While I always appreciate and respect Aleta's copious work and incisive opinions--as well as those of others here--I think that the problem you are trying to solve isn't as serious as you think it is. Maybe I am merely an optimist, but I don't think so.
Y'know how recurring themes are
- Reluctance of people to join CZ (Real names policy often blamed)
- People leaving/not contributing/grumbling but not doing
- CZ just isn't growing fast enough
I've been thinking about things a lot lately, thanks to some comments here and at WP.
Well, first of all, you must realize a few things about collaborative projects online in general. I'm sorry for repeating what most of you must already know and have heard many times before, but their (perhaps) banality doesn't make them any less true. First, there is always in every Internet community a huge difference in numbers between the people who create accounts (for CZ, that's like, thousands of them) and who have ever done any work in the system (over 1,000 perhaps); and between people who do any work in the system, and people who regularly do work over time (many hundreds); and between people who regularly do work, and people who work a lot (we have dozens).
Second, we've been at it for a little over a year. We've created more words than Wikipedia did in a similar amount of time, if the statistics are to be believed, and we're clearly accelerating. So we are (1) a very young project, but (2) we are on track to grow in a similar way to Wikipedia. We're not doing too shabby for the wiki being in existence for just over a year, and less than a year in public visibility.
Now, don't get me wrong. I don't mean to deny that we shouldn't be growing faster, and that there are things that we could do to grow faster. Also, I am doing all I can to help us grow faster (which is why I haven't participated so much on these forums lately), and you will see this work paying great dividends in the next few months. I PROMISE. I've got a plan, and however slowly I'm able to get through certain crucial parts of the plan without help (like the userinfo system), we're nonetheless on track. Other parts of the plan will have more obviously beneficial results.
All this said and admitted, I don't think we're growing slowly; rather, I think we're young, and this sort of project was bound to start as it did start, with an initial bang of interest and then a steady ramping up to a "fever pitch" of activity (we're getting there!). With more development, we'll be much more attractive to more people, and our growth will (continue to) feed upon itself at an increasing rate. I also note that our articles have risen in the Google rankings; thus, we should begin to see the Google effect kick in most strongly, as I predicted (and still predict), fairly soon.
The real names policy prevents many Wikipedians from joining; and that is, I think, a very positive thing, and not on balance a bad thing. It is frankly a great relief to me that the most problematic Wikipedian types have selected themselves
out of CZ; this has allowed us to develop a different culture. I am sure there are some people who would work only pseudonymously and who would do excellent work for CZ, and who would in most respects be excellent Citizens. But I also know that by remaining committed to a more responsible community of identified collaborators, I think we are creating a community that a far greater number of people will want to contribute to, in the long run. I admit that this is mostly speculation, wishful thinking, on my part, but it is not just that. CZ is a radical departure and a radical experiment from the rest of the Internet in this regard. But it is also the future of the Internet. As our lives themselves are increasingly mediated by the Internet, most users will be increasingly disgusted with the frankly infantile culture of a lot of the early Internet. And it will change, and we will have shown the way to a better system, one where the Internet is actually an extension of real life, not a giant silly role-playing game.
My feeling has been that slow growth is okay, and that with respect to the other things, the BIG PROBLEM is the lack of balance between responsibility and reward.
Well, I still feel that way, but now I'm wondering whether there isn't another component influencing these: the very PUBLIC EXPOSURE of people's mistakes.
What the wiki forces is for every error, every typo, every thoughtless comment, every stupid mistake, every sarcasm and all one's scrap paper, to be held up for public scrutiny and recorded for all time--or until the death of the Internet, whichever comes first.
I can't think of any other facet of our lives where we let ourselves in for that. When I write, I throw out the notes--no one--not my husband, not my editor, not my mum--gets to see my doodles. When I took a maths test, I got to throw away the scrap paper--and in the rare instances where the prof. required it, it still wasn't made PUBLIC.
This I fully admit is a feature of a system that combines openness, bottom-up work, and real names. There are, for better or worse, many people who simply are not willing to expose their mistakes, and their unwanted controversies, to the attention of arbitrary people. But many other people doing much work online
already use their real names and have left behind them trails of their lives online. So that isn't new. It's a problem familiar to me, has been familiar to me since the late 90s when one of the first hits on search engines was a record of an embarrassing argument I had on a mailing list in the mid-90s.
In short, put those three things together--bottom-up work (which allows anyone to work on anything and interact with anyone), openness (which allows anyone to see the results), and real names (which tie the results to real people)--and you get a recipe for embarrassment visible in the archives. But you also get phenomenal growth. Want to close off access to debate? Then you've got the Encyclopedia of Earth. Want to assign work to particular individuals? Then you've got Scholarpedia. Want to stop requiring real names? Then you've got Wikipedia. Want to try something
really new? Stick with CZ.
As to making talk pages of approved articles invisible, that's a technical feature we don't have the resources to add at this point, but I wouldn't rule it out of hand. Whether we should is a question of detail. The more interesting question is whether we should require the use of real names at all. I think we should and our fundamental policies say we must.
