I went to Citizendium for the first time today, and thought I'd write something, and then it says no IPs allowed, and you have to not only register, but to e-mail to register, including saying your real full name and a biography which will end up in your public profile!

http://www.citizendium.org/cfa.html

It seemed a bit severe, but I've written my biography. I am not sure if I'm really qualified enough. I don't have a PhD. My highest official qualification is a Diploma, although I did get 2 subjects short of a university degree, and halfway through another. I wouldn't employ me to write in an encyclopaedia. But I don't know what their standards are.

So what does everyone think of this? Is this fair enough? Or is it a bit too severe? Is anyone here a member of Citizendium?

And do you think that Wikipedia should have rules that severe?

I think that's a bit much.

How do they verify that your credentials are real or even your real name is real?

Wikipedia should have some sort of standards. But you have to be careful - I have no qualifications relevant to most of my edits.

Apparently you're meant to link to your resume online or something. I suppose that's fine if you're famous but I don't have a resume online. I change it all the time. Anyway I'll see if I hear back from them.

Joel Leyden got in, but didn't make any edits.

they really don't check it in the case of normal, boring qualifications. If you claim a phd and claim to be a published writer, they are supposed to make an attempt to verify that. i followed all this on CZ in March and Larry or someone suggested they maybe do a few cursory google searches in such cases (of normal, boring qualifications), but that's really it.

They didn't accept me (but didn't refuse me either). They wanted me to prove that I was the owner of Wikipedia Review, and that my real name was really what I said. The only place on the web that verifies my real name is a cyber stalking web site. http://www.toxicpink.net/ that lists me as one of the first victims.

I also pointed them to this post. And the fact that I'd talked to Larry Sanger and Jimbo Wales.

Nobody disputes that I paid the hosting money last year, and this year by accident, do they? Well anyway I guess I'm not really the owner in any power sense, but hey technically. Next year hopefully someone else will officially be the owner.

I think it'd be interesting to contribute to it too, because, even though registering is a pain in the butt, you'd know that once you're in, you're not going to be putting up with the nonsense from Wikipedia, right? Well, you'd hope not at least.

No, Citizendium is not worth it.

For a start, their business model is strictly begging-bowl only. The only way to survive is to hope the poor schmucks who have written articles for Citizendium pay for the bandwidth to keep their babies alive on teh Interwebs.

What CZ needs is a) sponsorship and b) Wikipedia to implode.

Both are fairly unlikely to happen.

Me either. Probably very few editors do. The WikiProjects that have bona fide scientists (with links to their university pages and stuff) and other professionals are quite nice to work in, though.

It is a bit like having a little voice saying "Surely Wikipedia could work if we just change this".

I tried Wikinfo before, hoping that would work, and all was fine until Fred Bauder decided in one fell swoop to delete all of the articles I'd ever created, after they'd existed for 3 months.

At least it is good to give it a chance, and see if it can work. Perhaps there is no hope, but perhaps there is some chance if we'd just change it.

I am not sure where I stand with regards to Larry Sanger either. My first thought is that if he opposes Wikipedia then I support him! The idea that he was ripped off by them makes me automatically feel sympathetic towards him. I mean he co-founded Wikipedia, but was thrown out on to the street. Its a bit like how Microsoft stole the windows idea from Apple, and ultimately it is that theft that primarily makes Microsoft wealthy.

How different would it be if Larry Sanger hadn't been kicked out of Wikipedia? Or if after he left he was treated with respect?

But on the other hand, Larry Sanger did refuse to participate in WR, stating that he hated Lir and wouldn't join while he was here. Well, Lir is gone now, so will he join now? Also, while I generally liked Lir, I didn't buy his criticism of Larry Sanger. What did Sanger do that was so wrong?

Anyway I guess its a bit of an experiment. When I first used Wikipedia, it was an experiment, and I got banned before I was able to conclude anything either way. So I guess if the same thing happens on Citizendium, then I can conclude the same kind of thing. But if I am still going relatively happily after a month then perhaps it warrants some kind of a chance.

And as for Wikipedia's demise, well, with the kinds of bills that they are getting, and the lack of sponsorship, they may well implode rather shortly even.



I don't have a lot of qualifications, but most of the articles I edited I had qualifications relevant to.

