[Foundation-l] Anons cannot create pages on english wikipedia?

Wed Dec 7 17:51:53 UTC 2005

--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> Daniel Mayer wrote:
> 
> >New users and anons can’t upload since undoing that is something that only admins can do.
> >Creating new pages is also something that only admins can undo. Ergo

> >  
> >
> In a very narrow sense that's true, but any user (admin or not), may tag 
> an article (or image) for speedy-deletion, which is in effect as good as 
> deleting it (speedy-tagged articles rarely last more than an hour before 
> an admin comes along and clears them out).

And that is two actions instead of one to remove patent nonsense (at least double the work). Thus
it makes sense to limit the amount of patent nonsense we get (and thus that effort could be used
somewhere else). Not allowing anons and newbies to upload images limits the amount of crap images
we have to deal with. 

If *too many* anons that would have created crap articles as IPs start to create user accounts to
post new pages, then it would be logical to extend the new page creation ban to new user accounts
just as we already don’t allow new users to upload images. Slippery slope? Not really since there
is already a ledge to land on that was created with the upload policy.

It is a matter of weighing costs vs benefits as they pertain to our goal of creating the best and
largest free encyclopedia in the world. We can and should remain as open as possible for as long
as possible. But we need to constantly monitor our processes to see if they are, on average,
bringing us closer or farther from our goal. Once a problem area is identified we then need to act
but try to do so in a deliberate and thoughtful way.

-- mav

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