[WikiEN-l] Anonymous page creation will be reenabled on English Wikipedia.

[Todd Allen]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> In December 2005 during the John Seigenthaler biography controversy
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr._Wikipedia_biography_controversy)
> it was decided to require that users create an account and log in
> before starting a new article.  The ability of people to make changes
> without logging in remained unchanged.
>
> Some people believed that Wikipedia's the high rate of growth may have
> outpaced its community's ability to monitor new articles, contributing
> to the Seigenthaler problem. It was hoped that the limitation of page
> creation would increase the quality of newly created pages, increase
> oversight over newly created pages, and avoid the creation of hoax
> articles.  Since that point several attempts to study the impact of
> the change have been conducted.  These studies have been unable to
> produce conclusive findings.
>
> Around the time of the Seigenthaler controversy Wikipedia underwent a
> dramatic and discontinuous increase in traffic and editing activity
> beyond the high rate of growth Wikipedia had long been experiencing.
> It is very likely that the press surrounding this incident contributed
> to this increase.  This increase had made it impossible to make
> conclusive statements about the impact limiting page creation.
>
> Furthermore, if we ignore the growth effects the data suggests that
> the change has been harmful to the quality of Wikipedia. I must
> emphasize that all results have been inconclusive. We just can't tell.
>
> Numerous discussions with Wikipedians, Foundation leaders, and
> Foundation staff going back for more than a year have generally been
> positive about the idea of re-enabling anonymous page creation.
>
> In the time since late 2005 the English Wikipedia community has grown
> substantially. The nearly exponential growth rate in articles we
> previously experienced has stopped.  Even if disabling anon page
> creation was beneficial then, there is no current evidence suggesting
> that the change continues to be beneficial.  As such, barring
> complications, anonymous page creation will be re-enabled on English
> Wikipedia on Friday November 9th.
>
> After a one month period, on December 9th, we will re-evaluate this
> decision using previously established methods (average article
> lifespan, rate of deletion, manual quality classification, random
> samplings of newly created articles, and most importantly, community
> discussion). If there is evidence of harm, anonymous page creation
> will be disabled to collect more data and provide time for discussion.
>  If there is no significant evidence of harm, the issue will be
> evaluated again after six months. Further milestones and actions may
> be proposed at that time.
>
> Finally the community will have the chance to make an informed
> decision on this subject. It would have been best if that had happened
> initially, but it wasn't possible then.
>
> I hope that we can all look at this matter with optimism. If you are
> aware of a strong factually-grounded reason why this should not be
> done please provide it as soon as possible, either as a response to
> this list or emailed to me privately.  If you have ideas on additional
> measurements we can perform after making this change or if you'd like
> to volunteer your effort for helping to perform a manual new article
> quality study next month, please let me know.
>
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>   
Sure, I've got a strong, factually-grounded reason why this should not
be done. WP:AFC has been set up as a mechanism for articles to be
submitted anonymously. The page has a big, clearly-worded instruction
page at the top as to what to submit and what not to submit, far more
help than one normally gets just clicking on a redlink and creating a page.

Well with all that extra help, most of the articles must be accepted,
right? I mean, it gives you a step-by-step guide as to how to get an
article accepted!

Not so.

Yesterday's AFC:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creation/2007-10-27

42 articles proposed. 3 accepted, of which 2 were redirects as proposed
and one only needed redirection to an existing article. 39 garbage
articles easily kept off without any chance of slipping through newpage
patrol.

Well, maybe that was a fluke? Again, not so.

On the 26th, 53 proposals, of which 5 were accepted. 2 of those were
redirects, leaving 3 decent articles out of 53. Other days are all
similar, a few (usually very marginal) articles out of dozens of garbage
ones.

And that's -with- significantly more help and instruction than the
creator of a page normally gets. Anons are not creating a flood of great
pages, they're creating a flood of garbage. That's already been shown by
AFC. We don't need to have mainspace crapped up to prove it, the ratio
there, if anything, would be worse, due to the comparative lack of
instruction. If anything, require registration for a week and/or a
minimum of 30-50 edits before creating pages. If you've managed to make
a few dozen edits and not get yourself blocked, maybe -then- we can
trust you to create pages. Pages created by new accounts and anons are
almost uniformly worthless. We would do ourselves far better by freeing
up known good contributors from having to constantly clean up the crapflood.

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