancouver-San Diego.
Air Canada announced 12 new US cities routes starting this May 2016. All routes are year-round with the exception of Toronto-Portland and Vancouver-San Diego.
The new transborder routes will introduce new destinations, such as Toronto-Washington-Dulles, Toronto-Salt Lake City and Vancouver-San Jose, while also creating new city-pair routings, such as Vancouver-Chicago, Montreal-Houston, Montreal-Denver and Calgary-San Francisco.
|Vancouver-San Jose (twice daily, Air Canada Express), May 9
|Vancouver-San Diego, (daily, Air Canada rouge) June 2
|Vancouver-Chicago (daily), June 4
|Calgary-Phoenix (Monday, Thursday and Saturday, Air Canada rouge), continued from winter
|Calgary-San Francisco (daily, Air Canada Express), June 18
|Toronto-Washington DC-Dulles (twice daily, Air Canada Express), May 2
|Toronto-Jacksonville (Saturday and Sunday, Air Canada Express), May 21
|Toronto-Portland (daily), May 26
|Toronto-Salt Lake City (daily), May 27
|Montreal-Philadelphia (twice daily, Air Canada Express) May 24
|Montreal-Denver (daily), June 4
|Montreal-Houston (daily, Air Canada Express), June 6
The routes listed above will operated by Air Canada mainline, Air Canada rouge and Air Canada Express aircraft.
Things we blog about
Places we have blogged about
- Africa, Anywhere
- Alaska, Usa
- Alberta, Canada
- Andalusia, Spain
- Antigua and Barbuda
- Athens, Esye31, Greece
- Austin, Tx, United States
- Australia
- Bali, Indonesia
- Banff, 01, Canada
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Barbados
- Barcelona, 56, Spain
- Beijing, China
- Belize
- Berlin, Germany
- Bolivia
- Bora Bora, French Polynesia
- Boston, Ma, United States
- Brazil


text:
PSO necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 145 diseños de 32 diseñadores freelance.
Prenatal Screening Ontario
Prenatal Screening Ontario is a provincial program which offers all pregnant women in Ontario the option of high quality and timely prenatal screening. Prenatal screening identifies pregnancies where there is an increased chance of the baby being born with any of three serious fetal health conditions. If the chance of the baby having one of these conditions is increased, additional health care services are offered to the pregnant woman, including counseling about the screening test, the health condition and the option of further testing to see if the baby is actually affected by one of these conditions. Prenatal Screening Ontario offers women the option to learn more about the health of her developing baby in a supportive and caring environment. Prenatal Screening Ontario is delivered by a multidisciplinary health care team including sonographers, laboratory staff, primary health care providers, genetic counselors, geneticists, obstetricians and maternal fetal medicine specialists.
Key themes are as follows: mother, pregnancy, optional, informed choice, prenatal care, support, fetal health, health, health care provider
The logo must include both official languages – English and French –
The logo must be professional and serious and not cute – no cartoons
The logo must command respect and confidence, yet not be harsh
The logo must be 100% original, no clip art
Required formats: jpg, pdf, psd, tiff, png
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.


text:
Saudi Arabia could use a seized Iraqi oil pipeline that runs through the kingdom to transport gas after carrying out repairs and technical changes, a Saudi oil ministry source said Wednesday, June 13. "We could use the pipeline for various purposes, including carrying gas, within the framework of our expansion projects in the oil and gas sectors," the "high-level" source said in the English-language daily Arab News.
Most of Iraq's dual pipeline runs parallel to a Saudi pipeline from Jubail on the Gulf to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. "A joint management of the two pipelines is feasible both economically and technically," the paper said.
The ministry source said the 1.65 million barrel per day Iraqi pipeline would help increase energy sources in western Saudi Arabia, especially for refining and industrial uses. Saudi Arabia has launched a natural gas initiative to provide feedstock for industry and meet the demands of a rapidly growing population.
Saudi authorities announced the seizure of Iraq's pipeline, which was built in the late 1980s at a cost of $2.2 billion to transport Iraqi crude to the Red Sea, in a letter to the United Nations on Monday.
Saudi Arabia disconnected the pipeline after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, and it has not been used since.
In a letter to Annan, the Saudi ambassador to the United Nations, Fawzi bin Abdul Majeed Shobokshi, said Iraqi threats of aggression had "destroyed any rationale" for maintaining the pipeline. Shobokshi said "the just compensation due to the government of Iraq" for the seizure should be deducted from Riyadh's claims against Baghdad for damages and losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait.
Iraq has denounced what it called the "hostile" action and informed the United Nations it will demand compensation.
Al-Riyadh, another Saudi paper, on Wednesday defended the confiscation as "legitimate and legal."
The kingdom acted "at the opportune moment to re-establish its sovereignty over a pipeline which passes through its territory and for which it paid a large part of the cost," the paper said.
"Saudi Arabia has thus defended its interests," especially as Iraq has allegedly carried out several attacks on the border, it said.
Iraq last week denied Saudi charges that it had provoked a string of border incidents since March. — (AFP)
© Agence France Presse
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)


