I think you're discounting the amount of time that
can be be sucked
up by patrolling. For instance, my longish watchlist has very few of
the "popular" articles on it, but still gives me some 500 edits to
review each day. Of those, most are by editors I know and trust, so
I don't look at those unless the summary line is interesting, but that
leaves maybe 100 by anons. Of those, maybe 5 of the anon edits are
the obvious "Joey is gay"-type vandalism, but since there is no way
to tell which ones they are without bringing up a diff, I need to
look at all of those edits. That can easily suck up an hour - very
often at least one of the vandalisms is "complex" in that it involves
multiple edits, and maybe a ham-handed incomplete attempt to fix,
thus requiring careful study of the history to make sure all is scrubbed.
I think the solution to this is to come up with ways to streamline this
process. What if watchlists could only show anon edits (or better yet,
include anon edits, edits by certain users you designate, and edits by users
with fewer than X edits)? What if there were ways for groups of users to
share a watchlist and check off items as they complete them (this could be
done for any ad-hoc group of users)? What if we could attach references
directly to pieces of text, or maybe even better, to individual edits? What
if we created a project to systematically go through all the edits made by
IP addresses? What if we added to that a project to go through all the edits
made by users who contributed fewer than say 10 edits? Time is being wasted
because vandalism hunting is way too ad-hoc.
Blocking is an inherently flawed solution to vandalism unless you suggest
that we lock down the wiki to essentially just the admins. Good idea or not,
that's not going to happen, the history of Wikipedia has brought together
too many people who would vigourously oppose it, so if you want a locked
down "wiki" I suggest you start a fork.
Sometimes blocking is an adequete temporary solution for the times when a
longer term fix is still in the works. But as Wikipedia grows and vandals
become more sophisticated, blocking is unlikely to be a good solution.
I think we actually block far too much already, especially with user blocks.
I'd suggest that most blocks actually tend to make it harder to find and
revert vandalism.
Of the other 95 anon edits, most are trivial - spellfix, commas, random
rearrangement changing good English into broken
English :-), etc.
This leaves a handful of valuable edits, but the average total is less
than I could have added in the same hour just working from the books in
my personal library. Nevertheless, I do the patrolling because it seems
that many of the pages I'm watching have no other reviewers - more than
a few times I've overlooked an anon's trash and it went unnoticed for
days or weeks.
I think a study of anon edits would show that the vast majority of them are
trivial, and the remaining ones are by people who would have created an
account anyway. What can't be as easily measured, and what I suspect is the
case, is that there are a lot of users who initially edited the wiki
anonymously and later got hooked and created an account.
So yes, we're keeping the random vandalism under control, but IMHO
just barely, and at the price of time that should be
going into
development of better content. I think we really need to consider
whether unlimited anon editing is helping or hurting our primary
goal of encyclopedia writing.
Stan