Starship Asterisk*

Interviewer: One of the objections over at Wikipedia to the idea of assigning a special role to experts was that it would slow growth by creating a bottleneck. Were they right to worry about that? You started Citizendium in 2007 and predicted explosive growth, but you currently have only about 14,000 articles to Wikipedia's 3 million-plus.

Sanger: I don't think that the way editors participate in the project constitutes a bottleneck at all. If there's one bottleneck that has made it more difficult for us to grow than Wikipedia, it's the sign-up bottleneck. One of the things that allowed Wikipedia to grow explosively and with as little friction as possible is that it was not necessary to even create an account in order to participate. On Citizendium, you have to sign up for an account and get yourself approved with an e-mail address, so that adds some friction, that does constitute a bottleneck.