[Foundation-l] Robert Mugabe's daughter - news story originating from Wikipedia?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 3/29/07, Robert Brockway <rbrockway at opentrend.net> wrote:
> While I do agree with this point, an MP making a statement in parliament
> should be double checking all facts (don't they have staff to do this?).
> Verification from a primary source (ie, LSE) should have been sought.
>
> I'll point out that IMHO anon edits do more harm to WP than good.  If
> people care about the project let them create an account - it takes
> perhaps 30 seconds?

We've never demonstrated that turning off anon-page creation made a
substantial improvement on enwiki... I wouldn't make claims like yours
without seeing it.

Think of it this way, if you see a little error you'd like to correct,
why would you also want to jump through a login hoop.. after all
you're doing US a favor.

If instead you'd like to put in some amusing piece of vandalism, you'd
probably jump through a dozen hoops to pull it off. Some crackers will
spend weeks of work sometimes to deface a single webpage...

In any case, the harm caused by vandalism itself is very minor. The
harm caused by our current practice of always instantly distributing
anonymous edits to the entire world, is what is actually of concern.