On 8/28/06, Rob gamaliel8@gmail.com wrote:
Sometimes when people say "experiment", they mean "let's measure the reliability of a hypothesis using months worth of carefully worked out calculations and data measurements". Sometimes when people say "experiment", they mean "let's try this new thing and see how well it works out". It astonishes me that people are attributing a nakedly cynical motive to a different connotation of a commonly used word.
And no one has proposed how we could have measured the effects without going ahead and doing it... there are just too many variables. We could have carefully quantified how much crap is created by anons vs non-anons, but we couldn't have quantified how many of the crapmakers would have simply made accounts.
Wikipedia won't be finished in a day...and some times we need to just try things out if we are to find good solutions.