[Foundation-l] Anons cannot create pages on english wikipedia?

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Ilya Haykinson <haykinson at 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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