Port Arthur massacre - I am probably the most qualified person in the world to comment on that.
Talkers - I ran my own for years.
Maths and computer technical talk - I have relevant qualifications to that.
Conspiracy theories generally - again, being involved in one of the most controversial topics ever makes you fairly qualified. The ones that I commented on I also had direct knowledge of. (note that I didn't comment on JFK)
Porn - all the porn articles I wrote were places that I had at one point subscribed to. And no, I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of.

Of course, there may be people more qualified than me for those topics, but I didn't tend to write all that much in areas that I didn't know anything about. I mean there were such things as Fortune Lounge Group that I set up for another user, but that was just a beginning article. I wouldn't be bothered doing it much more than that for something that I'm not really interested in. A stub is good enough.

But then here comes the problem - Wikipedia refuses to acknowledge experts, and indeed told me that as someone who was centrally involved in the massacre I was not allowed to comment because it was "original research" and I was personally biased. Of course I was biased, for heaven's sakes. But that doesn't mean that what I said was wrong or inaccurate. This is one of Wikipedia's most serious problems. Any other item of research has inherent bias, but a reader can account for this bias when using it as a source. Wikipedia has hidden bias, and you aren't really sure what the bias is, or it may have mixed bias (part of the article biased one way, part biased another) so it just becomes really confusing. There is no such thing as true neutrality.

I mean for an example, when I wrote User:Zordrac/Poetlister, I was pretty darn neutral with regards to the ban. On one hand, I thought that SlimVirgin was a pretty nice person, who, after all, had helped out Daniel Brandt and risked de-sysopping to get his page deleted. On the other hand was someone who was supposedly a sock puppet, and while she talked to me, none of the others ever did. But then there were a lot of suspicious things going on there. I never made absolute conclusions with regards to that, and still to this day consider myself to be pretty neutral with regards to it. I did however feel very angry at the levels of corruption in relation to that incident, by such people as SlimVirgin and Kelly Martin.

But the amusing thing was that in spite of my pretty close to neutrality on that issue, I was considered by some in Wikipedia as being so biased that they thought that I was a sock puppet! Of course compared to their bias going the other way I probably was.

And this is precisely why there is no such thing as neutrality. You learn this in high school. You can take the most neutral view you think that you can have, but there is always some level of bias.

No, of course it isn't. I always feel weird even correcting the spelling and grammar in porn/fetish-type articles in AutoWikiBrowser searches for spelling errors, though. :/

So, since you don't appear to be banned anymore, Bliss, what's stopping you from editing? Is it just the worry that as soon as you start editing, you'll get blocked? Or is it because you don't want to edit from your original account? Or because it's just not worth the hassle?



Yeah, there's always going to be inherent bias, no matter what. Choosing reliable sourcing can help, but I've seen perfectly reputable sources shrugged off as not meeting [[WP:RS]]. It is a big problem.

I am still banned:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Zordrac

They have forgotten to ban Internodeuser, but know that they don't need to bother since I forgot the password.

I would never sneak in to anywhere anyway. I would wait until they apologise, or forgive me, or at least undo the ban.

Firsfron and I were talking about that on another thread. So Internodeuser is a sock of the main account Zordrac and as long as no one is willing to unblock the Zordrac account, you are effectively banned? We were getting confused as to which was the main account.

LOL. Well, Internodeuser I used for 1 week, and had about 100 edits, while Zordrac was used for 2 months and had about 4,000 edits. Which do you think is the main account? And they weren't meant to be sock puppets of each other anyway. I was forgiven for my previous "sins", and allowed to create a 2nd account. I quit Wikipedia in December, and was banned in January. If I hadn't gone around and protested Poetlister's ban, they wouldn't have banned me, and I would have had a new account in July 2006, after the ban on Internodeuser had expired, never to use either Zordrac or Internodeuser ever again.

Not that I totally regret protesting that ban, because it was quite unfair. Sometimes you have to make a stand. I intended to create "Blissyu2" in July 2006, or alternatively to use my real name, and then to make real edits.

I like the fact that Citizendium attempts to associate a real person with each contributing account.

I am a registered contributor to Citizendium.

