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

[Stefan Sittler]

On 8/20/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> (I'm quoting from
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-December/033880.html)
>
> Jimbo wrote once:
> "Today, as an experiment, we will be turning off new pages creation for
> anonymous users in the English Wikipedia."
>
> This was way back in 5 Dec 2005. Has the experiment run long enough?
> What sort of experiment varies the independent variable only one way?

Thanks for asking this, I was wondering too.

Yeah, I would have much preferred a statement more like

"Today we are starting an experiment-- we are turning off new page
creation. This experiment is to last until (t). Analysis of (typeA),
(typeB), and (typeC) will be done by (userA), (userB), (userC). If you
have other ideas for analysis, please let us know. Also we are looking
for someone to do specialized (analysisZ). Please see the discussion
at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_Anonymous_Page_Creation)
if you would like to comment on or discuss it."

(or something like that...)

Instead, it's an experiment of indefinite duration with analysis (of
an unknown kind? where is this analysis described?) presumably being
done by some person or persons, probably, and the results to be
revealed at some later unspecified date.

Most  distressingly, as far as my (admittedly quick) search turned up,
there's no particular place that this experiment is being discussed by
the community. The archive page at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation/Archive-2005-12
is the closest thing to a discussion I could find in the WP:
namespace, but it's no longer a discussion. It's an archive.

Am I missing a discussion of this kind somewhere obvious?

Thanks,

-Stefan
user:kiaparowits

>
> Let's turn page creation back on for anons. We turned it off, so let's
> see what happens when we turn it back on; otherwise we're simply
> running on sheer blind inertia and unthinking myopia. Every month
> since Dec. 2005 we should have been asking whether the costs have been
> worth the benefits.
>
> "1. Annoying anons may simply decide to create accounts and make annoying
> nonsense pages anyway.  This will certainly be true in some cases, but
> it is an empirical question as to how many."
>
> Quite a few. I haven't seen much of a reduction in PROD or AFD or
> speedies ([[User:Dragons flight/Category tracker]] shows that Speedy
> has at times reached 349 entries, and it tracks back to late July
> 2006).
>
> "2.  We will lose good new pages created by anons of good will.  This may
> cause the growth of English Wikipedia (in terms of the number of
> articles) to slow a little bit.  With 800,000+ articles, and
> ever-increasing traffic to the website, this seems to be a worthwhile cost."
>
> PR-wise, turning off page creation wasn't good, to say the least; it
> has forced all sorts of ugly hacks to pages and annoyed many many
> people (such as persons like me; one cannot even create a simple
> redirect when not staging out of one's computer/account).  Take a look
> at the monumental failure that is AFC sometime, which turning off page
> creation has forced on us. Valid, good articles are being entombed
> there.
>
> There's no time like the present. It's summer now, so dedicate
> Wikipedians have plenty of time, and the September deluge is not yet
> upon us; there are even more Wikipedians than ever, and more articles,
> and better tools. How much have the anti-vandal tools (too many to
> name now, even excluding bots) proliferated and improved since that
> long-ago December?
>
> "But preveneting [sic] anons from creating new pages is a different
> matter, and it seems a worthy time to make an experiment of it."
>
> Yes, let's. Experiments go both ways, remember...
>
> ~maru
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