On 8/20/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@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-20... 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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l