I was interested most in helping that project compile articles about business and businesses, but two observations led to my account going virtually dormant:

1. Larry Sanger personally expressed anxiety about having me (the "Wikipedia Review lightning rod") be a major part of the project
2. Simple questions that I posted to the "Economics" portion of the project went largely unanswered, sometimes for weeks.

About the same time, Centiare.com became a more interesting prospect for me, since it incorporates Semantic Web architecture, and it was getting just as much traffic as Citizendium.

(You may be amused to note what Google AdWords site link appears when you type in the word "Citizendium" on Google. If Sanger can't even take ownership of his Google AdWords namesake, what does that tell you about the financial savvy of the project?)

Greg

Y'know, I was wondering when all that was happening! Apparently it's happening right now. I'd better get cracking!

Larry hasn't even bought his own name, either... What's more, nobody has even bought the word "happening." Then again, I guess there hasn't really been a Happening since the Andy Warhol Factory days, or at least not one worth attending.

Hey, if I actually paid for the word "Wikiphrenia," do you think they'd finally put wikiphrenia.com above "The Reluctant Cyberprof" in the Google rankings? I'm beginning to develop a serious dislike for that guy... It isn't a real word, so it couldn't be too expensive, right?

After a lengthy process, they finally let me join (I had to show them my drivers license lol). So this is me: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Adrian_Meredith

It says quite clearly that you must be an expert on your topic, so I decided to start on the topic which I have the greatest expertise, the Port Arthur massacre. Wikipedia calls that bias, and says that what I know is original research. Its still true though, while their article isn't. Anyway, I am slowly but surely writing an article on it, and hopefully it can supercede the lies that Wikipedia tells. Here is my starting article:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Adrian_Meredith/sandbox

I'll aim to finish it in about 1 or 2 weeks.

Other topics that I am semi-expert in, are:

- Backpacker murders (my step father was a suspect and was tried for them)
- Peter Falconio disappearance (I was living there at the time)
- Azaria Chamberlain disappearance (I was living there at the time)
- Talkers (I used to run one)
- ICQ (I saw the source code when it was in development)

And that's about it. Other than that, I'll just write articles related to that, and maybe do some minor edits. I don't feel comfortable editing articles about stuff that I don't know much about. It feels wrong somehow.

I'll see if this time I am allowed to keep my work.

Citizendium may have the problem in that it wants only experts, but doesn't pay them so it will be slow to grow.

Again, it depends on what they view as an expert.

I mean I am not the world's greatest authority on ICQ, but I'd probably know more about it than 95% of people. That isn't really an expert, but its better than average knowledge.

While if I wrote about say the history of China, I don't know any more than I was taught in grade 8 history class.

Yet on Wikipedia, you get people writing about things that they haven't even studied in depth. I mean most people end up writing about things that they are fairly knowledgeable about, except when sometimes they feel sort of forced to write about something else, like its a favour to someone or something.

I remember the worst one I wrote was for Fortune Lounge Group, to try to save an AFD. It was a horribly written article, and I have no expertise in gambling or online casinos or anything like that. But I kind of had to do it. I bet that other people have had to write articles too.

I mean say Everyking would probably be an expert on Jessica and Ashlee Simpson, so he should be able to write on those topics. He might not be their number 1 fan, but he is a solid fan of them. While most likely most of the people that opposed him weren't experts on the topic.

I think its a great idea, and there's way too many people that are being banned for being experts. People like Jack Sarfatti were banned for writing about topics that they were expert at, including writing about their own biography...

Looch was banned for being an expert on that one book about professional wrestling. Whereas, Chip Berlet, who is an expert in the same kind of way, is allowed to fill his own wikipedia biography full of his expertise and gets no ban and SlimVirgin bans anyone who stands in his way.

I just bought "Larry Sanger" and "wikiphrenia". It usually takes Google some time to get them into the mix, and my ads don't run 24/7.

Somey, some names and words are more expensive than others. The most I've ever seen for any wiki-related person or word was $10 a click. I think the minimum is 40 cents. Most of my active words are in the $1.00 to $1.25 range. I refuse to pay more than $2.00, and sure enough, Google upped about 65% of my library of words to the $5.00 level. Bastards.

If you're really interested in getting wikiphrenia.com to the top spot on Google, maybe a Centiare page with backlinks would be just the ticket?

