[Foundation-l] Re: User Rights

[Andrew Lih]

We need more than speculation before we discard a fundamental working
of the wiki concept.

Firstly, there is [[Special:Newpages]], so it's easy to find track all
new pages created.  The volume of new pages created by anons is of
negligible load on our servers.  A quick glance of the last 24 hour
period -- 666 new pages, with 216 by anons.  Not a great volume, even
if you take into account deleted nonsense.

I offer that the benefits of being inclusive of anons far outweigh any
downsides. Any vandalism by anons in new articles is usually so
simplistic it's trivial to catch. Everyone was a newbie at one time.

If you look at our "New Wikipedians" graph in the stats, we need to be
more inclusive.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm

-Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)


On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 11:36:47 +0300, Viajero <viajero at quilombo.nl> wrote:
> 
> On 06/18/04  at 09:31 AM, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> said:
> 
> > I know a few users who started by creating a page, because they knew
> > something about something that didn't have an article. Generally as an
> > anon user. Why should they bother waiting a week? What's in it for them?
> 
> I would turn the question around: what is in it for us?
> 
> Maybe three years ago, when the project was just starting and it was important to build momentum, we needed every contributor and contribution we could get. But now we have ~300k articles, many of which still need lots of work, thousands of regular users, and a database which is unable to keep up with the demand, no matter how much hardware we throw at it. Maybe we should start thinking in terms of quality rather than sheer quantity.
> 
> 
> V.
> 
> 
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