[WikiEN-l] Proposal to not allow editing without account

[Oleg Alexandrov]

I am sure that this came along many times, but I was not able to 
search for it through the mailing list. 

OK, so to start, users without account (anons) contribute a lot of 
content, at least as typo fixing, etc., and many established users
started as anons.

However, it is also true that the vast majority of vandalism is
committed by anons, and it takes a tremendous energy to police the more
than 1.7 milions articles for vandalism.

Hereby I suggest that only people with account be allowed to edit, and
that they also suppy an email address when registering, which is then
confirmed by sending an email to the supplied address and having the
user clicking on a link.

This is quite standard nowadays on the vast majority of websites which 
allow more than just reading things, and people are rather used to it. 
It takes little time too to register and confirm one's email.

I am aware that this may decrease somewhat the number of people who get
hooked on Wikipedia and the amount of contributions. I'd argue however
that Wikipedia is at a stage now where it has a very large amount of
users, articles, and recognition. At this stage we should care a bit
more than in the past about the quality than the quantity of users and
articles (while of course we should hope that the community and the
number of articles will increase).

In short, I believe that having people make account and confirm their 
email is going to bring much more gain than loss.

Comments?

Oleg Alexandov