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Consensus for its implementation was not established within a reasonable period of time. If you want to revive discussion, please use
the talk page or initiate a thread at
the village pump. |
This is a perennial proposal - variants of it pop up every couple of months. The answer, each and every time, is a firm and resounding NO. The whole point of Wikipedia is its accessibility, and it will not be restricted in this way. R adiant _>|< 23:13, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
Especially note Wikipedia:Disabling edits by unregistered users and stricter registration requirement, where common objections to the proposal are laid out. -- Chriswaterguy talk 15:02, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia must tighten up controls of who can edit and who cannot!
hello, i am User:Rbj and i love Wikipedia and have made quite a few edit contributions that have stuck, so i think i am a positive asset to Wikipedia. but i am spending too much time reverting vandalism.
why is it that Wikipedia allows anonymous (from mere IP addresses) editing of the articles? this is just dumb and we're literally begging for vandals to come and mess it up?
you should require every editor to Login and when they first create an identity or username, they should have to verify by responding to an email from Wikipedia (so we know their email address is real). they should have to identify themselves fully (name, valid email), viewable at least by the administrators. and whenever they login, there should be a record of IP addresses so that if vandalism is done from the same IP (but a different login name), we might have an idea of who else to contact.
you guys have to fix this!
r b-j 18:49, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
WANNA CONTRIBUTE—LOG IN! -- Barbatus 14:37, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
abakharev 22:38, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
This comes up quite frequently. Have a look at Wikipedia:Disabling edits by unregistered users and stricter registration requirement. -- Goobergunch| ? 07:38, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
Allowing anyone to edit is an absolute cornerstone of Wikipedia, and contributes enormously to its attraction to the general public. I would be very much opposed to any attempt to restrict edits to logged-in users. I see plenty of good edits from IP addresses (and no shortage of vandalism from IPs).
Preventing article creation by IPs is something I would have more time for, but would still be wary of. Many an anonymous editor has probably found a redlink, thought 'I know about that' and started an article. However, if there were a way to prevent IP addresses from creating new articles which nothing links to, I would think that might be a good idea. Worldtraveller 13:08, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
Why not test the hypothesis? As of 2007, how many other public wikis still allow anonymous edits? Is the trend among public wikis to become more open, or less? Those other wikis that started off without a registration requirement and later added it, what are their results? Have they improved their ratio of good to bad edits? Did they abandon the registration requirement after seeing that it was a bad idea? Can we really know what we are discussing until we test the idea by requiring registration for a while? I'd like to see some evidence to support the seemingly self-contradictory argument that requiring registration will deter the good guys while somehow not deterring the bad guys. If registration won't stop vandals, how will it stop the the positive contributors? There seems to be an implicit assumption that vandals are much more motivated to vandalize than positive contributors are motivated to contribute. That assumption seems to contradict WP:AGF, by which we would instead assume good faith, i.e., that most prospective editors would be motivated enough to do good that they would understand the need to meet some reasonable minimum requirements.
After all, most Internet users are accustomed to registering for almost any sort of free account on the Internet; by not requiring the same sort of registration that almost every other site requires, Wikipedia might turn off some people, just as it might attract some others by that policy. It's far from clear that a registration requirement would lead to a net reduction in positive editors. How many experienced editors give up on Wikipedia in disgust after wasting hours of their time reverting vandalism over and over? Reverting vandalism is not always simple. If no one notices vandalism when it first appears, other editors may subsequently edit an article, and by the time someone finally notices the vandalism, editing the garbage out may be laborious. Who in their right mind wants to waste time doing that, year after year?
Today Wikipedia is one of the largest and most popular sites on the Web, making it much more attractive both to editors and to vandals. The point of self-perpetuating critical mass was passed long ago. Maybe a few years ago, few people knew about Wikipedia, and they needed every possible inducement to try editing here, but today the site shows up in every other Google search, and the odds are higher that we will know some people in real life who are editing here. People who learn about Wikipedia from registered users they happen to know personally are probably more willing to register up-front, since they will already be "sold" on the idea by their friends; they won't have to be convinced on their own by the wonders of anonymous editing. Registration won't stop vandalism, but it should reduce vandalism. Most criminals are lazy. Like predators, they instinctively seek out the weakest prey. Making it just a little harder to vandalize should reduce the percentage who vandalize to the fraction who are willing to make that extra effort. This works the same way as locking the doors to your house. It's easy for a sufficiently motivated criminal to smash through most locked doors, but making it just a bit harder than walking through an unlocked door is enough to deter some criminals, and send others looking for easier targets. In any case, the only way to be sure whether requiring registration is a good idea is to try it, while comparing the statistics on new user registrations, good and bad edits, etc., before and after the requirement takes effect. After a few months, enough data should be available to indicate which policy is really better. If requiring registration is really not a good idea, then we can rescind it. I don't understand this non-objective approach of deciding a priori that requiring registration is a bad idea.
