[WikiEN-l] anons editing

Mon Aug 9 20:20:02 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.

1. By keeping the barriers to entry low, we make it easy for new
people to get involved.  It's fairly common for people to make a few
edits as anons before they decide that this is a good project, at
which point they get a login and start to build a reputation.

2.  By allowing anons to edit, we actually encourage a certain type of
"drive by" vandal to self-sort themselves into an easily identified
category.  We allow sysops to ban ip numbers who do bad things on a
much lower standard than the standard for logged in users.  If we
forced all the random idiots to login before adding "FAG FAG FAG" to
the articles, we might have to weaken the "civil rights protections"
that we give to logged-in users.

--Jimbo