Brainstorm! How to ramp up writing, recruitment, retainment, and approval?

[Stephen Ewen]

MONEY ISSUES:  There's a good extension for mediawiki that allows for a google site search.  I would recommend that this be added to the CZ.  Revenue generated from the ads might help offset some of the costs of functionality.  Recognize that I'm suggesting this without any knowledge of CZ's public or private statements regarding funding, selling online advertising, etc. etc.  It may already be a "no-go" due to a policy I do not know.

The only constraining statement would be from http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Fundamentals:

The Citizendium will not sell advertisements. There may be unobtrusive non-profit sponsorship statements, but sponsors will have no editorial influence over the project, and enforceable, adequate oversight of this rule will be in place.

[Jacob.Roecker]

MONEY ISSUES:  There's a good extension for mediawiki that allows for a google site search.  I would recommend that this be added to the CZ.  Revenue generated from the ads might help offset some of the costs of functionality.  Recognize that I'm suggesting this without any knowledge of CZ's public or private statements regarding funding, selling online advertising, etc. etc.  It may already be a "no-go" due to a policy I do not know.

The only constraining statement would be from http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Fundamentals:

The Citizendium will not sell advertisements. There may be unobtrusive non-profit sponsorship statements, but sponsors will have no editorial influence over the project, and enforceable, adequate oversight of this rule will be in place.

I thought there would be something out there against this.

[Dejan Papež]

As a novice I don't have enough experience to propose deeper changes to the infrastructure. Anyway, I hope Citizendium will soon be launched in other languages (in my case Slovene) and it would be nice to pick up another name as this one is completely (or almost completely) untranslatable.

[Denis Cavanagh]

I've seen a few non english speaking contributors here now and it really is wonderful that there are people out there already wanting to expand citizendium to accomodate other languages. It really is an exciting prospect for the months and years ahead!

[Robert_W_King]

I'm thinking that whichever secondary language happens to be the most spoken according to our list of documented users, that should be the one selected for the first non-english version of citizendium.

Given that we have more users now, it might make sense to go ahead and spin it off on the condition that we could find that non-english equivalent of Larry Sanger (in terms of an editor-in-chief) to spearhead the project. 

It might open us up to more funding opportunities too.

[tkjazzer]

1.  Need a YouTube Channel.  I've posted this at the other thread: http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,1434.msg12763.html#msg12763

2.  Some type of reward system.  Make friends with a casino addiction expert and see if we can get some free tips on how to make CZ addicting.  For example, computer games like World of Warcraft do this, except they pay for their advice - lets hope we could get this for free.  There is a whole secret science to making something "catchy" in the business world... and it can be applied on all fronts - make friends with people who think like this for more ideas.

3.  Ask each member to tell one person a week (in person/verbal) about Citizendium.

4.  Get posted in some blog somewhere - or get some articles posted in some blogs - now that we have a commercial license we can do this.  Get the name out there by getting our quality articles out there!

5.  improve the monitoring ability of "workgroup recent changes"

6.  pick up recruiting on all fronts.

7.  Recruit heavily on facebook and myspace.

[Robert_W_King]

2.  Some type of reward system.  Make friends with a casino addiction expert and see if we can get some free tips on how to make CZ addicting.  For example, computer games like World of Warcraft do this, except they pay for their advice - lets hope we could get this for free.  There is a whole secret science to making something "catchy" in the business world... and it can be applied on all fronts - make friends with people who think like this for more ideas.

One of the points that I definately agree with WP about is that they don't want the wiki to turn into a "game" (regardless of what it may actually be now), and I for one would not like to see CZ do this either.  There are inherent dangers when you turn something that's good for everybody into some kind of competition.

[tkjazzer]

the whole idea of moving nonmembers comments to other threads is not nice in my opinion.

here were a few of kim's ideas - blown up from small font:

"
In short, software change to include draft as talk pages are now included. Semi-anonymous (account +, name -) editing at draft pages. Approval not on whole pages, but every time parts are deemed approvable by an expert. Automatic updating of main page as soon as a draft version is approved. Multiple language versions linked through gathering page.
"

are we too exclusionary?

[tkjazzer]

2.  Some type of reward system.  Make friends with a casino addiction expert and see if we can get some free tips on how to make CZ addicting.  For example, computer games like World of Warcraft do this, except they pay for their advice - lets hope we could get this for free.  There is a whole secret science to making something "catchy" in the business world... and it can be applied on all fronts - make friends with people who think like this for more ideas.

One of the points that I definately agree with WP about is that they don't want the wiki to turn into a "game" (regardless of what it may actually be now), and I for one would not like to see CZ do this either.  There are inherent dangers when you turn something that's good for everybody into some kind of competition.

