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

[Gallagher Mark George]

G'day Oleg,

<snip />

> 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.

Many established users still *are* anons, including Yours Truly.  I use Wikipedia a lot for research at work.  If I come across typos, trivial errors, and the like, I will usually take the 30 seconds it requires to patch them up before getting back to work.  I am not able to log in from the office, and even if I were, I probably wouldn't bother to do so.  Since my user account hasn't been kicked off the project (yet), I can only assume that my contributions --- whether as User:MarkGallagher, or any one of several IP addresses including that of my work PC --- are welcome.

The thing that many people forget about anons is that they are, well, anonymous.  They could be a 12-year-old vandal acting up in a How to Use the Internet workshop, or they could be a Nobel Prize winner.  More ordinarily, they might be Mark Gallagher ... or Oleg Alexandrov.

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

It takes less energy to revert 10 anons making tests or childish graffiti attacks than it does to clean up after a single registered account committing more subtle vandalism.  Blocking anons won't stop vandalism, but if the vandals have to invest more effort into their "work" to disrupt the project, they will consequently try harder, and cause more damage.

> 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.

The vast majority of websites which allow more than just reading things also ask less effort from contributors, and yet still enjoy fewer members than we do, even after controlling for joke accounts (I assume).

> 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.

Our biggest problem is not drive-by vandalism, but deliberate misinformation or attacks masquerading as worthwhile contributions.  The people who try to abuse Wikipedia to host hatchet jobs on living persons often (usually?) do it from behind an account, and I can't see them abating just because future editors will need to hold a throwaway email account first.

Meanwhile, the contributions not just of new users or people who haven't bothered to register an account, but also those who have accounts but happen not to be using them at the moment, will be lost.  I don't consider this a fair trade.


Cheers,

-- 
User:MarkGallagher