[WikiEN-l] "the experiment" - did it work?

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote: It is not clear to me that it did. I would love for us to have some serious analysis of that. My sense is that the number of articles created by unknown people is about the same, but that they now sign up for an account first. This is not helpful, because whereas before we had the rough indicator of "ip number equals newbie" (imperfect), we now have less of an indicator. There is also the question of whether the net production of new articles by ip numbers was sufficiently worthwhile to mean that preventing those cost more than it was worth. I do not think we have very firm answers to these questions. What I would prefer to see, in the long run, is a replacement of locking and controls by flagging and visibility. This is core to what I think works: not gatekeeping, but accountability. The issue we have, but so far only in English Wikipedia, and to a lesser degree elsewhere, I think, is that the sheer volume of crap that the new pages patrollers have to deal with means that every day we are making major mistakes that could be dealt with better through openness than through controls. (Openness in this case meaning: visibility and accountability.) --Jimbo -- ####################################################################### # Office: 1-727-231-0101 | Free Culture and Free Knowledge # # http://www.wikipedia.org | Building a free world # #######################################################################