--- Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
And preventing anons from creating new pages was an example of a restriction that, as far as I am aware, has not been particularly successful. I think the lesson we should take away from this is: we should continue to become more open.
I prefer to say that our openness is a means to an end and we should continue to experiment with technical and social tools that hopefully help us reach our goals. Being too closed will harm us by slowing our growth in depth, breadth and currentness. Being too open will harm our usefulness by overwhelming our quality-control mechanisms and even divert us from our mission.
A balance is needed. But letÂ’s not forget your key-note address at Wikimania that expressed a need to concentrate more on quality vs quantity for the larger wikis.
Preventing anons from creating new pages was an attempt to balance these competing forces by reducing the number of crap pages created by anons. However, much of the problem was moved to new users. Does that mean the experiment was a failure? Maybe. Then, it might just mean that creating a user account is too low of a bar to the creation of new pages.
I would like to see a much better analysis of this experiment that weighed the pros vs the cons. Only after that analysis is complete, should we decide to change the parameters of the experiment (such as adding more days to the age of an account before page creation is allowed) or to scrap the whole thing.
-- mav
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