[WikiEN-l] "the experiment" - did it work?

Tue Jun 20 23:00:31 UTC 2006

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:37:21 -0400, "The Cunctator"
> <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Sorry. This is mainly a reference to the whole "Today, as an experiment, we
>> will be turning off new pages creation for anonymous users in the English
>> Wikipedia." I still think you were being a bit disingenuous (if
>> unintentially) about the experimentality of that decision.
> 
> It worked, though.

It is not clear to me that it did.  I would love for us to have some
serious analysis of that.

My sense is that the number of articles created by unknown people is
about the same, but that they now sign up for an account first.  This is
not helpful, because whereas before we had the rough indicator of "ip
number equals newbie" (imperfect), we now have less of an indicator.

There is also the question of whether the net production of new articles
by ip numbers was sufficiently worthwhile to mean that preventing those
cost more than it was worth.

I do not think we have very firm answers to these questions.

What I would prefer to see, in the long run, is a replacement of locking
and controls by flagging and visibility.  This is core to what I think
works: not gatekeeping, but accountability.

The issue we have, but so far only in English Wikipedia, and to a lesser
degree elsewhere, I think, is that the sheer volume of crap that the new
pages patrollers have to deal with means that every day we are making
major mistakes that could be dealt with better through openness than
through controls.  (Openness in this case meaning: visibility and
accountability.)

--Jimbo

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