Greg

I have a Bachelors degree in History and I'm going for a Masters in Library Science, but I'm not really quite an expert in any one area. I'm more of a generalist historian and not really fixated on any one historical topic.

Would Dr. Sanger want me there?

I don't know. He keeps sending mixed signals. I saw one comment where he says he isn't pro-expert and welcomes generalists and yet it seems you have to be an expert with some specialized interest in order to get in. I guess I'd be in the American and European history work group or even the military history group, but my interests come and go.

For now, I'm not really interested in using my name and likely getting into hot water with the specialist experts (I'm not against experts by any means. I just don't want to make a fool of myself pushing something I've learned either in college or elsewhere and being potentially ridiculed by someone).

Surely there is a way experts and non-experts can edit in harmony on a single project? Wikipedia and Citizendium may not have the answers to that question. Not yet, anyway.

That's right. Generally they ban people for being experts, but there are exceptions like Chip Berlet, Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters, and a handful of others, who in those cases get to make articles that they are expert in, lay claim to expertise in areas which they know nothing about, and bully people out of their way if they don't get their own way.

CZ might end up in the same way, but like everything I give it a try.

Just as well - I was thinking wikiphrenia.com could save money by only running 12 hours a day anyway, and I'm pretty sure Larry sleeps at least 8 hours a night.


You're saying that every time someone clicks on the paid link to Wikiphrenia.com, you have to pay Google 40 cents? Don't you realize that you could end up out-of-pocket for as much as $1.20 over the next 12 months alone?


I've been meaning to do that, actually... but shouldn't I try to add some actual content to wikiphrenia.com first...?

So, what if I present my credentials as an expert on the history of British Methodism, they let me in and then I write an article on rotifers. Would they wipe the article and throw me out?

Would Larry ever let Lir in?

Let's have a guess here.

I wrote to Larry Sanger inviting him to this site soon after we had our own domain name, in February 2006, and he said that he had looked at it and loved this site, and was going to post, except, except - LIR IS AN ADMINISTRATOR?????? OMG! OMG! I CANNOT CONDONE A SITE THAT ALLOWS LIR AS AN ADMINISTRATOR!!!! DO YOU KNOW WHAT HE'S DONE???? HOW CAN YOU PUT UP WITH HIM? CLEARLY YOU DON'T KNOW HOW BAD HE IS, SO I'LL FORGIVE YOU, BUT NOT LIR!!!! HE IS THE EPITOMY OF EVIL!!!!

Or words to that effect...

Lir is no longer an administrator and as far as I know it is banned from WR now (I am not sure about that), but suffice to say that he doesn't come here anymore. So maybe Larry would come here. Except that we are forever "Tainted by the presence of Lir!" We were once touched by him, once liked him so much he was an administrator!

So yeah, suffice to say that Lir is permabanned before he even thought of the site. In the planning stage, it would have said "Ban Lir's IP address, or anything like it, forever, no questions asked"

Oh dear that got a laugh out of me.

You can put caps on how much you're willing to pay for clicks per day, so you could theoretically limit your annual accounts payable to something more manageable than $1.20. Say, $0.80, perhaps.

As for actual content on wikiphrenia, I say "Content, Schmontent".

Greg

Yeah well I got a "warning" for my sandbox. It is nice and all that they have lengths to protect vandals, but they are really a bit over the top, and it is quite trying. It'll take me weeks to make an article up to a level that they would accept as good enough for an encyclopaedia, and as far as I can tell I am only really capable of writing 6 articles to a level that is good enough in a real encyclopaedia. I listed them there:

- Port Arthur massacre
- Talkers
- ICQ
- Backpacker murders
- Peter Falconio (disappearance)
- Azaria Chamberlain (disappearance)

4 of these are Australia's 4 most controversial murder mysteries in Australian history. I do not include the Snowtown murders, as that is not a mystery, as we know for sure who did it and what happened. Whilst Backpacker, Peter Falconio and Port Arthur have someone in prison for them, they are what could be described as cause celibre. The Azaria Chamberlain disappearance led to the movie Evil Angels, and actually had the conviction for murder against Lindy Chamberlain overturned. The other 3 haven't, but realistically only because the government refused to go through the embarassment a second time.

