Talk:Battle of Vimy Ridge

Provenance

Howard Berkowitz, a Citizendium contributor, wrote this article in 2010, and it was subsequently deleted from that site. The license he submitted it under, there, allows re-use, so long as his work is attributed to him.

Berkowitz is/was a polymath. His work could be uneven, but his good work included hundreds of excellent articles, many of which were deleted from the Citizendium for reasons I won't try to explain. Geo Swan (talk) 14:27, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

Until I read that last line, I was going to ask why this article was deleted. I'm going to assume it had something to do with the site's internal politics. Enki (talk) 14:39, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

Ping @Enki

• When he started the Citizendium Larry Sanger wanted it to have a hierarchy of contributors. Like the Wikipedia, regular contributors, like me, were still barred from "original research". However, everyone who wanted to contribute there submitted their resume, and those who thought they were authoritative experts, and who Larry agreed were authoritative experts, were given special status. If Larry designated an individual a subject field expert they WERE allowed to submit what Wikipedians would call original research. Larry asked them to supervise the work of ordinary contributors. They were asked to politely guide them. And, if they had submitted new articles that the expert that were unsalvageable, they were authorized to ask the Citizendium's Constables (ie administrators) to delete those articles.

  When I joined the Citizendium there were several things I really liked about it. Instead of a policy on notability, it had a policy on maintainability. I like that. But I had reservations about this designated expert hierarchy.

  How did it work in practice? Other than Howard, I only ever interacted with one designated expert, who seemed to have been a very cranky history professor. He called a couple of my contributions "unprofessional", when, Jeez Louise, I was an amateur and a volunteer. Instead of offering guidance he completely rewrote longer article to replace a couple of articles I wrote. I think my original stubs were perfectly adequate, as I believe they were neutrally written, properly referenced, and replace redlinks.

  Anyhow, I decided, when I joined Citizendium, that I would abide by the rules there, and never leave with a bitter valediction.

  Howard started on the Citizendium about a year after I did. He must have really impressed Larry, as he authorized him to be the designated expert for five broad topics, including Computer Technology, the Military, and Intelligence -- all topics I wanted to write about.

  Well, did Howard offer me friendly collegial mentorship and guidance? Hell no! He was a terrible bully. He kept criticizing me for tackling topics he thought were down in the weeds, while ignoring more fundamentally important topics, that I should have tackled first. This all came to a head over the Citizendium's article on torture. He criticized me for leaving redlinks to torture, in multiple articles. He insisted I needed to write an article on torture.

  I'd avoided the topic, as it was so controversial. But I had signed up for this hierarchy, where I was supposed to submit to his mentorship, so I wrote an initial draft, which confined itself to classical torture, like the Spanish inquisition. I even found a woodcut showing Spanish inquisitors waterboarding someone. Well, he wanted me to revise it, make it more current.

  Guess what? The whole thing was a charade, a cruel charade. When my next draft had a couple of sentences about contemporary torture he came down on me like a ton of bricks, denouncing me for my bias, blah, blah, blah. I saw a comment, somewhere, where he told another contributor that he planned to scrub every word I wrote from the Citizendium.

  Well, I wrote Larry a letter of resignation. No bitter valediction s. I didn't condemn Howard on Citizendium's talk pages or its other fora. I wasn't bitter in my letter. I told him I couldn't work with Howard and I realized the hierarchy meant he was more important than I was, so I would slip away.

• Well, another thing was going on at this time. A contributor named Martin Baldwin-Smith was engaged in a dialogue with Larry, over surrendering most of his inherently dictatorial founding=editor/editor-in-chief powers. I think he was one of the experts, in politics. He argued that if the Citizendium, which had something like 100 active contributors at that time, was going to grow to a wikipedia-like size, Larry should consider devolving some of those latent inherently dictatorial powers.

  Martin seemed like a real nice guy, and I was sorry he wasn't the designated expert for any of my fields.

  I think Martin must have ultimately convinced Larry to devolve those powers on a democratically selected council. Well, Governance. It is hard.

  Things fell apart during the two year or so period between my resignation, and when I next signed on, a year or two later, to see how Citizendium was doing.

  Howard had gotten onto that council, and this was a problem, because it enormously increased his ability to be difficult, and there didn't not seem to be an effective mechanism to kick him off. I don't know if he kept the council deadlocked, or what. But, when I returned, for a look around, he had exhausted the enthusiasm of almost all those fine friendly volunteers, and almost everyone had retired.

• Howard was finally gone. But it had been costly. It made me think I made a mistake to meekly and deferentially resign, when I did.
• About three years ago, a newly promoted administrator at Citizendium, went on a deletion spree. He deleted thousands of articles, including hundreds of perfectly respectable articles Howard started, without ever explaining why. He's gone now.
• During WW2, ordinary working class guys were supposed to offer advice to one another, "bullshit baffles boffins", where a "boffin" was a aspergers smarty-pants. He was probably an officer, or an important civilian. Apparently those working class guys agreed you could get away with those confusing smarty-pants if you just made up shit that sounded like the smarty-pants stuff they said. I personally suspect that Howard's initial glowing impression on Larry was largely due to fibbing, and that he wasn't quite as big a polymath as he claimed. Still, he clearly was capable of excellent work, sometimes.
• Anyhow, with your permission, if I come across an article where I think Howard did good work, shall I port it here? Do you think stating it started as his work, on the ported article's talk pages, is sufficient attribution?
• What is Howard up to now? I don't really know. But I did see a guy with his name offering smarty-pants answers on Quora.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 15:59, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

Interesting story! I think it would be great if we could salvage some of that work. It might be useful to someone, and I hate to see good content wasted. Attribution the way you've been doing it should be fine. In years of doing this, I have never had anyone complain that we were misusing something they wrote, and we can always fix any problems fairly quickly.

Leading a small to medium wiki is definitely challenging. You want to devolve some power, but you also don't want to set up petty tyrants who discourage other users. But then again, that PvP gaming aspect is perhaps what draws many active Wikipedians to the platform. Enki (talk) 20:25, 31 May 2026 (UTC)