That seems very unneccessary, not to mention expensive to the user. With some collect services (probably most, because they don't tell you their rates) it costs upwards of four dollars for one collect call. I don't think we should reward people for giving up their anonymity, anyway. Anonymity is a very central and precious concept on the Internet. Your plan also has some flaws. What if two people under the same phone number wanted to make an account? It would be much harder for the second one. This would also waste the time of both the person making an account and the person testing the authenticity of the phone number. Also, wouldn't it be dammaging from the FIRST troll (from a given person) that signs up under this system? This system would also destroy the autonomy of the current computer system, requiring a phone call for each of the new users, or otherwise a special arangement. There are currently 9000 registered (not necesserilly active) usernames on wikipedia. Are you saying that if they were created today, then each would require a phone call? That's ridiculous. I don't see why everyone (the US govt, major websites, wikipedians) seem to want to destroy anonymity. Soft security and blocking users and IP adresses is working well enough. Sure, once in a while we have a troll, but wikipedia is still an excelent encyclopedia and seems about 99% accurate, quite good for something with no paid authors or paid fact checkers. Often, with obscure topics, we come up in the first five on Google. There's no need for this radical, anti-anonymity measure.
Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote: I have thought a bit about this. One way might be to (with their consent) make a collect phone call to them at the number they provide and delivery of mail with signature confirmation to the address they provide as well as reply to an email to the address they provide.
This would be for a full account with all privileges. If there was some real or perceived need for anonymity this could still be provided privately.
Fred
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