Do people still believe that anonymous contribution is critical to success, or is it just an attitude left over from the startup days?
This has been discussed to death, here's my opinion on what we need to get done in the next months:
1) Allow sysops to check the IP of new* contributors 2) Allow sysops to block new* contributors by IP/name 3) Have IP blocks expire after a definable amount of time 4) Use an additional cookie-based "soft blocking" mechanism that should fool the technically challenged 5) In order to increase sysop accountability, log all sysop actions in the recent_changes (e.g. user:foo banned, page xyz protected)
*new meaning that the user has not made any edits older than n days
This allows us to deal with almost all kinds of pests fairly quickly:
1) Standard vandals get a 2 hour IP block, which hopefully will teach them to behave. If they don't, whack them with another one. This is quick and easy with little risk to other users of the same ISP.
2) Obnoxious critters like Black Widow can be re-blocked as they re-appear under different nicknames and hopefully identified by their behavior and their IP address.
3) The cookie-based blocking could work across usernames/IPs if the user doesn't figure out how to disable it (cleaning cookies is easy, knowing that you can't edit *because* of the cookie is harder to figure out).
These improvements would help us to avoid the ever looming threat of an "email signup with confirmation URL" process that would significantly slow down the flow of new contributors. Having Wikipedia wide open has always been part of its attraction, allowing people coming from search engines to quickly fix stuff and maybe get "hooked" by the concept. Erecting barriers typically scares people away -- how many passwords do you have to deal with already? Even Wikipedia's signup process is easy as pie, and should stay that way.
But our current mechanisms are insufficient for dealing with persistent problem cases, so we need to improve them. Anyone up to providing code should join the wikitech-l mailing list and get going.
Regards,
Erik