On 11 January 2013 17:45, Aaron Halfaker
<aaron.halfaker(a)gmail.com>wrote;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
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