[WikiEN-l] Anons banned from creating articles

Tue Dec 6 16:12:39 UTC 2005

Magnus Manske wrote:

>My guess is that it's an experiment that will turn into a permanent
>policy change if it turns out to be useful.
>  
>
But there does not appear to be any actual criteria under which it can 
be judged to fail.  The only way it will be rescinded, basically, is if 
Jimbo changes his mind about it being a good idea, because there's no 
way he can be proven wrong about it being a good idea.  No one has even 
informally defined what it would mean for it to be "successful", much 
less suggested how to measure that.

One possible criterion: The overall number of bad edits on Wikipedia 
(counting new page creation and edits to existing pages) decreases.

Another one: The overall number of bad edits on Wikipedia not caught 
within [x] hours (again counting both) decreases.

Is anyone prepared to measure either of these, or some other useful 
statistic?

-Mark