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

Wed Dec 7 17:58:51 UTC 2005

When I found Wikipedia, I had no intentions of registering. At some
point when I created my first article (err...stub) I was just an anon.
I only registered after I saw how that new article got picked up by
the community and expanded and made usable:  I got hooked watching the
history of that first article.

When you first approach the Wikipedia community it seems overwhelming,
and registering is a pretty big step.  I highly suspect that a large
number of people who registered did so after the success of an article
they created as an anon -- like me -- and wouldn't have created the
article if they had to take a step of registering.  Becoming part of a
community is not something that some people take lightly, especially
as active and complex a community as Wikipedia is.

Ultimately most decisions have to be justified in terms of improving
quality.  Will people who are determined enough to create fictitious,
libellous biographies be stopped by restricting page creation to
registered users?  Not very likely.

-ilya haykinson

On 12/7/05, SJ <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 7 Dec 2005, The Cunctator wrote:
> > On 12/5/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> 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.
> >
> > Do we have stats on that?
>
> New, usable articles created by anons accounted for around 40% of all new
> articles.  This ignores speedied articles, etc which might inflate the
> figure in favor of anon-creation.
>
> Lots of them need wikification and start life as stubs; I wouldn't call
> that "crap".
>
> SJ
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