2010/1/2 altally <altallym(a)googlemail.com>om>: It cuts off huge amounts of easy participation way too early. Citizendium is the extreme case of this, and their restrictive requirements have arguably crippled them and led to their current all-but-moribund growth rate. It sounds like a good idea, but it isn't. - d.

On 01/02/2010 03:25 PM, altally wrote: My general rule of thumb is that you lose 20% of participants for each click you add to a flow. It varies a lot by circumstance, but the principle has been proven over and over: the harder you make something, the fewer people do it. The falloff is rapid. In this case, I'd expect creating an account and waiting 3 days to lose 50-90% of the contributions we'd get with an unimpeded flow. (To what extent we value or want those contributions is a different question; I'm just talking about raw user actions.) Generally when people make statements like yours, they're relying on their personal intuition for how hard something is. Given that we're experts, our personal intuitions for that will be way off from what novice users experience. One of the biggest steps forward in software in the last decade or so has been learning that lesson and taking usability seriously. The best way to answer a question like yours is to measure. The second best way is to assume that users are trying to accomplish the task while sleep deprived and working from the back of a truck with stiff shocks while simultaneously trying to pacify a 9-month-old baby. Those with more interest in the topic might start with these articles: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010204.html http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html William

On 01/04/2010 12:45 PM, David Gerard wrote: Makes sense to me. If nothing else, the non-garbage noob article contributions are great signals that a) there is a topic that some reader wants covered, b) where they expect to find it, and c) what they want to see there. All those are very valuable. Any actual content they provide strikes me as a bonus. Plus, if we do it right, we've given them a taste of the heady power of making something happen on the internet. If you look at every editor active today who has been around more than a year, what percentage of their earliest contributions do you think have stayed? Pretty low, I'd guess. I just looked and my first contribution is long gone, but I don't care. It was enough to hook me for at least 5 years of intermittent involvement and cash donations, with many more to come. William

Steve Bennett wrote: Autoconfirmed status of accounts affects ability to move pages, but not ability to create articles. Charles