2005/12/5, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com:
Today, as an experiment, we will be turning off new pages creation for anonymous users in the English Wikipedia.
I totally disagree with this. Disabling the creation of pages by anonymous contributors will not solve the problems of "nonsense pages" ; those pages will only be more difficult to track and to delete if they are created by registered users. The fact that some of the vandals will be annoyed by the need of creating an account and simply wander away is negligible compared to the increase of the workload created by this. And here, I'm only talking about the bad things ; we will also loose a lot of good new pages.
Simply, the fact is you're not looking at the right place. This is a problem we cannot solve locally ; by doing this, you are only trying to settle the symptoms instead of going directly to the reason of the problem. We should inform people ; we should warn them about the danger of writing lies. Internet users are not stupid. We should put a warning, that, when an anonymous create a new article, will explain that he is entirely responsible for what he writes ; that he can be traced down ; that he may be sued if he writes slanderous content. We're Wikipedia. We do not forbid people to do something. We explain to them why it's bad.
But, as you said, it's an experiment, so we'll see the results. Keep us posted.
Solensean.
-- He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony. Sabatini, Rafael.
Wikipédia, l'encyclopédie libre. http://fr.wikipedia.org