Re Todd Allen's remark about raising the threshold for article creation to auto confirmed: "Copy-pasters, spammers, and vandals will probably largely be put off by that requirement rather than bothering to fulfill it" is an interesting theory, the counter view is that vandals and other bad faith editors will do the minimum necessary to commit their damage, but a proportion of good faith editors will be lost if you make it more difficult for them.

From my experiences in Wikimedia sites and elsewhere I find the latter theory much more convincing than the former. So i judge proposals such as ACTrial on the assumption that they would be a significantly greater deterrent to good editors than to bad ones. Of course I may be wrong, as might be those who disagree with me.

This is one of those things where a controlled scientific test would be useful - another is the ongoing divide between those who think it important to template new editors and their articles as fast as possible in order that they know the flaws in their editing before they stop editing, and those like me who would like to slow down or better re channel the effort of templaters on the assumption that the faster they template the newbies the quicker the newbies will leave.

It is very difficult to achieve consensus for change where large parts of the community work on diametrically opposed assumptions. Independent neutral research might make it easier to build consensus and better decisions.

Regards

Jonathan (WereSpielChequers)

On 26 Aug 2014, at 17:06, wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:

Copy-pasters, spammers, and vandals will probably largely be put off by that requirement rather than bothering to fulfill it