On Fri, 12 Mar 2004 09:36:09 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Cookies provide a great mechanism for increasing anonymity *and* accountability, two issues that are often in tension against each other.
Persistent, non-deletable cookies might be a problem in internet cafes and other shared computers though. If you log in with your user name from that machine and the cookie isn't deleted on logout, the next user would edit with your user name.
In my opinion the concept of username and password has the big advantage of being bound to a person, not to a (potentially shared) computer. If a user has done many good edits (measured in 'trust metrics', number of edits vs. reverts, whatever), he has more rights (sysops for example).
A more flexible version display similar to the one described at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-vandalism_ideas could take more advantage of this accountability and might also make vandalism less attractive as it wouldn't immediately appear in the 'stable' version shown to new visitors.