[WikiEN-l] Re: The whole point of wikipedia

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 10/19/05, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:

> Of the other 95 anon edits, most are trivial - spellfix, commas, random
> rearrangement changing good English into broken English :-), etc.


By the way, I don't think you should discount the usefulness of "trivial"
edits. Yes, any individual edit is trivial, but in aggregate they are
significant. Also consider this: even in a perfect situation, where all
those anonymous fixes were submitted to a talk page or somewhere else for a
regular editor to fix, it'd still take editor time to make the change being
suggested by the anon. In fact, it'd take more editor time to do this than
to simply glance at a diff.

Yes, maybe some of those "anons" would log in instead, but having a bunch of
new users to check is harder than checking anons, at least with anons you
can easily distinguish them from regular users - their name is a number.

It'd be nice if we could get the regular anons to log in, but still let the
casual anons edit anonymously, but I'm not really sure how to do this.