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.
As Matt says, it's pretty much a tautology at this point, at least among the old guard. Example of that: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Account_creation_UX#Requiring_...
To speak to the registration process: the tradeoff is almost not worth thinking about. Even among the users in testing who actually noticed email was optional, they still would fill it out much of the time.
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.
Matt Flaschen