Surely the 3 or 4 more clicks it takes to create a
crap
article now aren't stopping that many anons.
I think this is the right question. If it turns out anon page creation (APC)
does, in fact, produce a lot more crap, then I would like to propose a
counterexperiment: just add ONE extra click to the APC process, and see what
difference it makes.
At the risk of repeating myself, sounding like a broken record, and repeating
myself, I don't see this is as a two-way choice between APC on or off, since
account creation is unrestricted anyway. I see this as a matter of how many
clicks are involved in the APC process, how obvious they are.
Currently, it is: click on red link, click on "log in or create account" (and
NOT "submit the content", which is a trap), click on "create account",
fill in
the form and press "create account", navigate back to where you were, click on
red link again, and there's your edit box.
On the other hand, for logged-in users, clicking on a red link goes right to the
edit box. This was also the case for logged-out users before English Wikipedia
disabled the feature (and remains the case on other Wikipedias).
Clicking on a blue link, on the other hand, only allows reading the article; to
edit, the user has to explicitly click on "edit this page".
That is, to get to the edit box for an existing page, a casual reader has to at
least intend to edit. Not so for a non-existing page, a casual reader could just
stumble into it (when anon pgae creation was on).
So I wonder what would happen if, after turning anon page creation on for a
while, we then change it so the red link leads to the no-article page (like
this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrapositive_Enthymemetics_in_Lower_Canada)
If it turns out that having anon page creation on, but with that extra click,
produces less crap that having anon page creaton on with no extra clicks (by
whatever metrics), we might then want to think a bit more about how to design
the editing/creation interface for logged-out users.
Regards,
Daniel Mehkeri