Citizendium Blog

The Citizendium registration system, coded up by Ohio State student Aaron Schulz, is a remarkable success.  We have gone from a few days (on average) to get new contributors into the wiki last summer, to 24 hours in recent weeks, to (usually) minutes within the last week.

The reason for this is quite simple, and instructive for Web 2.0 project organizers: automation.

And, as a result, we are now enabled, and empowered, to start a serious recruitment drive!

The registration system kicks ass

Earlier, constables had to receive an e-mail, go to the Web site, fill out a form for the applicant, copy the supplied bio to the user page, and add a welcome message to the new citizen’s talk page.  This whole process would take anywhere from 3-10 minutes for most constables.  It’s not long, perhaps, but long enough to make application approval seem to be a chore.  It also matters, I think, that the applications arrived in a mailbox, not on a website directly attached to the wiki.  The constables look at the wiki several times a day anyway.

The new system is beautifully simple.  People fill out applications here.  Applications then go into a queue.  Constables can click any application and see the applicant’s name, e-mail address, biography written for public consumption, and, to help verify identity, some notes and a URL or two.  Constables have discovered that looking over this material can be done in a matter of, say, a minute.  Once the decision to admit the person is made, actually turning on the account is achieved by literally a press of a button.  The new system does all the rest automatically.

To my sheer delight, I’ve noticed that the application queue is cleared out within, literally, minutes.  I haven’t seen any applications more than a couple of hours old, and many are approved within an hour.  It seems like constables are actually competing to see who can approve an application first.

For those of you who said that having humans involved in the application process would spell an intolerable slowdown: you were wrong.

As a result, I think more of our new recruits are getting to work (of course, still, most accounts go completely unused, but that’s par for the course in all Web 2.0 projects).  Moreover, though more data is needed for definitive confirmation of a real trend, we are averaging more new accounts per day–perhaps twice as many.  I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised at that, because for purposes of joining an Internet community, it seems easier and more familiar for most people to fill out a Web form than to send an e-mail.

Recruitment drive starts

With my “Dear philosophers” mail to PHILOSOP and PHILOS-L, I’ve kicked off a new recruitment campaign.  In the last 11 hours (most of which hours were night in the U.S.) we’ve let in 11 new people — mostly philosophers, although after some posts on clown & circus lists, there has been one clown (but no doubt some people think philosophers are all clowns – Aristophanes might have thought so).

I’m going to beat the recruitment drum, for the first time really, and actually take the lead.  I’ll post to at least one mailing list a week, but probably more (most weeks).

I’ll probably also be asking to speak at local colleges about CZ.

The grand thing is that will be fairly quick and easy for constables to get through the many new applications that the recruitment drive will generate.  We could easily handle ten times the load we’re handling now.