[WikiEN-l] anons editing

Mon Aug 9 05:15:05 UTC 2004

zero 0000 wrote:

>In my almost-a-year editing Wikipedia, I am yet to hear a convincing
>reason for allowing anons to edit at all, but saw plenty of cases when
>I wished they couldn't.  Zero.
>
You must be looking at the wrong articles then. There's been a bunch
of new material for which I've been grateful to anons for doing the
scutwork of creating and filling in, and lots of grammar/spelling
corrections from them too. Some of these are from IPs that become
familiar, so I assume they have reasons for anonymity.

I'm not averse to making anons be third-class though, logins with
no real-world identification second-class, and real-world people as
the first class. Anonymity cannot build the web of trust that we'll
need for long-term stability and reliability, so we want to tolerate
it but not encourage. (For instance, a quality rating system might
elevate an article to where anons could no longer modify it.)

Stan