An entry-survey approach does sound more efficient and potentially more friendly in terms of improving the on-boarding process. While some surely appreciate the personal touch of folks acting as Greeters, there's definitely a large segment online who find the idea backwards or who prefer to work in a "lurker" mode. So in that regard, this could be a good move, having a "self-serve" option.
However, the problem here is that it still tries to shoehorn potential (and current) users who may not identify with the term, genealogist, into being "a genealogist". I wrote briefly about this in my reply to the previous thread, but I'll repeat the gist for simplicity:
First, some people who do genealogy as a hobby might not consider themselves as "genealogists". I do genealogy; I don't consider myself a "genealogist". To me, that carries a semi-professional connotation.
Second, it limits the range of participation that the community welcomes. I'm not sure that someone who loves writing good biographies necessarily considers himself a "genealogist"; someone who loves building hierarchies and categories might not consider herself a genealogist. So what if by using such a narrow term, we are leading to people intentionally excluding themselves from participation?
So I'll tell you two stories of my personal experience:
Experience 1. A few years ago I was able to get in touch with a cousin (3C1R) who I noticed had been researching some common ancestors. By complete coincidence, she happened to live in the same neighbourhood as me, so we decided to meet up at a local tea shop in person. While there, she asked me a curious question, "So, how did you become your family historian?" Not exactly how I'd term it, though given her cultural background it was how she understood the role and how she identified herself in that regard. That stemmed from her LDS background. Different, but a very reasonable descriptor.
Experience 2. Last fall I had the pleasure visiting the local provincial archives. While there, I was sharing the space with three indigenous researchers who were collecting genealogical data to help advance their community's land claims. They identified themselves as "researchers", not as "genealogists". While it was intensely personal work to them and their band, they viewed themselves as doing legal, historical research, even though the immediate end product would be a genealogical database!
If one looks at the Wikipedia discussion on the motivations for doing genealogy, it includes medical, historical, political, legal, forensic, scholarly, community, religious, and personal motivations. My cousin the family historian was engaged through a religious motivation; The indigenous researchers were motivated by legal considerations; My uncle who gave me the first glimpse at my "Murphy family tree" was just passing along personal knowledge. None of them identified as a "genealogist".
Ask yourself: Is every person who writes down a family tree (no matter how many people are in it) a genealogists? Is everyone who documents and records any relationship (for instance by declaring parents, "my father is Jacob Jingleheimer and my mother is Johanne Schmidt"), a genealogist?
Many of those who are doing genealogy very likely do not self-identify as "genealogists" and WikiTree would be better, I believe, if it did not shoehorn them into that identity. As RJ Horace wrote,
The new system may be less inviting to uninvited non-genealogists, as the questionnaire basically says "you don't belong here".
Hence my push for a more functional and descriptive titles than "family member" and "wiki genealogist" in that previous answer. Editor or Contributor, Member, and Guest would likely be sufficient.
Chris, I think that the way this is written by someone who has blinders on. Those blinders being partly constructed by the pre-existing community on WikiTree largely on G2G (ones already largely self-filtered by the site's current state), genealogy professionals, and the genealogy industry. "Genealogy" as a term is largely a term from the industry side of the fence. The user side of the fence is what needs to be considered. Millions of people do genealogy (anyone who records or relates any family pedigree info is doing genealogy) and very few identify as "genealogists". And by shoehorning the term, many will self-deselect saying, "Oh, this isn't for me."
I would also suggest taking a casual survey of the public, user-facing messaging of other "genealogy" websites.
Look at how Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com present themselves. Sure, "genealogy" is part of the their SEO game, but it isn't the best foot forward that users see. It's entirely absent from the MyHeritage page, which invites people to:
- "Create your online family tree"
- "just search a name to learn more about your ancestors"
- "Collaborate with members and join the thousands who reunite with long-lost relatives every single day through our network."
Ancestry too focuses more on "family" with 9 non-menu mentions on the introductory page and only 2 non-menu mentions of "genealogy". It's clear what they (rightly) believe is on the "user" side of the fence.
Neither site else mentions "genealogist(s)". Neither site later tries to categorize its users or members as "genealogist(s)". I'm betting that they have done surveys and found that is a non-starter. The top percentiles of those active might consider themselves that, but not the average person, and not those starting out. It doesn't resonate with ordinary people.
* * *
So if it were entirely up to me, I would consider replacing the first question with something more broad and purpose-oriented, where one can mark as many options as one perceives applies, e.g.:
1. How do you want to be involved on WikiTree; What purposes of yours are served by WikiTree?
☒ Family history
☐ Professional
☒ Hobby
☒ Help others
☐ History
☐ Writing
☒ Programming
☒ Contact cousins
☒ DNA stuff
☒ Photographer
☐ Art
☐ etc...
Rather than auto-generating a biography (not sure why one would do that, when we have a free-form biography available), one could just have a set of purpose-related tags. Something like this, but with those user-purposes listed:
Again, a feature commonly used in other sites which should provide some level of intuitiveness. e.g. Maybe it can be used to filter and find fellow users in the future.
Note: the same could also be done for current "user-interest tags" (i.e. surname / following list) and the layout might benefit from the compactness. Clicking on "Oldford" might open up the comment. "Oldford is my maternal grandmother's name. Her parents were from Newfoundland." etc...
Again, this could help open WikiTree up to a greater range of interested users and allow for greater user specialization. For example, what if those folks asking for database dumps were encouraged to stick around by giving them profiles... even if they weren't interested in doing genealogy? Maybe a couple would choose to continue contributing in more technological ways. Right now, it's kind of limited to the subset of those who consider themselves genealogists and who also have programming skills. That's a lot more narrow and exclusive than simply those who have programming skills. Same could be said for many other skill sets. (Not everyone who contributes to Wikipedia consider themselves to be "encyclopedists": many niches exist within the citizenship-like identity of "Wikipedians".)
Help: Membership
One thing immediately jumped out at me:
Again, I don't see why one should need to "indicate that [one is] a genealogist" to have a tier 2 account (again, calling it "family member" is problematic).
Say that Alice is Googling and finds her grandparents on WikiTree. She doesn't know who added them, and the profiles aren't managed, but she decides to add herself to connect. Alice shouldn't need to be "a genealogist" to do that, but she might state her purposes (as above). If she likes WikiTree and has a positive experience, Alice will likely be an unofficial ambassador, showing off her family tree to friends and family, "Hey, check out this cool site". That's what I described before:
Being a lurker or observer isn't a bad thing, and many studies show that lurkers eventually do become contributors or editors when they feel that they have something to contribute. In my own experience, lurkers are often promoting the sites that they frequent through word-of-mouth. So WT would benefit from that. Much in the way that many genealogists here benefit from WT functioning as "cousin bait". But if those lurkers were given accounts here, that would provide WT with a more permanent audience. Other sites do this by having one of those frustrating pop-up messages, asking you to sign up for updates, before you've even read half of an article. WikiTree doesn't need to do that. It has an opportunity to being people on-board more organically.
(I need to end here, but more could be said. Might come back to edit my answer later.)