In our pilot project, we’ve gone through several different registration policies, adapting to growth and finding the right one. We began, in the first couple of months, with a policy that required a CV or resume, plus supporting Web links, from everyone who applied. On about January 22, we opened up the wiki to self-registration. At the time, we required only a bio from authors; so, we relied upon the “honor principle,” but we still required a CV and proof of identity from editors. More recently, as of February 16, we have shut down self-registration on account of rampant vandalism. We have had no vandalism either before or after the self-registration period.
Since we have moved back to hand-approval of new applications (you’re welcome to join us, by the way!), the Executive Committee and the Constabulary have been doing a bit of soul-searching. It isn’t just that we don’t want to waste our valuable time babysitting idiot vandals. We are very concerned about the credibility of the Citizendium as a reference work. If we rely heavily on the “honor principle” (used for example by my alma mater) for determining real identities, we assume that most of our contributors will be, well, honorable. Perhaps we are too old and jaded but I think most of us believe that too many contributors are not really honorable at all. We simply do not want to wake up in five years, to find that someone has done a study of the Citizendium and demonstrated that in fact 25% of all of our contributors are using neither their real names nor pre-approved pseudonyms. In short, we’ve reluctantly concluded that the honor principle, even coupled with a willingness instantly to ban people like Essjay who are exposed for using false personas, really isn’t due diligence.
We’ve come to this conclusion “reluctantly” because we also know that ease of registration is absolutely essential to really rapid growth and dynamism. So we are planning two things:
- While we still need human beings involved in the application approval process, we’re writing requirements for a new system, to be integrated with MediaWiki, that will greatly automate the approval process. Constables will be able to approve new applications with the press of a button, which should speed things up a lot.
- But we will also give authors at least three alternatives for establishing their identities. They can either (1) allow an existing Citizen to vouch for their identity; or (2) provide a link to a corporate or institutional Web page, or other credible Web page, that provides their name and relevant details of their identity, that (if we wished) we could check up with; or (3) point to the Web page of a person we can e-mail to confirm their identity.
Ultimately, (1) might prove to be the method of registration used most often. The notion, then, is that if a person is discovered to have a fraudulent persona, the member who vouched for that person is also either reprimanded or banned. But it should be quite easy, ultimately, to automate this recommendation system, since the recommenders are already in our system. We’ll be able to help ourselves to it once we do our public launch–hopefully just a few short weeks away.