Requiring registration is inevitable anyway. Consider: as more articles improve toward featured or good status, those pages will tend to become protected to varying degrees. The proportion of protected articles should steadily grow, and new articles will become harder to start, because there are only finitely many articles that can meet Wikipedia's requirements. Most of the sufficiently notable and attributable topics will already have articles, at some point in the fairly near future. Once upon a time, there was no Jupiter article, for example. Anyone could have started that article, confident that the subject was notable and attributable. Today the remaining topics for new articles are growing increasingly marginal, and the process of getting one started is growing less pleasant. New users will find Wikipedia progressively less inviting, because it will keep getting harder to further improve the already good articles, and harder to create new articles that will be initially good enough to escape speedy deletion. After a few years of manually policing the increasingly futile efforts of new users, Wikipedians will find it more efficient to automate more of the barriers to entry, perhaps by making new article creation more difficult (requiring proof of compliance with requirements up front, or formally quarantining them for review). The recruitment and training of new editors will probably be separated from the production of the encylopedia, perhaps by setting up a sandbox mirror of Wikipedia where new users can experiment freely, quarantining their edits for evaluation by experienced users before incorporating into Wikipedia proper. There will be some form of user ranking, whereby edits by unranked users get flagged for increased attention. The egalitarian ideal of allowing "anyone" to edit Wikipedia will become increasingly fictional in practice as the difficulty of getting low-quality edits through the initial policy gauntlet increases. The more successful Wikipedia becomes, the more selective it must deliberately be, by one mechanism or another. The mechanisms currently employed make lavish use of volunteer human labor, and this seems unsustainably inefficient. How many skilled professionals will want to donate their free time reverting the mindless vandalism of schoolchildren? Sooner or later, Wikipedia must raise the drawbridge. -- Teratornis 19:49, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
NO WAY! The banning of IP editors would not widely reduce vandalism, yet it would make it more difficult to fight severe vandalism since checkuser would be required to trace some of these vandals that would otherwise be easily traced and reported. GO-PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 21:05, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
This is not recommended, because it could be multiply abused. (If it isn't noted in public who is behind the IP, person could vote several times with its account (if it has one) plus dynamic IP addresses often changes.) It is very questionable. Alex discussion ★ 23:06, 17 September 2011 (UTC)
![]() | This is a
failed proposal.
Consensus for its implementation was not established within a reasonable period of time. If you want to revive discussion, please use
the talk page or initiate a thread at
the village pump. |
This is a perennial proposal - variants of it pop up every couple of months. The answer, each and every time, is a firm and resounding NO. The whole point of Wikipedia is its accessibility, and it will not be restricted in this way. R adiant _>|< 23:13, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
Especially note Wikipedia:Disabling edits by unregistered users and stricter registration requirement, where common objections to the proposal are laid out. -- Chriswaterguy talk 15:02, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia must tighten up controls of who can edit and who cannot!
hello, i am User:Rbj and i love Wikipedia and have made quite a few edit contributions that have stuck, so i think i am a positive asset to Wikipedia. but i am spending too much time reverting vandalism.
why is it that Wikipedia allows anonymous (from mere IP addresses) editing of the articles? this is just dumb and we're literally begging for vandals to come and mess it up?
you should require every editor to Login and when they first create an identity or username, they should have to verify by responding to an email from Wikipedia (so we know their email address is real). they should have to identify themselves fully (name, valid email), viewable at least by the administrators. and whenever they login, there should be a record of IP addresses so that if vandalism is done from the same IP (but a different login name), we might have an idea of who else to contact.
you guys have to fix this!
r b-j 18:49, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
WANNA CONTRIBUTE—LOG IN! -- Barbatus 14:37, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
abakharev 22:38, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
This comes up quite frequently. Have a look at Wikipedia:Disabling edits by unregistered users and stricter registration requirement. -- Goobergunch| ? 07:38, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
Allowing anyone to edit is an absolute cornerstone of Wikipedia, and contributes enormously to its attraction to the general public. I would be very much opposed to any attempt to restrict edits to logged-in users. I see plenty of good edits from IP addresses (and no shortage of vandalism from IPs).
