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
On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 4:18 AM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 11 January 2013 07:43, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.orgwrote:
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.
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
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.
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-- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation
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