From: Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2006 17:59:06 -0800 To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] User Pages & Editing in Wikipedia
Marc Riddell wrote:
Sources can be checked. What I'm presenting to are the totally mindless, malicious vandal edits by totally anonymous fools who have complete access to the encyclopedia. Perhaps I am being naive, but I believe a named, accountable User Page would go a long way to ridding Wikipedia of them.
Yes, you are being naive. :-) Have you been back to look at the user login creation page? Did you see anything there to keep you from creating ten different user accounts, and pretending to be different people on each of them? Rumor has it that even the God-King has a few extra, so that he can move among his subjects incognito. :-)
In fact, we do now require logins to upload files, and take a look at commons; every day there are a dozen logins created, each uploading a few copyvios (OK, sometimes legit images), and then never seen again. Pretty much zero accountability there.
Vandalism by anons is a nuisance, but it's so easily and quickly countered that it's just not a major issue for maintenance.
Stan
Thanks, Stan.
My reaction was & is a visceral one. The fact is real freedom is untidy - and does require maintenance from time to time.
Marc
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