G'day Oleg,
<snip />
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.
Many established users still *are* anons, including Yours Truly. I use Wikipedia a lot
for research at work. If I come across typos, trivial errors, and the like, I will
usually take the 30 seconds it requires to patch them up before getting back to work. I
am not able to log in from the office, and even if I were, I probably wouldn't bother
to do so. Since my user account hasn't been kicked off the project (yet), I can only
assume that my contributions --- whether as User:MarkGallagher, or any one of several IP
addresses including that of my work PC --- are welcome.
The thing that many people forget about anons is that they are, well, anonymous. They
could be a 12-year-old vandal acting up in a How to Use the Internet workshop, or they
could be a Nobel Prize winner. More ordinarily, they might be Mark Gallagher ... or Oleg
Alexandrov.
However, it is also true that the vast majority of
vandalism is
committed by anons, and it takes a tremendous energy to police the
morethan 1.7 milions articles for vandalism.
It takes less energy to revert 10 anons making tests or childish graffiti attacks than it
does to clean up after a single registered account committing more subtle vandalism.
Blocking anons won't stop vandalism, but if the vandals have to invest more effort
into their "work" to disrupt the project, they will consequently try harder, and
cause more damage.
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.
This is quite standard nowadays on the vast majority of websites
which
allow more than just reading things, and people are rather used to
it.
It takes little time too to register and confirm one's email.
The vast majority of websites which allow more than just reading things also ask less
effort from contributors, and yet still enjoy fewer members than we do, even after
controlling for joke accounts (I assume).
I am aware that this may decrease somewhat the number
of people
who get
hooked on Wikipedia and the amount of contributions. I'd argue however
that Wikipedia is at a stage now where it has a very large amount of
users, articles, and recognition. At this stage we should care a bit
more than in the past about the quality than the quantity of users and
articles (while of course we should hope that the community and the
number of articles will increase).
In short, I believe that having people make account and confirm
their
email is going to bring much more gain than loss.
Our biggest problem is not drive-by vandalism, but deliberate misinformation or attacks
masquerading as worthwhile contributions. The people who try to abuse Wikipedia to host
hatchet jobs on living persons often (usually?) do it from behind an account, and I
can't see them abating just because future editors will need to hold a throwaway email
account first.
Meanwhile, the contributions not just of new users or people who haven't bothered to
register an account, but also those who have accounts but happen not to be using them at
the moment, will be lost. I don't consider this a fair trade.
Cheers,
--
User:MarkGallagher