Citizen Wausau

First off, we’d like to thank you for wanting to be a part of our website, as merely a reader or by contributing content. Since this is a growing endeavor, and many of the kinks are yet to be ironed out, we thought we would start by a personal statement of our editorial policy.

This is Citizen Wausau, and as a result, we’d like these posts - and the information contained within them - to be related to the City of Wausau or the surrounding areas.

While we will be using a “news-like” structure, we believe in a social media paradigm. Personal voices expressing personal stories to readers in their community. You, talking to me, about what you have seen, what you want to see, and what you hope will come along — either way, it should make a connection with people.

It’s a new thing, maybe. Or it might just be an Internet based version of the counter at The Mint or Log Cabin restaurant. The only difference may be, this version is typed.

That said, we are working on one of those long drawn out terms of service for the site, but for now, lets try it this way.

1. Civility. We expect some level of discussion, and an exchange of ideas - but we expect it to be civil. We expect you to treat each other with respect. So if we feel that someone has crossed the line in a comment or in a post, we reserve the right to remove it. There will be obvious things, like racism or slander… and there will be less than obvious ones like personal attacks or a lack of structure or eloquence. It is in this less than obvious arena that we will reserve the right to make a call.
2. Ownership. You own your work. We own our work. But we are collaborating - so how is that going to work? We are going to license the Citizen Wausau website under a creative commons license. We will trademark things like the name, the art, etc, but the content is always fluid, so we’re bound to run into issues.We will defend our CC license, if we find someone using our work or your work for personal gain. But more than that, you’re giving us your work. We will treat it with respect, giving it a once over for clear typos, grammaticism and the like. But, you’re putting it up, and we are merely providing a framework for it to sit in.
3. Originality. We are going to be pretty heavy handed about this whole thing, its got to be your work, under your name. No cut and paste jobs. This blog / journal is for original work, from or about the Wausau area. If you generate the content, and it goes here, it can still go anywhere else you’d like it to go… your personal blog, a newspaper, your Aunt Mildred’s scrapbook… and so forth. We only want original work, work you did with your hands, or your camera, etc. We’re not only talking about Wausau, but we are encouraging writing, poetry, art or photography. Those are the things we think people will like.

We could go on and on, but at the end of the day we’re just starting, and we really want your contributions. We will make changes I am sure, as our goal is to be inclusive. We know we’re not going to make everyone happy (we have already gotten negative feedback, “thanks friend,” we love you none the less), but we will try to offer an outlet for information.

We reserve the right to make changes to this, and inform our contributors as we go.