They are examples where what happened put mud on the faces of the police, law enforcement bodies, and ultimately the government, and they needed to have someone in prison for it. Backpacker murders was the worst ever example of this actually, as they imprisoned someone who was the most helpful. They all warrant movies being made out of them. Wolf Creek is sort of related to the Backpacker murders, but not really.

Anyway, I am as of right now, not too impressed with CZ.

oh my god that is ridiculous. i had no idea that is what they were doing.

The ban was lifted quite a while back, actually, and he's posted here occasionally since then. We prefer to view the whole episode as "an unfortunate misunderstanding" these days.


I'm not sure we'd want Larry here anyway. He tends to be a bit disruptive, what with all that crazy "co-founder" talk. After all, everyone knows that Wikipedia was founded by Lir, and Lir alone, right?

Obviously things have moved in a slightly different direction since then...

I don't think I was using WR when Lir stopped being admin.

I actually had major personal disagreements with Lir, but that's beside the point. He is really good at making me pissed off.

That's what I fear will happen to me (though I'm no expert on British Methodism, but you know what I mean)!

After countless hours of work (and I really hope that they don't wipe it), perhaps 10 or 15 all up, and wading through really irritatingly bad Wikipedia versions and correcting all of their errors, I have finally presented my first article on Citizendium:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre

You can compare it to the Wikipedia version if you like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_m...%28Australia%29

I will wait to see if it stays up and what happens to it. It is not complete yet (way too long, etc) but I think its already about 20 times better than what Wikipedia has got.

Great work.

CZ will fail solely due to their shunning of the kinds of contributors Wikipedia thrives on: bored college and high school students. Many people with degrees in their fields don't have the time to write detailed, authoritative articles for free, as Nupedia learned. So while CZ may be more credible then Wikipedia, it will never reach the critical mass WP has.

If you had a choice between a popular encyclopaedia and a good encyclopaedia, which would you pick?

If Wikipedia could be established as a great place to fiddle, while an alternative, such as Citizendium, could be established as a great place to actually use as a reference source, then we have 2 projects.

I actually don't see why Nupedia did fail. What was wrong with it? Its greatest problem seems to be that most of the people who started off working with Nupedia ended up tempted by "the dark side", Wikipedia. If Citizendium is nothing more than a resurrection of Nupedia, then perhaps that is a good thing.

Hi all.

Just dropping in here to say that there are many egregious misconceptions about Citizendium in this thread, and that there have been false statements made here by the CZ contributor very actively posting in this thread.

--

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Stephen_Ewen

Has been asked of < 1% of all applicants.



Wipe the article and throw you out? Where have you gotten this stuff? Anyone in CZ can write whatever encyclopedia articles they want!



http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Shirley_Chisholm was written almost entirely by a high school student, see http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Shirl...&action=history




Again, where are you folks getting this stuff? As it says at http://www.citizendium.org/cfa.html

To get on board the wiki, please send a mail to constables@citizendium.org providing three things:

1. Your real name. This is a strict policy that we take seriously. See below if you require a pseudonym
2. Your endorsement of the Citizendium Statement of Fundamental Policies. A statement that says not only that you've read and understood it, but that you support and endorse it.
3. A biography of 100-500 words, 50 words absolute minimum. This must, of course, be accurate. It should include information about your educational background and interests. This will be posted on your user page, and so should be written for public consumption. Can be written in either first or third person.
Also helpful, if at all possible:

4. A Web link or two that tends to establish your identity. E.g., a link to your CV online.
5. Send your request through a non-free email address that bears your name or a portion thereof.
6. (Optional) Tell us how you heard about the Citizendium.

Note the complete absence among the above about having "to be an expert with some specialized interest in order to get in."

Hello Stephen. You're not really selling it to me, I'm afraid. I want to collaborate with people who are experts with specialized interests in subjects, without the infernal know-nothing crowd reducing the contributions. I don't want to read articles written entirely by high school students. Good encyclopedias are not generally written by high school students.

Better to have a small but accurate "collection of human knowledge" than a large but unreliable collection.

I completely agree that good encyclopedia articles are not generally written by high school students alone. Note that is the only such article and that it was APPROVED by a professor emeritus of history.

I also completely agree: Better to have a small but accurate "collection of human knowledge" than a large but unreliable collection.