Preventing article creation by IPs is something I would have more time for, but would still be wary of. Many an anonymous editor has probably found a redlink, thought 'I know about that' and started an article. However, if there were a way to prevent IP addresses from creating new articles which nothing links to, I would think that might be a good idea. Worldtraveller 13:08, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
Why not test the hypothesis? As of 2007, how many other public wikis still allow anonymous edits? Is the trend among public wikis to become more open, or less? Those other wikis that started off without a registration requirement and later added it, what are their results? Have they improved their ratio of good to bad edits? Did they abandon the registration requirement after seeing that it was a bad idea? Can we really know what we are discussing until we test the idea by requiring registration for a while? I'd like to see some evidence to support the seemingly self-contradictory argument that requiring registration will deter the good guys while somehow not deterring the bad guys. If registration won't stop vandals, how will it stop the the positive contributors? There seems to be an implicit assumption that vandals are much more motivated to vandalize than positive contributors are motivated to contribute. That assumption seems to contradict WP:AGF, by which we would instead assume good faith, i.e., that most prospective editors would be motivated enough to do good that they would understand the need to meet some reasonable minimum requirements.
After all, most Internet users are accustomed to registering for almost any sort of free account on the Internet; by not requiring the same sort of registration that almost every other site requires, Wikipedia might turn off some people, just as it might attract some others by that policy. It's far from clear that a registration requirement would lead to a net reduction in positive editors. How many experienced editors give up on Wikipedia in disgust after wasting hours of their time reverting vandalism over and over? Reverting vandalism is not always simple. If no one notices vandalism when it first appears, other editors may subsequently edit an article, and by the time someone finally notices the vandalism, editing the garbage out may be laborious. Who in their right mind wants to waste time doing that, year after year?
Today Wikipedia is one of the largest and most popular sites on the Web, making it much more attractive both to editors and to vandals. The point of self-perpetuating critical mass was passed long ago. Maybe a few years ago, few people knew about Wikipedia, and they needed every possible inducement to try editing here, but today the site shows up in every other Google search, and the odds are higher that we will know some people in real life who are editing here. People who learn about Wikipedia from registered users they happen to know personally are probably more willing to register up-front, since they will already be "sold" on the idea by their friends; they won't have to be convinced on their own by the wonders of anonymous editing. Registration won't stop vandalism, but it should reduce vandalism. Most criminals are lazy. Like predators, they instinctively seek out the weakest prey. Making it just a little harder to vandalize should reduce the percentage who vandalize to the fraction who are willing to make that extra effort. This works the same way as locking the doors to your house. It's easy for a sufficiently motivated criminal to smash through most locked doors, but making it just a bit harder than walking through an unlocked door is enough to deter some criminals, and send others looking for easier targets. In any case, the only way to be sure whether requiring registration is a good idea is to try it, while comparing the statistics on new user registrations, good and bad edits, etc., before and after the requirement takes effect. After a few months, enough data should be available to indicate which policy is really better. If requiring registration is really not a good idea, then we can rescind it. I don't understand this non-objective approach of deciding a priori that requiring registration is a bad idea.
Requiring registration is inevitable anyway. Consider: as more articles improve toward featured or good status, those pages will tend to become protected to varying degrees. The proportion of protected articles should steadily grow, and new articles will become harder to start, because there are only finitely many articles that can meet Wikipedia's requirements. Most of the sufficiently notable and attributable topics will already have articles, at some point in the fairly near future. Once upon a time, there was no Jupiter article, for example. Anyone could have started that article, confident that the subject was notable and attributable. Today the remaining topics for new articles are growing increasingly marginal, and the process of getting one started is growing less pleasant. New users will find Wikipedia progressively less inviting, because it will keep getting harder to further improve the already good articles, and harder to create new articles that will be initially good enough to escape speedy deletion. After a few years of manually policing the increasingly futile efforts of new users, Wikipedians will find it more efficient to automate more of the barriers to entry, perhaps by making new article creation more difficult (requiring proof of compliance with requirements up front, or formally quarantining them for review). The recruitment and training of new editors will probably be separated from the production of the encylopedia, perhaps by setting up a sandbox mirror of Wikipedia where new users can experiment freely, quarantining their edits for evaluation by experienced users before incorporating into Wikipedia proper. There will be some form of user ranking, whereby edits by unranked users get flagged for increased attention. The egalitarian ideal of allowing "anyone" to edit Wikipedia will become increasingly fictional in practice as the difficulty of getting low-quality edits through the initial policy gauntlet increases. The more successful Wikipedia becomes, the more selective it must deliberately be, by one mechanism or another. The mechanisms currently employed make lavish use of volunteer human labor, and this seems unsustainably inefficient. How many skilled professionals will want to donate their free time reverting the mindless vandalism of schoolchildren? Sooner or later, Wikipedia must raise the drawbridge. -- Teratornis 19:49, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
NO WAY! The banning of IP editors would not widely reduce vandalism, yet it would make it more difficult to fight severe vandalism since checkuser would be required to trace some of these vandals that would otherwise be easily traced and reported. GO-PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 21:05, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
This is not recommended, because it could be multiply abused. (If it isn't noted in public who is behind the IP, person could vote several times with its account (if it has one) plus dynamic IP addresses often changes.) It is very questionable. Alex discussion ★ 23:06, 17 September 2011 (UTC)