I did a little bit of statistical analysis at the time, which was as
outrageously unscientific as a good faith effort could possibly be,
and should be taken as a studied vignette.
I found that net creation rate dropped by perhaps 20% right around the
change... and that new account creation went up significantly. A
quote:
"4 days out (discounting anything speedied in the intervening 4
days), around 45% of new articles were created by anons. Of these,
around 80% are usable articles (the other 20% end up being deleted or
merged). Most are stubs, and most do not know/conform to style
guidelines."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sj/Newpages
Being an eventualist and index-lover, I think these sorts of stubs,
with or without proper style, are good for the encyclopedia and great
for the index. I also think that Articles for Creation is pretty much
a waste of time and energy, and very confusing for new users; and that
barring indication of substantial improvement we should also turn off
the restriction to see what the change is like in the other direction.
Most of the commentary I've seen about how necessary or pointless this
change is/was has been speculation supported by passion.
SJ
On 7/5/07, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/30/07, Bryan Derksen
<bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
Gracenotes wrote:
Andrew does make several very thoughtful
arguments about the
probable cause, but I think that the real reason for decline in the
rate of growth is this:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-December/033880.html
A pity nobody had any plans to monitor and analyze the results of this
"experiment" back when it was initiated. Or, for that matter, any time
since then.
If experimentation was really the point, how about we finally re-enable
anon article creation and see whether the article creation rate changes
again?
If only someone had asked that the "experiment" be a valid one when it was
started.
Oh right, I did.
Grr.
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++SJ