When I found Wikipedia, I had no intentions of registering. At some point when I created my first article (err...stub) I was just an anon. I only registered after I saw how that new article got picked up by the community and expanded and made usable: I got hooked watching the history of that first article.
When you first approach the Wikipedia community it seems overwhelming, and registering is a pretty big step. I highly suspect that a large number of people who registered did so after the success of an article they created as an anon -- like me -- and wouldn't have created the article if they had to take a step of registering. Becoming part of a community is not something that some people take lightly, especially as active and complex a community as Wikipedia is.
Ultimately most decisions have to be justified in terms of improving quality. Will people who are determined enough to create fictitious, libellous biographies be stopped by restricting page creation to registered users? Not very likely.
-ilya haykinson
On 12/7/05, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, 7 Dec 2005, The Cunctator wrote:
On 12/5/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
For the record, I very strongly support this. This is due to the fact that almost all, not just most, new pages created by anons on the English Wikipedia are borderline to complete crap.
Do we have stats on that?
New, usable articles created by anons accounted for around 40% of all new articles. This ignores speedied articles, etc which might inflate the figure in favor of anon-creation.
Lots of them need wikification and start life as stubs; I wouldn't call that "crap".
SJ _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l