Anons to Create Wikipedia Pages
After a two year moratorium, it appears that anonymous (or more precisely, unregistered) users will be able to create new articles/pages in Wikipedia again.
The “clamp” was lowered in December 2005 after the Seigenthaler incident proved embarrassing to the Wikipedia community and started the march towards quality over quantity.
The move was announced boldly on the WikiEN-L mailing list by Greg Maxwell, one of the more resepected developers in the community and chief research coordinator for the community.
In December 2005 during the John Seigenthaler biography controversy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr._Wikipedia_biography_controversy) it was decided to require that users create an account and log in before starting a new article. The ability of people to make changes without logging in remained unchanged. […]
In the time since late 2005 the English Wikipedia community has grown substantially. The nearly exponential growth rate in articles we previously experienced has stopped. Even if disabling anon page creation was beneficial then, there is no current evidence suggesting that the change continues to be beneficial. As such, barring complications, anonymous page creation will be re-enabled on English Wikipedia on Friday November 9th.
After a one month period, on December 9th, we will re-evaluate this decision using previously established methods (average article lifespan, rate of deletion, manual quality classification, random samplings of newly created articles, and most importantly, community discussion). If there is evidence of harm, anonymous page creation will be disabled to collect more data and provide time for discussion. If there is no significant evidence of harm, the issue will be evaluated again after six months. Further milestones and actions may be proposed at that time.
It seems like a sensible trial given that many folks, including myself, have noted that the article growth has slowed substantially.
The announcement presented as fait accompli bothered some folks. But this is a classic example of Wikipedia’s community dynamics — being bold, with a person’s established social capital, rather than any strict hierarchical mandate, providing the authority for making things happen. It will be an interesting experiment.
