Matt Brown wrote:
I think it's inevitable that given the high profile Wikipedia is increasingly having, more people are getting involved - and a smaller proportion of them are highly interested in developing an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is in one of the "top sites" spots now, like it or not.
We *do* encourage people to create accounts, telling them that it "takes only a few seconds, and has many benefits". Also, even read-only people still need the account to be able to set preferences.
If we really don't want non-editors creating accounts and user pages, we could start by not soliciting them to do so.
Stan