Bryan Derksen wrote:
Todd Allen wrote:
Do WP:AFC for a few days, keeping in mind that the submissions there are made right next to a set of -very specific instructions-. Then see if you think anon page creation would be a great thing. If you think CAT:CSD backlogs -now-...
But can you actually _show_ that the quality of new articles went up when anon article creation was disabled? Sampling of new articles beforehand wasn't done and AfC didn't exist before anon article creation was disabled so there's no data to compare the current situation to. I'm not going to make an argument based just on my subjective opinion.
That's my whole _point._ As an experiment it was a complete failure since it produced no usable data. Perhaps by reversing it and actually collecting data this time we'll be able to salvage something from it.
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That would have been great, but since we still have a mechanism for anonymous editors to submit articles, I think it's the case that we -can- gather useful data from that, in terms of "Roughly how many pages that an anon wants to create would be pages we would actually wish to have, and how many of them would we need to take time to get rid of?"
We could certainly look at how many AfC submissions are accepted, and how many declined. And if anything, that may be a -higher- percentage of good pages than simply turning anon-creation back on, since AfC contains specific instructions, whereas "You can create this page..." often seems to give the mistaken impression that there are no minimum requirements.
I'm all for anon editing. A lot of edits made by anons are good ones, even if some are vandalism (and not as high a fraction of anon edits are vandalism as people seem to think). On the other hand, we get a very high number of garbage pages even from new registered contributors (and that certainly can be proven with hard evidence, I think someone at one point looked at what percentage new pages wound up deleted). That data seems to indicate that the threshold to create a page is, if anything, too -low-, and that if we're going to experiment we should do it with more restrictions, not fewer.