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(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 11 January 2013 07:43, Matthew Flaschen <mflaschen(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;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.
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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