[WikiEN-l] Blocking anon page creation was an experiment, wasn't it?

[dmehkeri at swi.com]

> Yes, let's. Experiments go both ways, remember...

Oh good. I was wondering when this experiment was going to end. For purely
selfish reasons from the perspective of a mostly logged-out user, you see.

But as a rationalization, I can go with:

> > 2.  We will lose good new pages created by anons of good will.  

My first IP address was http://en.wikipedia.org/Special:Contributions/209.167.55.131

As you see, after briefly checking that I could, in fact, edit, I jumped right
in with article creation. What would happen if I wandered into Wikipedia today?

- The articles I created exist now, and that field has much better coverage now.
Would I have new articles to contribute? 

Absolutely, there are many missing topics in that area still. Even some of the
red-links I created way back then I still haven't made blue (nor has anyone else).

- Wouldn't I just register an account?
 
Don't know. Hard to say what I would do. But, quite aside from the question of
whether anon creation of new articles should be allowed, have people actually
tried to logout (WHAT did he say? log OUT? Burn him!) then follow a red-link to
create an article, and follow the process through? There might be some
improvements to be made there. I have tried to be deliberately Wiki-naive, and
have wound up either lost in AfC, or correctly submitting to AfC which then
promptly gets ignored. And I don't think I was being unreasonably dense. Even if
I guess that the CORRECT choice from the article-not-found page is actually
"create an account", at the end of it I wind up back at the main page. The
obvious thing to do here is to back up in the browser history, but this doesn't
help, unless I guess that I have to back up one PAST the article-not-found page
to the original red-link page and click it again! An unlikely guess.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if it is precisely these obstacles
which also cuts down on the nonsense. 

Regards,
Dan Mehkeri