The new licensing apparently makes it possible to import Citizendium articles into WP. This may not be welcome news to Citizendium editors. See [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Citizendium Porting]]. (Not really much to see there, but it shows that there are editors working towards this.)

If this is really their best work, god help Larry. If anything, the problem is going to be Wikipedia slinging them off for being even more poorly written and unreferenced than the Wikipedia articles they replace, if my dip-sampling is any indication.

Still, it may be helpful to compile a list of CZ-original articles. Not sure how long it would be, but out of ~22,375 "probably legitimate content pages" at post time I'm sure there are at least a couple dozen not found on the English Wikipedia (which despite all the rhetoric still has numerous gaping holes in its coverage), and I'm not sure how poor they'd have to be not to be better than nothing.

Does CZ produce/release database dumps?

No doubt your right but wouldnt wikidiots try to delete most of themas non notable?

Well, I wouldn't at least.

Id never charge you as being a wikidiot.

Not really but they'll probably do it anyway.

Glad I never really got into Citizendium.

There is some useful content on CZ, but having looked over their "approved" biology articles, these are not particularly impressive in terms of quality and have an odd mix of chatty and over-technical style. However, if there is useful content, I don't see any problem with copying it over.

To Eva and Tim, I'd be interested to see what folks thought were the best citizendium articles thus far seen. I will have a look later on myself as well, but if we can post and share it might be enlightening
cheers
Cas

In my area probably "Bacteriophage" or "RNA interference" are best, as to the worst, probably "Metabolism", which is little more than a C-class article (covering only a fraction of this topic and citing only 5 references).

The article on "NMR spectroscopy" is good, but probably too technical.

That's the problem with production of wikis - there's no real interaction with readers, technical or not. On Wikipedia, the level expected of the reader varies from complete moron to PhD mathematician (although usually its the former).

Sometimes this effect happens in a single article.

A very strange remark, since there is maximal interaction with readers on Wikipedia. In fact, that is part of the problem.

Some may be called single-purpose-editors or vandals, depending on the nature of the interaction.

By the way, PhD mathematicians are in no way excluded from moronity.

Production on Citizendium is slower. In time, quality will improve somewhat.

There is no easy way for readers to give feedback to authors in conventional publishing, since you can't talk to a book, however Wikis have talkpages, where I often get feedback from readers.

Indeed they're not, unless I've been misled by the discussions that surrounded the Monty Hall problem.

You e-mail or write to the author. Its quite easy.

You've clearly never tried that.

I'll second that - it is feedback from editors unfamiliar with specialist knowledge that can be very useful in dejargonising a page where possible without losing meaning.
Cas

In my areas, and just going by their "Approved Articles List" (which as I understand it are their equivalent of Featured Articles), the oddly-named Pittsburgh, History to 1800 looks fairly good but let down by a poor quality sister article. Crystal Palace is reasonably well-written but let down by appalling sourcing. Most of their "best" articles, such as the dismal Literature, Agriculture, history or Industrial Revolution, are quite frankly so badly written and poorly sourced that were they to be imported to Wikipedia they'd be cut down to stubs or deleted. On a skim, the only one I can see where the CZ article is of a higher standard than the WP one is Telephone newspaper, but that's as much a case of the WP article being poor-quality than the CZ one being good.

I have on more than one occasion attempted to contact an author to correct blatant errors in their material, and in one case even their publisher for allowing a blatant and unattributed plagiarism of an entire chapter of another book. And not some tinpot little publisher either, I'm talking about Academic Press. Did they care? No idea, because they never bothered to reply.

Wrong. Ive done it several times and the response rate is well over 50%.

Under the new changes, it requires editors under the license agreement to tag the article it's original attribution. Given the high level of copying/plagiarism by anonymous editors in wikipedia, this is simply going to be avoided.