[Foundation-l] About WM private policy

[MZMcBride]

Liam Wyatt wrote:
> The Wikimedia Foundation does not require that individuals create a user
> account in order to make any kind of editing. However, the local project
> community (in this discussion - English Wikipedia) decides on what can and
> cannot be done without a user account. Many (most?) language editions of
> Wikipedia allow anonymous users to create articles but the English Wikipedia
> does not allow it. This decision on English Wikipedia was taken primarily as
> a deterrence against SPAM - not taken for privacy policy reasons. Also, it
> was taken by the Wikipedia community, not by the Wikimedia Foundation. This
> decision could be changed in the future if the English Wikipedia community
> formed consensus amongst themselves to do so.

With all due respect, you're talking out of your ass. (A less polite way of
saying "citation needed.")

Anonymous page creation was disabled by decree on the English Wikipedia
following the "Wikipedia biography controversy."[1][2][3] It had nothing to
do with spam (though you could arguably say it had to do with vandalism, I
suppose) and it was not a decision made by the English Wikipedia community.
There was a subsequent "Requests for comment" in 2007 on the English
Wikipedia.[4]

All of this information and history is readily available with a few quick
searches, so I'm confused as to why you're posting the nonsense that you're
posting. Simple confusion, I assume.

Your assertion that it's a simple matter of local community consensus in
order to change this configuration setting on the English Wikipedia is also
dubious given the current political realities.

For reference, you can see which wikis restrict the 'createpage' right by
looking at the public Wikimedia configuration files.[5]

MZMcBride

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_biography_controversy
[2] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-December/033880.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia#2005
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=181968815
[5] http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/InitialiseSettings.php.txt