Yes, I agree - I was just trying to make an example on rewarding people somehow.  I don't care how you do it - just keep an open mind to some kind of reward = member satisfaction = member retention and activity.  I'm sorry my example was a game.  I've seen too many people on the news and in real life fall victim to casinos and computer games so it is a bad example - but some type of reward system would help.

For example, many people go in to academics instead of the private sector because of the desire to be a big fish in a big pond instead of a little pond.  Journal articles are an incentive/reward for academics in many ways. 

[Anthony.Sebastian]

Having read only Larry's post:

Make it easy for authors with expertise in an area(s) to submit articles, by avoiding having them deal with wiki mark-up.  It often takes a lot of work to get a quality article into developed stage.  We may lose some, perhaps many, potential contributors put off by the intricacies of wiki-coding.

Make it easy for CZ to accomplish that by generating an automated way to convert any word-processor-formatted article, with tables and references, to MediaWiki mark-up.

For authors who have no problem using the wiki editor, recode the editor to simplify source-citing, including text footnotes that accept source-citation hyperlinks.  Hard to work with text in the wiki-editor because of all the interrupting ‘<ref>….</ref>’ entries.  How to do that?  Incorporate a bibliographic reference manager into the wiki-editor, with cite-while-you-write and reference list output styles preferred by CZ.

[Anthony DiPierro]

Yes, I agree - I was just trying to make an example on rewarding people somehow.  I don't care how you do it - just keep an open mind to some kind of reward = member satisfaction = member retention and activity.  I'm sorry my example was a game.  I've seen too many people on the news and in real life fall victim to casinos and computer games so it is a bad example - but some type of reward system would help.

I totally agree that rewarding people is key.  I believe rewarding people for creating content and making it easy to create that content are the two keys to Citizendium's success, and I think there's a lot of room for improvement in both areas.  I'd throw in not reinventing the wheel (unnecessarily) as number three.

For me I think the single biggest reward I get from participating in a wiki is the knowledge I get - from researching the topic, from discussing it with others on the talk page, and from seeing how others edit the content I provide.  So that's what I tried to get at with my idea #3.  Citizendium is supposed to be where "experts work shoulder-to-shoulder with ordinary people", and if that goal is fulfilled it will be very rewarding, at least for the ordinary people.

Of course, another question is how do we reward the experts, and that I'm less sure of.  I defer to the academics in the audience and those who work with them to answer that part.

[Denis Cavanagh]

I think if we got posted on something like Dailykos and its conservative equivelent we could get a lot of new members (Dailykos gets around half a million hits a day) Then again, a lot of the bloggers on the political blogospheres are people I tend to stay away from, if only to avoid a headache.

[Nereo Preto]

Of course, another question is how do we reward the experts, and that I'm less sure of.  I defer to the academics in the audience and those who work with them to answer that part.

This is not a great problem for me. From my academic point of view, CZ is an editorial and PR experience which (that?) is valuable as long as the contents that are produced are good.
I don't need to be rewarded by having my name appearing among authors. My best reward is the articles I am working on as editor reach approval and are made of great content.
This requires greater editor-author interaction and more editors working together on articles, in a way similar to what editors and referees do in scientific journals.

[Warren Schudy]

We want to ramp up writing, recruitment (both editors and authors), retainment of new recruits, and approval of articles.

Users should be able to submit feedback in the form of a machine-readable proposed wiki edit if they wish. I believe that this would help users get their feet wet before committing, and therefore would spur more authors to eventually sign up. Here's how I imagine the user feedback process would work:

(Based on this post of mine).

Suppose a reader is looking at http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Composting and notes the bad grammar in "Actually it is one of the oldest forms of recycling of waste." in the introduction. S/he clicks on "send us feedback on this article". The reader puts "bad english" in the feedback box. Below the feedback text box is an ordinary Wiki edit interface, which the reader uses to fix the problem by deleting "actually". The reader then submits the feedback. (Readers are of course free to use just only the feedback text box and ignore the edit box.)

A Citizen (author or editor) views the feedback and is presented with a diff for the proposed edit. If the Citizen likes the edit as proposed, s/he can endorse it and make it go live with one click.

The feedback form should allow the reader to optionally give us his/her email address. Whenever a Citizen makes an edit in response to feedback, we can automatically let the reader know. These emails would of course encourage the reader to sign up as an author so they can discuss changes and make edits that go live immediately.

[Joe Quick]

Users should be able to submit feedback in the form of a machine-readable proposed wiki edit if they wish. ...

I initially disliked this idea because of the volume of garage I would expect us to get but I'm starting to warm up to it because of this part:

Whenever a Citizen makes an edit in response to feedback, we can automatically let the reader know. These emails would of course encourage the reader to sign up as an author so they can discuss changes and make edits that go live immediately.

Can we think of any other ideas designed to draw in people who have an interest in our work but might not have thought about joining us as an author?