On 4/11/07, Oleg Alexandrov <mathbot(a)hemlock.knams.wikimedia.org> wrote:
I am sure that this came along many times, but I was
not able to
search for it through the mailing list.
OK, so to start, users without account (anons) contribute a lot of
content, at least as typo fixing, etc., and many established users
started as anons.
However, it is also true that the vast majority of vandalism is
committed by anons, and it takes a tremendous energy to police the more
than 1.7 milions articles for vandalism.
Hereby I suggest that only people with account be allowed to edit, and
that they also suppy an email address when registering, which is then
confirmed by sending an email to the supplied address and having the
user clicking on a link.
Before we restrict editing by IP addresses, we should perhaps try to
figure out what was accomplished by restricting page creation to users
with accounts. As far as I know, it is unknown whether this had any
net positive effect, and no other major Wikipedia disallows article
creation by IP addresses (which are easier to trace (for
non-checkusers) and less anonymous than pseudonymous new accounts).
Are there any studies about this that I am not aware of?
Kusma