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Wikipedia to Restrict Creation of Articles

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the handful-out-of-850,000-plus-aint-bad dept.

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."

3 of 368 comments (clear)

  1. Not a problem. by FireballX301 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    But wasn't the Siegenthaler issue about an edit of his article, not creation?

    In any case it's not that hard to register, and it's not hard to lie about your personal details. Nor is it hard to do this by proxy. So not quite a free-speech issue since prior to this your IP was published anyway. Thumbs up for a decent resolution.

  2. Problem with efficiency... by Captain+Perspicuous · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Creating an account takes before creating an article adds about 5 seconds for a user. I can't see how this will help prevent this scenario again. However, I could imagine that this idea ("Best approach?") would help a lot.

  3. Bad news by Willy+on+Wheels · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As an ex-vandal of Wikipedia, I see this is as bad news. First of all, it only takes a few minutes to create an account, so vandals can still create vandalism. Consider this, Wikipedia restricted page-moves from new users due to page moving vandals, but vandals just created accounts, left them to mature for a few weeks and still got through. It will stop idiots performing toolbar vandalism, but it won't stop the professionals.

    To give an example, we had a user who created lots of new articles, then claimed he created lots of hoaxes. They banned him, but they still haven't repaired all the damage. There are over 12000 articles tagged for clean up, how many hoaxes are there? This list for example has tonnes of hoaxes, and they have been kept there for over a year!

    The Willy on Wheeels is no longer a threat to the Wiki, entropy and admin ignorance is!

    --
    Do you play with your Willy?