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

[Erik Moeller]

On 4/11/07, Oleg Alexandrov <mathbot at hemlock.knams.wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 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.

When we have Single User Login, we should disable unregistered user
editing on the higher traffic wikis. I'm not convinced about email
registration. In terms of threshold against vandalism, it's trivially
breakable (mailinator.net or your own mailserver with an infinite pool
of addresses). I prefer captchas for the purpose of avoiding mass
registration; spammers & script kiddies actually have to do some real
work to break them, and when they do, you can make trivial
modifications to make their life harder again. Asymmetrical resource
usage=good.

Without SUL, forcing registration is going to cause lots of pain for
people coming  from other projects for purposes such as interwiki
linking or image maintenance. But if one name & password are enough to
write-access the entire Wikimedia universe, the incentive for making
an account is also higher.

I do believe captcha-driven registration will deter a significant
amount of vandalism & spam, but the main reason I consider it a Good
Thing is that it builds community & makes people contactable in a
persistent way. And, if we target OpenID as a next evolutionary step
after SUL, people will be able to use their existing logins from other
sites, so it's really a trivial step that could even be incorporated
into the edit page.


-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik

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