I wanted to start a discussion on lowering the threshold for access. Very
very very few people qualify for the current requirements of 500+ edits, 6+
months editing, 10+ edits in the last month, and no active blocks. In fact
basically this excludes any new editor no matter how good faith and helpful
they have been. Even just lowering one of the account age or edit count
thresholds would go a long way.
I recently was pretty shocked to discover this high of a bar for access,
after recommending the library as a resource to a new editor who has been
doing a great job and (as a young student) could use access to academic
source material in creating science-related content. I won't name them, but
as an example this editor has over 300 edits and has created just over 50
articles, mainly for missing plant species.
Do the participating institutions require this level of exclusionary
criteria? How can we gather data to show them that there are good content
contributors being excluded here?
These requirements seem pretty absurd especially since many of the largest
resources in the Library, like JSTOR, give any random person with a Google
account access to 100 free articles per month. The risk profile of a
Wikipedia who say has,100 edits and 1 month of experience has got to be
less than that? We should pilot a threshold like that.
Steven