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

[phoebe ayers]

Hi Greg,

On 10/26/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I<snip>
>
> 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.


I know as research officer you are well aware that the results from such an
experiment will be of interest not just to the en: community itself, but
also to the wider wiki research community. Is there a page detailing the
metrics you have in mind, and listing possible studies that could be done to
determine "evidence of harm" from the switch? It seems like this is a good
chance for brainstorming on-wiki with both the research community and the
newpage patrol folks about possible ways to measure quality, etc., of new
articles, a discussion that seems overdue anyway given some general
unhappiness about deletion practices.

Also, before taking on such an experiment, it seems like it would be
worthwhile and sensible to run any intended metrics & studies on the current
state of affairs *first*, so there is something to accurately compare to.
AFAIK our understanding of what gets deleted, how many pages get deleted
versus kept; how many articles are speedied a day out of these, etc. is
imperfect; feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I'd also be interested in
seeing which studies you're referring to that inclusively suggest that "the
change has been harmful to the quality of Wikipedia"; I'm not familiar with
that work and it seems like a tough thing to measure given overall explosive
growth in this timeframe.

cheers,
Phoebe