text:
Can you remember the world before blogs? I'm tempted to say I've been blogging for all of my adult life, but if you've seen the gray in my hair, you recognize that statement as, at best, exaggeration. And yet the nature blog feels like something we've always had and enjoyed. Just like Facebook. And eBird. And cellphones that take decent landscape shots. Clearly, we can become accustomed to good things quickly.
Yet, when I started 10,000 Birds 11 years ago, the vast firmament of nature blogs was shockingly dark and, for a new nature writer, somewhat lonely. The former condition obviously improved rapidly over time as luminous new blogs populated our starry skies. Surprisingly, though, that initial feeling of writing in the wilderness faded quite quickly. Other bloggers were writing about birds and nature back in 2003, some even before then, and many of us found a communal spirit sparked by comments and crosslinks that carried into the world we wrote about.
Remember the blog carnival craze? We nature bloggers were part of the scene, first as part of the seminal science carnival Tangled Bank and later with our own community carnivals like, of course, I and the Bird. Some people might still argue whether such a thing as a "birding community" exists, but anyone who shared avian observations on the internet in the late 2000's and beyond could have been part of a vibrant bird blogging community.
The great struggle then, as now, was reaching new readers and cultivating an engaged audience. Community helped. Carnivals helped. Sometimes even recruiting readers offline helped. But we nature bloggers, in our tiny corner of the internet, needed more avenues to connect to larger audiences. We (and, by then, this blog was a wonderful "we") enjoyed a good volume of relevant traffic from toplists like the FatBirder 500 but had to jockey for position with forums, merchant sites, and even pet sites. Nature bloggers deserved a more tailored solution, which is why I issued the following invitation in January 2008:
Blogs are special. We deserve our own toplist, don't we? And ours shouldn't isolate birding blogs from our natural (pardon the pun) allies exploring topics like invertebrates, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, flora, fungus, and ecosystems of every kind, right? That's right…
Presenting the Nature Blog Network, the toplist for the nature blog community. A site like this has the potential to be a phenomenal resource for readers and publishers alike in identifying the very best nature blogs on the net. If you write about birds, bugs, plants, herps, hiking, mollusks, mushrooms, ecosystems, or any other natural topic, adding your blog to this toplist is the perfect way to reach new readers interested in exactly what you have to offer. As a bonus, you'll get to see where your site falls amongst those of your respected peers. And, in true blogging fashion, it's FREE!
As usual when launching new initiatives, I wasn't certain of the NBN's prospects. But we had hundreds of enrollments within weeks and new bloggers joining our network every single week from our inauguration until just recently.
The Nature Blog Network was, at its heart, a community meant to promote this very personal, very beautiful commitment so many of us have made to sharing our experiences of the natural world. It takes a community to drive a community, which is why we're fortunate that folks like Nate Swick, Jane Blumenthal, John Riutta, Seabrooke Leckie, Rosie Nixon, Nicole Burgoz, and our dear departed friend April Lorier volunteered their time and passion to make this one blossom.
But the title of this message probably confirms what you may have suspected if you've been keeping up with the Nature Blog Network. The bad guys have won. Our decrepit toplist software, which just didn't keep up with the times, couldn't hold up under the assault of literally thousands of spam registrations. At first we couldn't approve new members. Now we can't even log in. Worst of all, the toplist isn't showing up. The damage is, as far as I can tell, irreparable.
As a result, I'll be pulling the plug on the Nature Blog Network and taking the whole thing down. But while we're gathered here to bury the Nature Blog Network, spare a few moments to praise it as well. Rosie took some time to capture the Nature Blog Network experience:
I was always excited when Mike sent me a new batch of blogs to be given a warm welcome through the NBN blog. NBN was such a great place to find niche blogs that I'd never have found through any search engine …easily! There were so many specialists in their own field of work sharing their stories and their images from across the world. It was far better than subscribing to a nature magazine as I was able to get to know the writer 'behind' many of the blogs and I formed some good friendships thanks to NBN.
Based on the feedback so many of you have shared over the years, the Nature Blog Network has fostered countless connections involving well over 3,000 nature blogs. And just about every one of these blogs is worth reading… believe me, I've visited most of them!
In some ways, this is the passing of an era, but, in Jane's words, communities don't end because one platform ends.
Not just birders, but also herpetologists, marine biologists, mothing enthusiasts, writers, conservationists, artists, bloggers, and myriad other specialists, observers, and supporters who fall into the broad community we might call the network of nature lovers will continue to connect and work together to make our world a little better by protecting, fostering, and sharing nature at its best.
TL; DR, the Nature Blog Network has run its course. Thank you to every one of you who joined our ranks or enjoyed what our international community cared so much about sharing. The community, which is the only part that really mattered, lives on. I, for one, cannot wait to see what comes next!
I'm sad to see the end of the Nature Blog Network, just as I was sad to see the end of I and the Bird. But to tell the truth, I hadn't paid much attention to it recently. The good news is that there are still many vibrant and interesting nature blogs even if many of the bloggers have changed since the early days.
"Yet, when I started 10,000 Blogs 11 years ago,"
Wow, that is the epitome of a "Big Year!"
Thanks for all the hard work you did for us over the years.
Happy Future, whatever you decide to do next.
So, so sad. I loved Nature Blog Network. It was my go-to site when I was looking for something interesting to read , , , and I watched my stats daily.
Thank you so much for welcoming me into the NBN fold. I met some fellow botanical artists through the network and now have some great friends. Deeply saddened to hear of the end of the site, but thanks you for all your hard work and dedication on behalf of us bloggers..
Although I never expect to be one of the Big League bloggers, just getting the feedback provided because of your efforts motivated me to strive for excellence. Thank you!
Thank you so much for filling us in. I was starting to Google "what happened to Nature Blog Networks" just to see if there was some news.
I had my low ranking blog in there, which was great, but more than that, it was such fun to browse through the various topics and find interesting stuff all over the world.
Thank you for the NBN concept, the time invested, and the effort from the team in making it real.
© 2013 10,000 Birds. All words, images, and opinions are the property of their respective authors unless stated otherwise.


