On 11 January 2013 07:43, Matthew Flaschen
<mflaschen@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 01/11/2013 02:22 AM, Steven Walling wrote:
> The community rationale comes from a very old and entrenched part of
> Wikimedia: the idea that people have a right to complete and total
> anonymity, even when editing.
I don't think it was just a philosophical thing.
I think it was probably pragmatically understood that the fewer fields
people need to fill the more likely there are to finish. This is
particularly true when it's personal info.
It is also because the norm was set before
> the ubiquity of easy to use Web mail accounts (we predate Gmail by a few
> years, for instance), so users at the time had the idea that
> semi-anonymous email was not as ridiculously easy to set up and use.
I agree that both technology and attitudes have shifted. People are
more willing to give out their email now, which is partly (but probably
not mostly) because *some* users know about and use disposable emails.
Agreed. I think we're overstating it by saying "users had te idea that semi-anonymous email was not as ridiculously easy to set up and use" - look, I was using Hotmail accounts before Wikipedia existed. Gmail did not come up with the idea of easy-register pseudonymous email accounts.
Of course, the users who were around initially were not the same
population on average as the ones we're now testing and reaching out to.
Early adopters are more likely to notice things like a field not being
required.
> In the age of notifications and password recovery systems, users have a
> clear mental model of why email is helpful.
I agree.
I think one thing we may need to consider is what this binds us into. So, there's a very good reason as to why a lot of the old guard have disabled email or not provided accounts - the emailing system built into MediaWiki sucks. It can be, will be and has been used for wide-scale abuse that it's pretty difficult to shut down. If we mandate email we're also dramatically sizing up the pool of people that bad-faith trolls can take a shot at; we may find the community demanding a rebuild of Special:EmailUser when the vandals of the world notice what we've done.