>From: "Larry Sanger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: <[email protected]> >Subject: [Citizendium-l] Approval and copyeditors >Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 20:16:00 -0700 > >Now back to the copyeditor question. Suppose the above describes what it >means, operationally, for an article to be "approved." Suppose next that >we >say we *also* want the approval of a copyeditor (i.e., anyone from a large >stable of competent, interchangeable, volunteer copyeditors) before the >article can be considered "approved" by CZ. . . . By the way, there is >still a problem associated with the copyeditor role. >Namely, would having people play this role, and making a copyeditor's OK a >condition of an article's approval, "pay for itself" in terms of better >articles? It *would* be more rules, more bureaucracy, another role, more >complexity. Therefore, it needs *heavy* justification. >
When I read about CZ considering the possibility of having copy-edit approval *and* content approval before an article can be considered CZ approved, I immediately thought of a potential problem. I have seen many articles in professional mathematics journals that are not grammatically perfect. (I've noticed this even though I'm no expert in English grammar.) Some of these articles are even in some very prestigious journals, some of these articles containing some very important results. These articles are readable only by people with a rather high level of mathematical sophistication. Even mathematics (and science) articles that are written for a general audience can require a relatively high degree of mathematical sophistication to read. How many people who consider themselves "good at English" also consider themselves "good at math (and science)"? Based on one possible answer to this question and based on the above observations, I think that there could be quite a few technical articles at CZ covering mathematics (and science) topics, some taken from Wikipedia and some written at CZ, that would not even be looked at by most people who consider themselves "good at English". It seems to me therefore that because of the volume of mathematics (and science) articles (14,000+ mathematics articles already at Wikipedia) and because of a possible relative lack of people qualified to give copyedit approval and also willing to try to read these articles, it is possible that some if not many good and important mathematics (and science) articles with some minor grammatical imperfections would escape CZ approval. Could CZ accept this as a consequence? If CZ wants to make copyedit approval part of its approval, then maybe it could have two categories, "content-approved" and "copyedit-approved", allowing the CZ user for any given article easy access to the last content-approved version and to the last copyedit-approved. Cheers, Paul _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