text:
Filing the
WR-30, Quarterly Wage Report, over the internet is a new process
offered by the Division. It is currently available to users of QREPS.
It will become available for widespread use in the near future.
To use this option, you will need a PIN number supplied by the Division.
The information provided below describes the various segments of
the process a filer will need to complete and submit the WR-30 online.
This process will reduce the amount of time to complete and submit
your return. You will have the ability to link back to this page
from any of the three segments for quick reference and explanations.
You will also be able to send the Division an email if you need
additional information. We also encourage you to send us your comments
via email. Your comments will help us to make changes that will
further increase the ease of use and efficiencies of filing returns
in this manner.
This page is divided into
sections that correspond to the three available parts of the filing
You may
select any one of these to obtain information relative to the part
of the online filing process. If you have any questions, problems,
or comments, please notify us via the email. You input will help
to make this a convenient, useful process.
This internet
application replaces the need for you to file a paper WR-30. You
can review your list of employees at any time, and print a copy
if you wish; update any information relating to the list; add or
delete employees as necessary; and submit or file the return from
this application. The application is available 24 hours a day, 7
days a week. In addition, until you actually submit the return,
you can go back to the data as many times as you wish to either
complete the form in stages or to make changes as necessary. Please
note that the day that you submit the return will be the filing
date. If you plan to complete the form in stages, leave sufficient
time to complete, review, and submit the form by the due date.
This screen
presents all of the employees that were filed by your company on
the last return. It lists their names and social security numbers.
The gross wages and base weeks are zero. The wages and weeks are
to be filled in by you. You may enter all of the required information
at one sitting, or you may sign off and return at a later time or
day and resume filling out the return. You may continue to work
on the return until it is submitted. You will not be able to make
any changes once you've submitted the return.
Updates - To update a listed employee, double click their social security
number. You will be presented with a detail screen for that employee.
Enter the appropriate salary and weeks information. You may also
correct any spelling of the employee's name. You can then press
the "Enter Changes" button. You will be presented with
a revised page indicated the update was successful. You may then
select "Return to Employee List" to move to the next employee
for updating. If you need to correct a social security number, see
"Delete Employee" below.
When you
have completed adding employees, you can return to the submenu by
either using the "Back" button on your browser, or by
selecting "New Jersey WR30 Reporting System". If you use
the "Back" button, you will step back through each page/employee.
If you select the selecting "New Jersey WR30 Reporting System"
option, you will need to reenter you company ID, quarter, year,
and PIN. If you have made a lot of changes, this second option may
be quicker.
Employee - You may delete an employee by simply pressing
the "Delete Employee" button at the bottom of the screen.
You will be required to confirm the delete with either a "Yes"
or "No" response. You will be presented with a new screen
that will confirm the deletion of that employee, listing their social
security number and name. Select "Update Employee List"
to return to move to the next employee. You will note that the employee
list no longer displays that employee.
If you need
to correct a social security number, you will need to first delete
the employee with the incorrect social security number, then add
them as explained below.
New Employee - This screen is for either adding a new
employee or reentering an employee because their social security
number was listed incorrectly. You can add an employee either from
the "Employee List" screen by selecting "New"
at the bottom, or "Add New Employee" from any "Update"
When adding
an employee, you will need to provide the following information:
If the information
is correct, press the "Add" button at the bottom of the
screen. You will be presented with a detail screen for the employee.
If you notice that some of the information is incorrect, you may
correct it, as you would with an update screen, then press "Enter
Changes". The new information will now be displayed and you
may select "Return to Employee List".
If you have
another employee to add, you may press "Add New Employee"
at the bottom of the screen. All new employees are displayed at
the bottom of the employee list.
If you have
questions or problems with this process, please advise the Division
by email. Include as much information as you can to describe the
problem. We will respond to you inquiry by return email.
This screen
presents information about your company, the quarter, year, and
due date for the return. It also provides for a contact person,
their telephone number and email address. It lists the number of
employees and the total of their wages. If you have not begun to
prepare the return, wages will be listed as zero. The status of
the return is also indicated.
Information - If you need to correct either your company name or ID number,
please contact the Division via email, call (609) 633-2633, or fax
(609) 943-4480. While not required, providing a contact name, telephone
number, and/or email address can help in expediting any problems
that the Division may encounter in processing a return. The status
will also indicate if this return has or has not yet been submitted.
Returns - When
the data has been updated and you are ready to transmit it, you
can click the "Check to Submit Batch" box at the bottom
left hand side of the screen. You will be presented with a screen
indicating successful transmission of the return and the "Status"
field will now show "Submitted to the New Jersey Processing
You have
the ability to print, at any time, the current list of your employees.
Prior to making any modifications to the file, your list will include
every employee that you filed on your last WR-30, along with their
social security number. As you make changes, update wages and weeks,
add and/or delete employees, you can return to this list and view
and/or print it as you wish. You can print the list by using the
"Print" button on your browser.
As with
any page at our site, if you have problems, questions, and/or comments,
please let us know via the email option.


