agreed – on a related note, I have data on email registration/authentication/notifications
for MoodBar users here:
On Jan 11, 2013, at 10:16 AM, Thehelpfulone <thehelpfulonewiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 11 January 2013 17:45, Aaron Halfaker
<aaron.halfaker(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Oliver said:
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.
This is a good point. In my work with subject recruitment policy in Wikipedia, I worried
that using SpecialEmail to contact users circumvents the primary means for Wikipedians to
notice when other people are being spammed. For example, if I receive an email from a
potential spammer, it's currently impossible for me to tell how many other users were
contacted, so its hard to know if I should just make a post in the Village Pump to see if
there are others or quickly find an admin on IRC to shut this user down. This is my
primary reason for recommending that subject recruitment requests happen on wiki -- so
that Wikipedians can most easily track its use.
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.
I just ran a few queries to check how much we'd be sizing up our pool of emailable
editors. In the last year, 380,281 users registered an account and made at least on edit.
Of these users, 233,733 (61.5%) provided an email address and 128,572 (55.0%) confirmed
it. Assuming that the same number of people register accounts once we require an email
address and the same proportion of people that provide an email address will confirm it,
requiring an email address could increase the pool of email spammable editors for new
cohorts by about 80k users (a 63% increase) from 128k to ~200k/year.
-Aaron
Some interesting statistics - do we know how many users have actually been spammed
through the MediaWiki interface though? If spamming is a serious problem then we could
just reduce the number of emails someone can send out per day like we have for the 6
account creation/day limit per user account/IP at the moment. In fact some metrics on how
many users (both new and older ones) use the MediaWiki Special:EmailUser interface could
be interesting too if you can generate those.
--
Thehelpfulone
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Thehelpfulone
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