The Reeves Project - Open Tiki or Closed Community?

Should the content of The Reeves Project be accessible (read only) to non-members or only to members of the community?

Thus far the underlying design of The Reeves Project has been built round the concept of a "Closed Community with a Liberal Admissions policy". Any data entered into TRP would only be available to other community members, but the threshold for joining the community would be pretty low - simply complete a form. The form was deliberately long-winded to dissuade those who were not serious about their Reeves research, but not difficult. The advantage of the closed community is that we know who has access to the data we're sharing, we have shared expectations, we can communicate to all members and we can encourage those who have yet to contribute.

However, as we've been counting down to launch, the issue of providing sample pages to non-members has caused some to ask if we should make ALL of our wiki pages available (read only) to non-members? Clearly the best of our existing pages provide an excellent advertisement for TRP. But all our incomplete work in progress pages would also become visible by the same token.

And is it just Wiki pages which should be made visible externally? Comments attached to a Wiki page sometimes provide more context to the content of that page. On other occasions they reflect our temporary personal thinking about a way forward. So should Comments also be accessible to non-members? And when we get Forums working again, do we want them also visible to non-members?

And remember, whatever we make accessible to non-members will also potentially be accessible to the search engine crawlers.

Before we go any further, we need to know your preference. Please either privately drop Martin an e-mail or publicly post your thoughts on this wiki page before Sunday 20 March.