[WikiEN-l] Experiment on new pages

[Mathieu Amo]

2005/12/5, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>:
> Today, as an experiment, we will be turning off new pages creation for
> anonymous users in the English Wikipedia.

I totally disagree with this.
Disabling the creation of pages by anonymous contributors will not
solve the problems of "nonsense pages" ; those pages will only be more
difficult to track and to delete if they are created by registered
users. The fact that some of the vandals will be annoyed by the need
of creating an account and simply wander away is negligible compared
to the increase of the workload created by this. And here, I'm only
talking about the bad things ; we will also loose a lot of good new
pages.

Simply, the fact is you're not looking at the right place. This is a
problem we cannot solve locally ; by doing this, you are only trying
to settle the symptoms instead of going directly to the reason of the
problem. We should inform people ; we should warn them about the
danger of writing lies.
Internet users are not stupid. We should put a warning, that, when an
anonymous create a new article, will explain that he is entirely
responsible for what he writes ; that he can be traced down ; that he
may be sued if he writes slanderous content.
We're Wikipedia. We do not forbid people to do something. We explain
to them why it's bad.

But, as you said, it's an experiment, so we'll see the results. Keep us posted.

Solensean.

--
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was
mad. And that was all his patrimony.
Sabatini, Rafael.

Wikipédia, l'encyclopédie libre.
http://fr.wikipedia.org