On 4/11/07, Oleg Alexandrov mathbot@hemlock.knams.wikimedia.org wrote:
I am sure that this came along many times, but I was not able to search for it through the mailing list.
OK, so to start, users without account (anons) contribute a lot of content, at least as typo fixing, etc., and many established users started as anons.
However, it is also true that the vast majority of vandalism is committed by anons, and it takes a tremendous energy to police the more than 1.7 milions articles for vandalism.
Hereby I suggest that only people with account be allowed to edit, and that they also suppy an email address when registering, which is then confirmed by sending an email to the supplied address and having the user clicking on a link.
Before we restrict editing by IP addresses, we should perhaps try to figure out what was accomplished by restricting page creation to users with accounts. As far as I know, it is unknown whether this had any net positive effect, and no other major Wikipedia disallows article creation by IP addresses (which are easier to trace (for non-checkusers) and less anonymous than pseudonymous new accounts). Are there any studies about this that I am not aware of?
Kusma