On 12/6/05, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 06/12/05, Sy Ali <sy1234(a)gmail.com> wrote:
How about valuing email verification before
editing:
* To assure that person x on wiki a is the same as person y on
wiki/forum/mailing list/toaster b. (I mean wiki, not necessarily
mediawiki)
* As a necessary step towards integrating logins between all those
various services.
* To make it possible to warn/ban an /email address/ from using the
wiki (vs graffiti, spam, etc)
Interesting concept, but wouldn't this fail as long as it was as easy
to create a new, non-black-listed e-mail account as to create a new,
non-black-listed wiki/forum/whatever account? Which, unless you had a
very restrictive e-mail domain blacklist/whitelist system, would
undoubtedly be the case.
It doesn't stop the persistant nor the automated. I wouldn't restrict
email addresses so much as banning *(a)aol.com or the like, or even
whitelisting them. However, email authentication before allowing
editing does add a level of annoyance and slows down automation.
---
A bit more context on my opinions:
This annoyance can and will turn away legit users.
However, in my experience. And this is my experience here. Very very
very very very few people contribute. Ever. I mean I could take my
socks off and count them on my hands and toes. My first wiki was very
highly ranked in search engines, and I had visitors dropping by all
the time. Nobody would edit. When google changed their technology
and also I switched to mediawiki, my rank dropped like a stone. I
still had uniques dropping by. My mediawiki installation was even
more open than the first one.
Nobody edited. I mean.. once in a month perhaps.
So for me, closing up my wiki doesn't mean anything. I still get
people who are willing to sign up just to write a "hey, nice site"
note. It's not that annoying to be forced to sign up to edit.
However, it's also not annoying enough to prevent spam, one of the
highest ranking annoyances I have with mediawiki in particular --
there is no spam prevention. It assumes that a thousand volunteers
are there to thward spam with the minimal prevention tools provided.
After having been hit by automated spamming, and noting that mediawiki
doesn't have a mechanism to stop automated account creation,
aggressive editing, link dumping etc.. I had to lock it down once
again until I reconfigured and set up a *third-party* extension to
help me out.
Now I'm back to requiring account creation. However spamming is still
very easy through automated account creation (no captcha), automated
editing (again, no captcha - although I wouldn't want it) and finding
the right links to dump which avoids the filters.
Nothing is in place to help out.. for example, nothing automatically
bans people who persistantly try to save pages with banned links.
So for all of that.. email verification is just a touch more annoying
for users, gives me reasonable peace of mind (e.g. that I can email a
user if I need to), slows down bots etc..
I'd love to have it. I myself wouldn't mind if it was in other wikis
out there, including wikimedia projects, but if it were off by default
elsewhere it'd be fine as long as I could use it.