On 3/5/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
In a perfect world, we could have perfect anonymity in this matter (actually, we wouldn't /need/ anonymity), but the world is far from perfect. I'm not going to buy into the "this proposal amounts to trolling" argument, except to say this: removing usernames from contributions would be a troll's paradise.
Predicting the future is hard. I wonder how you arrive at that conclusion? How is it possible to troll something that is effectively nothing more than a huge stack of edits? Trolls require opponents and if the opponents are not discernible the primary incentive to troll is not there. There are lots of totally anonymous (as anonymous as you can get on the Internet) communities and the few I have been involved in have not been plagued by trolls.
Of course, no way in hell that Wikipedia will do away with the user account concept. It is just to deeply rooted. But thinking about it can give you some insight on flaws in how Wikipedia currently operates. For example, did you know that in some universities professors are not able to see the students names on exams and papers handed in? Why do you think that is and do you think Wikipedia users are in general better than university professors?
-- mvh Björn