Infernal know-nothings (and infernal know-it-alls) who reduce contributions, and the like, don't last at CZ, and there are plenty of experts with specialized interests in subjects that one collaborates with.

At Citizendium there are *authors* and *editors*:

* Authors: all contributors have "author" rights on the Citizendium. They can start new articles, edit existing articles, engage other contributors in discussion about articles, etc.
* Editors: editors, in addition, have the right to make (or work together with other editors in making) plans, policies, and decisions for particular articles, and eventually will have the right to designate particular versions of articles as "approved." As a rule of thumb, editors in traditionally "academic" fields will require the qualifications typically needed for a tenure-track academic position in the field, while editors in more "professional" fields require the usual terminal professional degree in the field plus significant experience and publishing.

See http://www.citizendium.org/cfa.html and http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Category:Approved_Articles

There are only 31 approved articles. It's a good start, but I thought there would be quite a few more in 4 months of editing. It's sort of reminiscent of Nupedia's 24 articles.

The Citizendium article on The Crystal Palace is approved, but it's sort of anemic: there's only a passing mention of the very first dinosaur sculptures, which were a major attraction to the Crystal Palace.(BBC link) There don't appear to be any references, either. Pittsburgh, History since 1800 seems in much better shape, but what's with the "Renaissance I" heading? There's no "Renaissance II" heading, leaving the reader to wonder what happened to the second renaissance.

Are these "finished" articles (relatively complete and polished) or just samples of what's to come? Do editors regularly add material to approved articles?

I give up. Whilst its fine for someone to tinker with the work, someone is now adding inaccurate information to the article.

The date was not 28 April 1996, but was 27-29 (and this is incredibly important in relation to the person who ASIO labelled as the man who had committed the murders). To have a fire destroy the property at 8.25am on 29 April suggests that it lasted in to that day. Changing that is horrendous.

Stating that Martin Bryant did it, when the whole point of it is that it cannot be definitively stated that he was the murderer, as eye witness testimony, video evidence, and many other pieces of evidence disagree, is very incorrect. You can't legally do this.

To see this place agree to introduce lies is the end of my experiment. I will contribute no further to this project.

I added this to every piece that I had created:

I will leave this project as of now. Please delete my account and all contributions. I had thought that I would be helping to write an accurate assessment of material that I had expert knowledge of. To see critical information deleted, and an accurate article that I had spent years compiling turned in to nonsense is not something that I want my name associated with. I will no longer be involved in this project.

Seriously, there is no point in staying when they are going to do that. There is no advantage to Citizendium ahead of Wikipedia if it will agree to tell lies in the same way that Wikipedia does. Has CZ now accepted Wikipedia's version of the truth?

And yet CZ has the misfortune of additionally making it incredibly difficult to register and to create anything.

Experiment over - CZ sucks.

Citizendium lets you send a photoshopped fake driver's license with a fake bio and you can sign up.

12 year old kid + fake ID = Ph.D.

I'm not convinced that they do. They were very suspicious of me. But maybe I just look suspicious. It was very hard for me to get in.

Welcome Stephen. I can confirm what you say to true based on my experiences on CZ. I hope you continue to post here at WR.

Probably not frequently at all. However, I'm not difficult to get hold of, see http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Stephen_Ewen

Good o. I ask to have the account deleted all all contributions deleted and instead I am accused of vandalism and my account blocked: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Speci...Adrian_Meredith

The "Vandalism" that he refers to was my altering the content of the page that I had written to state my goodbye message, and request that the article I had written be deleted.

This request was ignored.

I do not think that it is right that my name is associated with something that I do not agree with. If they wish to write their own article then that is fine. Just delete all of my contributions please. You can have the same thing in there, just delete it, and then restore it with the current revision only.

I most certainly did not ask to be blocked.

I think that I can conclude from this little experiment that CZ is "Just as bad as Wikipedia, but it uses your real name and asks for copious amounts of ID to establish you". To have lies associated to your internet persona is bad, but to have those lies associated with your real name is horrendous.

I am currently ranking CZ below Wikipedia.

It seems to be a frequent misconception that you need to be an expert, among other things. There is an idea that there is a large chance of being rejected when applying for a CZ 'membership'.

