Citizendium Blog

I have to admit that I was a bit worried at the relatively slow start we made with our first 100 invitees last Sunday, but the technical difficulties, together with a Sunday launch, seem to have explained that. Yesterday participation really shot up, and today has increased even more. There were 307 edits today (i.e., Wednesday, though I write this after midnight!). Some 57 articles are “live,” meaning that we have worked on them or started them from scratch. I estimate a half-dozen of these are brand new articles, but I just don’t know–could be two or three times that. Presently there are 131 people registered as having read/write access to the wiki. About half of these, I would estimate, are editors. There are also a few dozen people who have registered usernames, but whose usernames haven’t been activated (hint, they need to tell us to activate their usernames; we’ll get around to it, though, even if they don’t tell us). And there are still over 200 applications–no exaggeration–waiting for the “personnel administrators” (there are five of us doing this now) to “let them in.” And we’re still receiving, I would say, at least 10-20 new applications per day.

After we’ve let everyone in (or at least gotten rid of the backlog), I am going to send a mail out to all invitees, cheerleading and orienting. I’ll bet that will help ramp up work even more. People unfortunately need to be told that it’s OK, it’s a wiki, you can get to work now, and if enough of us do it will be something fantastic.

Also, I’ve received several calls to open up the Citizendium-Editors mailing list and to start organizing editor work. (I haven’t done so yet because I don’t want to kick off discussion until all invite-able editors sitting in the queue have been added to the list.) I think that will change and markedly improve editor effort, because unfortunately a lot of editor types are very timid. My “be bold” injunction (true here as it was on Wikipedia) makes them nervous. When editors start talking to other editors, telling them to come in, the water’s fine, the result will be a really energized group of really smart people. Anyway, when we get editors organized, and particularly when we get discipline-level editorial workgroups organized, then by golly I hope to see a higher level yet, in both quantity and quality, of work done on the wiki.

I haven’t really had time to take stock on what’s happened this week until now. As my wife knows better than anyone, I’m at it nearly every waking hour. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. But as I peek my head out “from the trenches” and attempt to take stock, it seems (from this unreliable perspective) that the pilot project is shaping up to be not just a success, but a roaring success.