Dear all, Inspired by a post by Peter Hitchmough (http://textop.org/smf/index.php?topic=80.0), I'm proposing to change course a bit. We'll be able to start doing work much sooner than recently anticipated. Within a week, I hope.
The *current* plan, which I want to modify, would have us launch to a select group maybe by the end of October. That would happen after all details are worked out with a hosting service and a new technical consultant is on board. Then we'd work hard for a week on policy documents, and then launch publicly. Now, this is still a perfectly realistic plan. For instance, I can report that we have a commitment for the funding for the consultant (basically we just have to set up the Citizendium Foundation's bank account, and the money will be wired). But doing all this *will* take on the order of several weeks. Well, I don't know about you, but I don't like waiting for weeks. So I propose to change the plan! We will quickly install a password-protected MediaWiki either in my own space or, much better, on a certain hosting service's servers on a very small scale (I've just sent them a mail asking if we can do this). I or volunteer then set up the wiki (basic setup is not hard) and give permissions to a technical team (as recently proposed: http://textop.org/smf/index.php?topic=8.msg378#msg378) to fiddle with various settings. Then we open the wiki to some select members, i.e., it would be readable and writable only for them. Those people then gradually bring in more and more people. Soon, the pilot project might feature several hundred people, including you citizendium-l subscribers. Only after we have "privately" prepared everything for the deluge, we open the project to public contribution. Of course, we'll try to do that quite soon, within several weeks, and (I propose) one to two months. Below are some details. I'd like your feedback within the next 48 hours, either at length on this list, or more quickly on this forum thread: http://textop.org/smf/index.php?topic=82.0 The main purpose of the pilot project is to prepare the Citizendium wiki for public contribution. More particularly, we want to: (1) ensure that the MediaWiki settings are appropriate for public launch; (2) prepare initial policy and help pages; (3) take on board and train a core of reliable constables, editors, and authors, in order to have a relatively stable, thriving community in place at public launch; (5) prepare a number of high-quality, approved articles to demonstrate the capabilities of the system; and (4) before too long, upload Wikipedia articles and settle on a way to mark CZ-edited versus CZ-unedited articles (and test this system). In the first few days after the pilot project wiki is set up, I will ask a relatively small set of people to hammer out the ground rules for the pilot project, and prepare the wiki for an influx of people. Then, I think a few days after that, we will open the pilot project up to other people who apply or whom we know and trust. (Note, we *will* have both editors and authors in the pilot project.) Then we bang away at the thing for a few weeks, until we feel the software settings, policy pages, some sample articles, and server network are ready for whatever bandwidth we feel is likely. Then we open it up to the world! Who's with me? http://textop.org/smf/index.php?topic=82.0 --Larry _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
