--- Ilya Haykinson <haykinson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
Recruitment like that is certainly a benefit and should be considered (the smaller the
wiki, the
more important recruitment is). But we also have to consider the bad effects as well. At
least on
the larger wikis the bad effects on anon article creation seem to greater than the
positive. The
larger wikis also have a much higher reader to editor ratio, so concentrating more effect
on
improving existing articles vs creating new ones that themselves need to be maintained may
in fact
be the better course of action.
When you first approach the Wikipedia community it
seems overwhelming,
and registering is a pretty big step.
If setting aside 10 to 20 seconds to create an account is too big of a step, then that
person
really should not be increasing the maintenance burden on the community. Smaller wikis
excepted
since the likelihood of any one reader becoming an editor is much greater than on larger
wikis.
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.
Having a user account does not a community member make. We all have all sorts of user
accounts on
the Internet. That does not mean we belong to communities associated with those accounts.
-- mav
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