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

[Gerard Meijssen]

Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>> The way I read your answer, you assume that all improvement is coming 
>> from our existing editors. I do not know what you base this on. 
>>     
>
> That is not what I meant at all. I was simply pointing out that on a large wiki, such as
> en.wikipedia, the negatives start to outweigh the positives of allowing anon and newbie new page
> creation. In other words (for large wikis), the bad effects of additional maintenance and strain
> on existing users start to outweigh the benefit of recruitment and the relatively small part of
> anon new pages that survive. We also have to consider Jimmy's reasoning; that new pages are much
> more likely to have far fewer eyeballs on them and thus more likely to contain libel, slander, or
> blatantly false information. Thus limiting that function to people who are less likely to do that
> (at least on impulse), is something to try. 
>
> We may in fact have just shifted much of the problem to new users and may need to extend this
> experiment to cover new user accounts as well. Undoing a page creation is only something that
> admins can take care of, so this would be not-unlike our prohibition on page moves by newbies
> since multiple page moves can only be fixed by admins.
>
>   
Over time more people sign on to our project. Given our importance the 
number of these people in a similar time frame increase. It is a similar 
situation as with stubs, numerically the numbers grow and as a 
percentage they stay the same. The point of this exercise is to decrease 
the existence of flawed articles. The blunt mechanism that is chosen for 
now will not help the existing flawed articles. It only leads on an ever 
increasing path of repressive measures.
>> But thinking 
>> that we can get absolute good quality is an achievable goal is like 
>> believing in Santaclaus. 
>>     
>
> Nobody here is that naive. What we must do, however, is decrease the probability of creating bad
> content and increase the probability of creating good content. We need to scale our processes to
> meet new demands. Our software and methods need to adapt to an environment where people depend on
> the larger wikis to be as correct as possible and where our fame and license makes the libel,
> slander, and false information we host that much more harmful; both to those it directly puts into
> a bad light and ourselves. 
>
>   
When you say that we need to improve our methodology I agree. I agree 
that it requires tooling. When you single the bigger wikis out to be 
correct, I think the tooling you are thinking of is probably flawed. The 
small wikis are probably more in need of improvement than the bigger 
ones. The chance of lawsuits is not less but more complicated. The 
consequences of not addressing issues may lead to a total ban of our 
resources in a given country. I rate the current block of wikipedia from 
China as more damaging for the relevance of our data. My motivation is 
that we know that there are issues with content and we do address these 
issues as well as we possibly can. By loosing our public we lose our 
relevance and we lose their point of view that helps our point of view 
to be neutral.
>> Having made the step to have a user account like described is a big step 
>> towards becoming a community member. That is the point that you try to deny.
>>     
>
> Have you seen the number of user accounts created on the Enlglish Wikipedia? It is an order of
> magnitude greater than the size of the community. That misses the whole point anyway; our goal is
> to create the world's largest and best free encyclopedia. The community is a means to that end.
> Granted, the community is vitally important, but concerns about it should not trump our goal.
> Let's not deny our goal.
>
> -- mav
Again, the number of users needs to be seen in relation to a time frame 
and in relation to the size of our popularity. I would not be surprised 
that the amount of new users has been fairly constant.

I would be the last to deny our goal. I am all for better tooling and 
for being more discriminatory. I am all for stimulating annotations. I 
am however also afraid that the current train of thought is well under 
way, we are its passenger and we do not know where it will lead us and 
how far it lead us away from the very ideals that so many hold dear.

Thanks,
    GerardM