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Wikipedia to Restrict Creation of Articles
cine writes "News.com reports that starting Monday Wikipedia will restrict the creation of new articles to members. Anonymous users will only be able to edit existing articles. This move comes after a controversial week for the free online encyclopedia" From the article: "Wales said the Seigenthaler article not only escaped the notice of this corps of watchdogs, but it also became a kind of needle in a haystack: The page remained unchanged for so long because it wasn't linked to from any other Wikipedia articles, depriving it of traffic that might have led to closer scrutiny."
"Anonymous" Wikipedia accounts are actually less anonymous than registered users. As an anonymous user, your IP is visible for tracking across the site and tracing to your physical location; but you have the ability to create as many username sockpuppets as you want.
As a formerly prolific contributor, I never really understood how registration was helpful for anything but tracking people who want to be tracked.
Jimbo Wales and John Seigenthaler Sr. were on CNN to debate this issue. There's a partial transcript being worked on now.
(Disclaimer: I'm a relatively active editor on Wikipedia, although under a different name than this.)
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The article in question is right here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr
And yes, the IP addresses of (anonymous) people doing page edits are logged and publicised; but that still doesn't mean that people can be held accountable. If all you know is that whoever wrote a particular sentence in an article that's considered libellous or something else is that they edited from an AOL IP three years ago... good luck finding that person.
The big difference that Jimbo points out and that makes sense is that articles written by other users are likely on someone's watchlist, so that person would see the edit and check it out - I know I do that with articles on my watchlist, especially if the edits are by anonymous contributors or people I don't know. A malevolent user could still sign up for an account, of course, and get around the restriction that way, but I'd think it's safe to say that at least some trolls are gonna be deterred by that (although it's probably the low-level trolls who write things like "XYZ is a dumbass" in new articles instead of the high-level ones that write articles that look reasonable but are wrong in subtle but important ways); and if the problem persists, the system could just as well be expanded to people who have just signed up five minutes ago or who have not edited any existing articles yet etc. (Of course, that's just an idea of my own, and I'm not speaking for Jimbo, Wikipedia editors in general, the Wikimedia Foundation or anyone here.)
In the end, the lesson is probably that freedom also always means that people will be able to do bad things.
But look at it like this - even though there's almost a million articles in the English Wikipedia already, and even though Wikipedia is among the top 40 most popular sites on the entire Internet, as determined by Alexa, these are about the only examples of real controversy surrounding Wikipedia yet. I'd say we've been pretty successful at showing that the Wiki model *does* work - if the naysayers had been right, the whole site would've collapsed a long, long time ago. But it hasn't, not at all.
So we must be doing something right.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I used to be a big Wikipedia proponent. I have well over 3,000 edits there. Now however I think the site has gone to hell. I do think that it remains a nice reference site when trying to find general information about a common subject, but its usefulness stops there. Trying to get involved in the process any further is an exercise in futility. The site is run by people with huge egos, and any change you do will most likely get changed back regardless what it is. The time of big contributions of factual information is over, and it's mainly revert wars, arguing and vandalism that are most of the current edits.