text:
Please fill out the below whistleblower case evaluation form:
* Searcy Business Litigation & Employment Law represents clients in the District of Columbia and Northern Virginia, including Arlington County, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, and Prince William County, the cities of Alexandria, Falls Church, and Fairfax. The firm also serves clients in the Virginia counties of Clarke, Culpeper, Fauquier, Frederick, Madison, Page, Rappahannock, Shenandoah, Spotsylvania, Stafford, and Warren, as well as the cities of Fredericksburg and Winchester, Virginia and more.
All legal information provided on this website is general and should not be used or relied on as legal advice as legal advice cannot be given without full
consideration of all relevant information relating to a specific situation.
Designed by Scorpion Design


text:
Late in last night's Penguins win, defenseman Brooks Orpik laid a knee-on-knee hit on the Rangers' Derek Stepan. Stepan was able to leave the ice under his own power, but Torts was not a happy man after the game.
"It's a cheap, dirty hit. I wonder what would happen if we did it to their two whining stars over there?"
"It's one of the most arrogant organizations in the league. They whine about this stuff all the time, and look what happens."
"But they'll whine about something else over there, won't they? Starting with their two fucking stars."
The Eastern Conference playoffs may be less a measure of skill than an Atlantic Division survivor series. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are locked in to the 4-5 matchup, after a game last Sunday that saw 68 penalties minutes, fines, injuries, a line brawl, and opposing coaches yelling at each other on the bench. The winner of that could get the top-seeded Rangers, who have no love lost for the Flyers or Pens. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy.
NY Rangers coach John Tortorella fumes at Pittsburgh Penguins after hit on Derek Stepan [NY Daily News]