Add to that sending one person out with the idea that all driver's licenses are 'checked at the door', and people are left with the idea that this is a less than inclusive community, with a high chance of being rejected, whether this is fact or not. If I were blissy, I think I would be offended to find out that less than 1% are asked for their drivers license. Why ask at all if he is not claiming to be a published author or someone with high credentials? I would be happy to provide my real name, my academic history, profession, etc., but I would draw the line at providing a driver's license. There are a lot of people being excluded already, and that is why CZ has these policies, why exclude more?

In short, it does not really matter what your policies actually are when a large amount of people believe they are something different. I don't know if there is a way to combat this outside of what you are doing right now, but maybe it is something CZ should look at.

Hope to see you around more often, Stephen.

I don't have a PhD. I didn't even complete a degree. My highest completed qualification is a Diploma. I did claim to have done very well in Maths competitions, but I had those certificates destroyed in a fire, and as far as I know they don't give new ones 10 years later. So what was I claiming? Oh, I was claiming to be the owner of Wikipedia Review. I wrote this post to try to verify those claims. That's it really.

I did claim to be an authority on the Port Arthur massacre, indeed probably one of the leading authorities in the world. I think that probably the only 2 people that know more about it would be the person who actually did it (who is now dead) and Martin Bryant (who is locked up in prison and under suppression orders preventing him from talking to anyone). There are a number of others who know almost as much as me, but they don't know the lot. I mean Rob did tell a lot of people what he was going to do, and he wasn't acting alone. Martin Bryant wasn't one of the other gunmen that assisted him either. And the naked lady wasn't Noelene Martin - she was a younger lady. I know who it was, and I wrote on Wikipedia who it was. That woman is very much alive and well to this day. The fact that she shot at people but didn't kill them apparently means that she gets off. ASIO were only interested in Rob himself, not the people that assisted him. Or perhaps I should call him "Jamie".

Is it a conspiracy theory? Well, a conspiracy theory that starts with someone coming at you while you're sleeping, breaks in to your house and screams out that they are going to kill you tonight? A conspiracy theory where you get letters from the man telling you what he is going to do? A conspiracy theory that before the events begin there were numerous reports to police warning them about it? How the hell can you call that a conspiracy theory? That's something that happened.

The conspiracy theory is the one that Joe Vialls said, or at least his part about it being the work of Mossad secret agents. Most of what Vialls said was pretty close to the mark. Most of the theories out there were pretty much spot on, except for their conclusions. Because in the end only a few people knew the conclusions of what really happened. They all knew that what was supposed to have happened didn't add up, but they didn't know what really happened. I did. Wendy Scurr did. Andrew MacGregor and Stewart Beattie did.

I did feel for a long time that my life was in danger and that I would be targetted by ASIO if I put my name to these things, but since Rob was killed by ASIO in 2000 I no longer fear this. I had worried for some time that they might be confused, because I knew too much, and they might think that I was Rob. After all, he could change his identity quite well, so why couldn't he be me? This was why I kept anonymous about it for so long. This was why you don't see me being publicly interviewed in 1996 about what happened. This is why you see people that I talked to, people like Wendy Scurr, talking about it.

I talked to all of the people that were there, we all had a lot of counselling sessions. Not a single person got angry at me about it. They didn't tell me "Oh shut up about this conspiracy theory nonsense". To them, it put their mind to rest that they knew what had really happened and why. The angry part was that police hadn't managed to capture the person that did it. That was the big thing that upset everyone. That he got away, and that there was this stupid coverup going on. When is the government going to realise that pretending that you've solved a problem doesn't help, when the problem still exists?

There is no need to have a re-trial,and really no need for an appeal. Martin Bryant was guilty of assisting in multiple murders, and should be serving over 100 years of prison for the crime. He should be in prison for life. And the guy that did it is dead, so there is no point trying him.

So some sense of justice is served. While other people that were involved should also be arrested, perhaps that isn't all that important.

The only issue is that of truth. We have a thoroughly unbelievable story that is being pushed in some sections as fact, and we are told that all of the believable and logical and true stories are conspiracy theories. This is the problem.

It might not matter to most people out there whether we tell the truth about issues like this or not. But it matters to the people that were involved. To some people, like me, it really matters, an awful lot.

You can tell lies if you like, but don't associate my name with your lies.