[WikiEN-l] Policy proposal: require e-mail confirmation

[uninvited at nerstrand.net]

I would like to propose two related policy changes:

1.  That a confirmed e-mail address be required for creation of new
accounts
2.  That these e-mail addresses be visible to administrators.

Wikipedia extends several important priviledges to logged in users:
- uploading images
- moving pages
- hiding IP address
- stronger policy protections before being blocked

Each of these has been misused:
- Recently, there has been a spate of uploads of the goatse image.
- There have been several instances of page-move vandalism.
- We have growing problems with socks, which have been used for
circumventing AC bans, for vandalism, for POV-driven advocacy, and for
"good hand/band hand" editing where a throwaway account is used to
evade accountabilitiy for antisocial edits
- There are a growing number of cases where vandals create accounts,
make a few good edits, and then proceed with relative impunity since
they cannot then be blocked without an AC decision.

Requiring a confirmed e-mail address would have little effect on
legitimate contributors and would help considerably in dealing with
problem users:

a.  It would complicate the construction of vandalbots that register a
username and then conduct high-speed vandalism
b.  It would provide a better basis for following up on abusive users in
egregious cases where an ISP must be contacted
c.  It would allow likely socks to be more rapidly identified

While there are services that provide anonymous email accounts (hotmail,
yahoo, and so on), these take time to create, providing a deterrent
effect.  Also, a pattern of creating userids with anonymous email
addresses is easy to spot.

Finally, I believe that this would help us be more welcoming to new
users, since it would reduce the present atmosphere of suspicion
surrounding any account that has relatively few edits.

UninvitedCompany