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

Tue Dec 6 00:29:45 UTC 2005

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 02:27:21PM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
...
> For the record, I very strongly support this. This is due to the fact 
> that almost all, not just  most, new pages created by anons on the 
> English Wikipedia are borderline to complete crap. Thus it is sad, 
> but necessary to limit the amount of needless clean-up work that 
...

A. Creating new crap article now consists of typing the name of the 
article, typing the article + clicking one button.

B. Creating new article with compulsory registration adds aditional
requirement of creating one crap account.
Necessary effort consists of typing a random user name, 2x random
password + clicking one button.

C. Creating new article with compulsory registration with unique 
email adds requirement to crate one crap email.
Necessary effort consists of typing a normal email into jetable.org, 
and clicking one button.

and so on.... 

In long term perspective we'll achieve the same ammount of harder 
to spot vandalism. Effort required from vandals will increase e.g.
twice, from one click to two clicks.

Look from
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SoftSecurity
viewpoint.

> 
> Anons will still be able to edit existing articles. This is fine 
> since existing articles are much more likely to be watched by users and 
> decently linked from other pages. 
> 

This is interesting - is there some real statistic on how watched
articles are? I'm affraid there may be tens of thousand virtually 
unwatched articles no active wikipedians care about.

IMO Wikipedia should less try to mimic what works for traditional
encyclopedias (like the CITE madness) and concentrate more on 
inner proceses which works here - and improve software to aid them / 
identify where they fail. For example, locating various more likely
dangerous  articles, such as
*unwatched articles
*articles with high (external readers/wikipedian readers) ratio

> It is also my hope that this will help push the English Wikipedia, 
> however little, a bit from emphasizing growth and a bit more toward 
> emphasizing quality.
> 

I'm affraid it only pushes us from SoftSecurity which works to
HardSecurity which can not work for us.

Jan Kulveit 
[[User:Wikimol]]