text:
Write a News Story
Meet a Pioneer Pilot
Amelia Earhart Home
Back to
Story List
The Childhood of Amelia Earheart
By: Mike G.
New York, Age 14
Amelia Earhart was born in 1897 in Atchinson, Kansas to Amy and Edwin Earhart. Amelia was nicknamed Milly as a child. Milly had a younger sister named Muriel she had also had a nickname, Muriels nickname was Pidge. Milly and Pidge had a really nice childhood. Their father took long business trips and Amy often went with them so the children were left with their grandma and grandpa Otis. Later on Milly and Pidge's father started to drink. Edwin never came home to play anymore, but would spend his time and money after work to go out and do some drinking with his freinds. Soon after he almost lost his job but was sent to a one month alcoholic center. When he was released he started to drink once again. This news travled to the main headquarters in Chicago he was then fired. When Edwin found a new job he moved the family. When they arrived they found the job was a misunderstanding, but the family stayed. Amelia(milly) soon lost all her childhood ways and graduated highschool. She later took up flying. Flying was one of her greatest passions. She first saw and airplane when she was 10. Right there she knew she wanted to fly. She wanted to become the first women ever to fly over and across the Atlantic Ocean. Many people said that she would not make it and would crash and would not be found.
Back to
Story List


text:
You're about to visit our web page in English Would you like to continue?
If this is not what you're looking for,
Visit our Welcome Page!
Technical Support
Information applies to:
This how-to illustrates the necessary steps to configure a Roadwarrior SSL VPN (OpenVPN) tunnel between a remote user's computer and a Panda GateDefender eSeries device.
Configuration Example
The example below will be creating a remote user (roadwarrior) connection to allow communication between any external remote computer and the internal site's Green network.
This will allow the user to act as though they were locally (directly) connected to the Green network and will be able to access the same internal resources.
Enable the VPN Server
At this point, Panda GateDefender eSeries VPN Server section is already configured. You only need to verify that, if there is a router between the appliance and the Internet, this router is redirecting UDP port 1194 to the IP of the appliance red zone. This port can be modified in the Panda GateDefender eSeries Advanced settings and, if so, remember to apply the same modification also to the VPN client.
Create the VPN Users
Now you need to create a user who will have permission to access the VPN. To do so, navigate to VPN Users in the right navigation pane and click Add new User.
Finally, to complete these steps, you only need to download the VPN client, install it and configure it in the roadwarrior using the previously created user and its certificate. For further information on VPN account details and settings, read the complete document How to Create a Basic VPN Connection in Panda GateDefender eSeries.
Have you resolved your query with this article?
Thanks for your answer
Business hours: Mondays-Fridays 9:00 to 18:00 CET
Outside business hours, please use the online form.


text:
What do you do when you want to take a swing at a guy nine inches taller? Do what Will Bynum did and slug Tyler Hansbrough in the gut. Pow. Not so tall now, is he?
Bynum was frustrated Saturday night, frustrated with the Pistons' record and with getting blown out by the Pacers and with being unable to fight through a Hansbrough screen on the inbounds pass. So he popped Hansbrough. He was immediately ejected, and last night the NBA announced he'll serve a one-game suspension.
"It wasn't intentional, but it kind of happens throughout the course of the game," Bynum said. "The game was kind of physical. It was during the heat of the moment."
Judging from the video, I'm not sure Bynum is using the most common definition of "intentional" (in fact, it sounds like he's using it to mean "premeditated," but no one plans to hit Tyler Hansbrough—it just kind of happens). Regardless, he'll miss tonight's game vs. the Hawks and have plenty of time to think about what he's done.


text:
The application deadline for Fall 2019 is August 1st
Fall 2019 Classes Start: August 28, 2019
The following information is provided for international applicants interested in applying to the Masters of Professional Studies in Data Science. International applicants should read the information provided carefully prior to applying.
All students need to meet the following minimum requirements:
*If you have a three-year degree versus a four-year degree, your transcript will be reviewed to determine whether you have met the necessary pre-requisites for the program. Eligibility for admission can only be determined upon receipt of a complete application.
All international applicants are encouraged to apply as early as possible to allow sufficient time to receive all the necessary documents and to process and assess the application. International applications are accepted for the fall and spring semester. We encourage all international applicants to send in their documents at least six months prior to the start of the semester for which they are applying. To apply, complete a Graduate Degree Application and use program name: Data Science (MPS)
All documents should be mailed to:
UMBC Graduate School, MPS: Data Science
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore, MD 21250 U.S.A.
Your application packet should include the following documents:
*Please note: All international students are required to submit TOEFL scores unless you attended a university in an English-speaking country or hold an undergraduate degree from a U.S. institution. IELTS or PTE are accepted in substitution for TOEFL scores.
If you intend to apply for an F-1 visa and require an I-20 from UMBC, please include the following additional documents with your application.
Send these documents after receipt admission acceptance. Note: I-20 is processed after formal acceptance into the program.
All immigration related questions should be addressed to International Education Services by phone at (410) 455-2624 or by e-mail, email@example.com.
UMBC at The Universities at Shady Grove · 9636 Gudelsky Drive, Rockville, MD 20850
301-738-6081 · email@example.com · © UMBC Division of Professional Studies