[WikiEN-l] Daily premier anonymity

[BJörn Lindqvist]

On 3/5/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> In a perfect world, we could have perfect anonymity in this matter
> (actually, we wouldn't /need/ anonymity), but the world is far from
> perfect. I'm not going to buy into the "this proposal amounts to
> trolling" argument, except to say this: removing usernames from
> contributions would be a troll's paradise.

Predicting the future is hard. I wonder how you arrive at that
conclusion? How is it possible to troll something that is effectively
nothing more than a huge stack of edits? Trolls require opponents and
if the opponents are not discernible the primary incentive to troll is
not there. There are lots of totally anonymous (as anonymous as you
can get on the Internet) communities and the few I have been involved
in have not been plagued by trolls.

Of course, no way in hell that Wikipedia will do away with the user
account concept. It is just to deeply rooted. But thinking about it
can give you some insight on flaws in how Wikipedia currently
operates. For example, did you know that in some universities
professors are not able to see the students names on exams and papers
handed in? Why do you think that is and do you think Wikipedia users
are in general better than university professors?

--
mvh Björn