I’ve had a lot of questions on the content freeze recently, and I’d like to clear one of those up: there’s no end date on the freeze. Part of that is practical: until the website launches, we need to make updates to both the old and new site whenever there’s a content changes.
But even after launch, we’re not going to be immediately adding a bunch of accounts. Last time, we had a massive training program where literally hundreds of people learned to use the website to make edits. In retrospect, this was a bad idea:
- Many people took the training without ever making any changes to the website (only about 1 in 3 accounts on the website is even active anymore, and we’ve deleted dozens of accounts who never made edits)
- Most people don’t make many edits to the site. Excluding Lori and me, over the last 9 years, the average user has only made about 100 edits – about one per month since launch. There are only 11 people, including 2 retirees, who have made more than 600 page edits since we started. By contrast, Lori has made more than 16,000.* Of course, there are some outliers who have made over a thousand edits – more on them in a minute.
- Providing web editing access to hundreds of people ensured that our website would never have a consistent voice. Even today, there are sections written in very academic sounding third person, sometimes right next to a more casual 2nd person. If we’re going to provide a good experience to prospective students, this needs to stop.
Right now our focus is on launching the website. Once we’ve launched, and have a better handle on how we’ll handle user permissions, we’ll start exploring ways to help get our really frequent website users more involved. But whatever that process, it will be very slow, and very deliberate.
* These numbers are actually more complicated than this, since we’ve deleted thousands of pages, and I can’t capture those edits in these statistics. Since those pages were often the least edited pages, Lori’s total edits should be several thousand higher.