[WikiEN-l] Anons banned from creating articles

[Jimmy Wales]

Delirium wrote:
> No one has even
> informally defined what it would mean for it to be "successful", much
> less suggested how to measure that.
> 
> One possible criterion: The overall number of bad edits on Wikipedia
> (counting new page creation and edits to existing pages) decreases.
> 
> Another one: The overall number of bad edits on Wikipedia not caught
> within [x] hours (again counting both) decreases.
> 
> Is anyone prepared to measure either of these, or some other useful
> statistic?

Those two are, quite obviously, difficult to measure.  Indeed, it is
very hard to come up with appropriate simple metrics, and so I think
what we need to do instead is take a holistic approach.  We have a rough
idea of the tradeoffs here, and we can see if things are working out the
way we expect.

"    * As a new page patroller, the new system does seem to be working.
It's pleasant to be spending more time fixing useful articles, and less
time getting rid of newbie tests. Kappa 15:25, 6 December 2005 (UTC)"

That's a valid voice.  But only one.  What problems are we seeing?

Netoholic gathered some first-pass statistics:
	Before 	After
New pages 	2050 	1622
Article deletions 	1309 	929
New users 	3241 	6370 (!)

The increase in number of users seems out of proportion; he theorizes
that this has more to do with our massive press coverage than anything
else.  It'll like some more time to really assess this.

--Jimbo