[WikiEN-l] The downside to requiring account creation. See also: [[Slippery slope]]

Thu Dec 8 01:28:53 UTC 2005

I'm still officially on wikibreak (can that be official? =) but I just wanted to
drop a note here on my take on these new restrictions.

Many feel that the [[USA PATRIOT Act]] was only passed on the basis of it being
a highly emotional, gut reaction. Pretty much everyone was OK with it at first,
but over time a lot of Americans have come to wonder if it violates some of our
very basic principles. That's just a surface analogy - don't read into it too
far. The point is that, whether or not it is a perennial suggestion, and whether
or not an article existed for several months and displayed a prominent person as
an assassin, we should absolutely not go against the principles that got us
here.

The reason is simple: It is a slippery slope from stopping "anonymous" editors
from creating new pages, to stopping "anonymous" editors period. I quote
[[anonymous]] because it only (and merely) raises the bar to entry, and does not
affect the pseudo-anonymity that these so-called anons are granted. Creating an
account does not improve our ability to identify you, and not creating an
account does not stop us from identifying you. Creating an account merely gives
you the possibility of handing over legitimate contact information. It is
unnecessary and makes us look like a [[gated community]]. We are not that.

Requiring the creation of an account to solve these so-called problems (and I
will get to that, below) is akin to you realizing you are driving over the speed
limit, and in order to slow down you /turn around and start driving the other
direction/. Now you're just speeding the other way! You are going to the exact
same place, but you're just going to have to drive all the way around
the world to
get there.

I think the point we should take from the experience is this: Wikipedia worked
EXACTLY the way it was supposed to. Sure, we like to trump the fact that we
legions of uber-nerds scanning incoming edits as fast as they can sometimes
catch erroneous facts in a matter of seconds. But sometimes it takes longer.
Instead of requiring account creation, what we should really do is drive the
community to higher inter-linkage of obscure articles so that more people can
read it and the discrepancies can be caught by the very same process that got us
to hundreds of languages, hundreds of thousands of articles (and contributors!)
and multitudes of projects.

I know you can think of other ways we can focus community effort, and I think
that's what we should do. Wikipedia is not a gated community - it is an open
community based on open, (FOSS!) principles. Getting rid of one principle is a
step towards getting rid of them all. If we really do have a problem, e.g., if
we really are experiencing growing pains and not just sensationalism,  we need
to stick to our principles to solve it, not drive frantically in the other
directions. It doesn't solve the problem, it just means its going to be around
for longer.

--
Cheers,
Brian Mingus (Alterego)