Well, it looks like most of my ideas got shot down, which just proves
that I'm a brilliant visionary and ahead of my time. ;-)
For the record, I wasn't proposing that we "ban" all people who use
hotmail and yahoo addresses. I was proposing that we make it a
requirement that NEW registrants supply an ISP-based email address.
This wouldn't need to be applied retroactively. Moreover, it wouldn't
prevent people from continuing to use a hotmail or yahoo address for
the purposes of correspondence.
My main point, though, is not about hotmail or yahoo accounts. The
central thing I'm trying to say is that there's not much point in
having policies regarding behavior if there's no way to enforce them,
and there's no way to enforce policies when anyone can use an
anonymizer and create a hundred sock-puppet identities for
themselves. Some kind of identity verification system is necessary.
It should be done in a way that is non-intrusive and respects
individual privacy, but SOMETHING needs to happen. Otherwise an
enormous amount of decent people's time will continue to be wasted
trying to cope with the childish behavior of a few trolls.
In lieu of a system for identity verification, what we have at
present is a system that falsely pretends IP numbers can be equated
with individual identities, which is both ineffectual and unfair to
innocent people. It's ineffectual, because abusers can easily get
around an IP ban. It's unfair, because banning an IP number punishes
an entire class of people for the behavior of a single individual.
Arguably my "hotmail-yahoo" approach is a half-baked way of achieving
identity verification. I think Erik Moeller's "permanent cookies"
approach might work better.
Another approach might be to create a _reward_ system for people who
supply a verified identity. We'd have three classes of users:
(1) People who have supplied a verified identity, through a means to
be determined.
(2)People who have registered but HAVEN'T supplied a verified identity.
(3)People who haven't registered at all.
The reward for supplying a verified identity would be greater trust
from the Wikipedia community. You'd get some extra privileges, like
the ability to mark changes as "minor," and you could participate in
a system of rating other WIkipedians similar to the way eBay buyers
and sellers rate one another. There would be a feature that makes it
possible to filter out high-ranking Wikipedians when people look at a
list of "recent changes," thus reflecting the presumption that
highly-rated Wikipedians need less monitoring that people who haven't
earned that level of trust.
People who have registered but haven't supplied a verified identity
would still be able to contribute as they do at present, but they
wouldn't be able to earn "trust" and would therefore always be ranked
at zero.
People who haven't registered would also be treated the same way they
are at present.