[WikiEN-l] Daily premier anonymity

[Jonathan]

Steve Bennett wrote:

>How does this help the vast majority of peaceful editing that goes on?
>It seems it would just lead to conusion, lack of teamwork, and lack of
>recognition for one's efforts. If you look at the history of an
>article you've worked on, you like to be able to distinguish edits
>from users who haven't edited that article before.
>
>I also believe users are already pretty anonymous - it's no effort for
>a user to get themselves a second or third account if they really want
>it.
>
>Steve
>  
>
It's meant to improve quality by anonymity -- not to keep people 
completely anonymous. Even if people trust another's recent edit by 
their name, it would be nice to know that such work is still being 
scrutinized as well as every other edit. The only argument I've seen 
against it is based on a preference for convenience. One must ask -- 
does such convenience affect quality?

"...technology often forces us to choose between quality and 
convenience." (Alan C. Kay, Computers, networks and education, 
/Scientific American/, September 1991).

http://www.squeakland.org/school/HTML/sci_amer_article/sci_amer_03.html

Consider that the open content is pretty liberal, are we just peacefully 
editing or peacefully tinkering? That same article has this to say about 
it: "Media can also lure us into thinking we are creating by design when 
in fact we are just tinkering. Consider the difficulty of transforming 
clay-a perfectly malleable and responsive substance into anything 
aesthetically satisfying. Perfect "debugability," or malleability, does 
not make up for lack of an internal image and shaping skills. 
Unfortunately, computers lend themselves to such "clay pushing"; they 
tempt users to try to debug constructions into existence by trial and 
error."

I don't see how anonymity can actually ruin distinguished efforts, 
peaceful editing, or lack of teamwork if the anonymity is not to 
completely keep people anonymous. One can always sign there user name to 
an entry and reveal who they are. Given there are options to reveal who 
made the change, it's not kept a secret. Just the identity of who made 
the change is not obvious to the casual reader, which includes editors 
that haven't edited the article for a day.

As for efforts, there are aways other means that can be developed. For 
example, a stats page that reveals who contributed the most to an 
article, or a page that lists all the authors of an article (which is 
needed by the GFDL anyways.)

Jonathan