Shut Out from Citizendium

I've written a number of times about Citizendium, Larry Sanger's fascinating project to create a new kind of user-generated online repository of knowledge. Well, it's now officially open to the public - sort of. As the press release puts it:

For the first time, anyone can visit the website (www.citizendium.org), create a user account and get to work within minutes. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names.

The catch is that you not only need to create a user account to "get to work", but even to view what's already there, as far as I can see. I can't help feeling that the best way to get people to join this worthy venture is to let them see what's going on. To lock out casual visitors from anything but the home page seems counterproductive.