We’re excited to announce that as of Saturday, September 9, the Erowid crew has reached a new high for the number of experience reports published in a single calendar year. We’ve not seen such an active year of reviewing since 2007, when by year’s end, 4,461 reports had been published.
As of September 26, with three months left in 2018, we’ve published 4,671 reports, exceeding the decade-old record.
Late last year in November, as we began working on issue #30 of Erowid Extracts, focused on the Experience Vaults, we realized that it might be possible to beat 2007’s record number if we set the goal early. Crew members Spoon and SellieG together took on this herculean task and immediately started ramping up their reviewing of triaged submissions, publishing hundreds of reports in the final two months of 2017.
But to beat 2007, they and other reviewers would need to shoot for publishing 400 reports per month in 2018. And they did it, publishing 519 reports each month for the first nine months of 2018!
Erowid Extracts #30 goes into retrospective detail about the type of information that is found in experience reports, the perspectives of volunteers (in their own words), and reflections on how the collection has developed since its inception.
Erowid relies on the help of dedicated volunteers to read, filter, flag, grade, categorize, and edit submitted reports. It takes around ten hours to go through the training program and then a few hours a week to be a part of the team. If you’re interested in joining the Erowid Crew, please apply at https://erowid.org/volunteer. We’d love your help!
The newest issue of Erowid Extracts, dedicated to information about experience reports and our process of editing and reviewing, is available to current members. Erowid Center is a non-profit run solely on donations of members and supporters. Though much of the work publishing experience reports is done by volunteers, it requires staff and technology to keep the project growing and improving. The full-issue PDF and individual articles will be released publicly in the next six to nine months. (All back issues are available at erowid.org/newsletter.)