On 4/11/07, Oleg Alexandrov mathbot@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.