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Infrequent Anonymous Cowards Reliable on Wikipedia
Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers at Dartmouth University have recently discovered that infrequent anonymous contributors, so called "Good Samaritans," are as reliable as registered users who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain. A graph from page 31 of the group's original paper (pdf file) shows that the quality of contributions of anonymous users goes down as the number of edits increases while quality goes up with the number of edits for registered users."
That study was published by Dartmouth College. Dartmouth University is an unrelated entity in Canada.
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I think that accounts for some of them -- there is little question that a significant number of those anon ids are from previous users who choose not to use their login id for whatever reason. I think there are also users who have been regular contributors in the past under a login id who got sick of the endless back-and-forth from users they have disagreements with. Some of the fights get vicious and even when they don't, there is a lot of tedious "lawyering" that goes back and forth between users about all of the rules (whether or not they're relevant to the particular situations). It's easy to get sucked into and if you take a strong position on anything (even questions of basic fact), there is another user somewhere who thinks you are wrong and is just as stubborn .... The argument can go on ad infinitum and it's easy to see why some people withdraw from it; read this article for some examples of the kind of thing that can happen.
It allows you to do both those things (create pages, and edit semi-protected pages). It also allows you to not have an annoying captcha pop up when you try to add an external link, and reduces the chance of your edits being mistaken for vandalism and reverted even though they were perfectly good.
There are several tangible benefits to having a registered account. The primary one I would think of is GFDL attribution: since your IP is not guaranteed to be stable (at least for most people), your edits cannot be attributed back to you as easily.
Additionally, as an anonymous editor, you can't edit semi-protected pages, but you cannot upload images either. You cannot move pages either, nor create pages in the article namespace. You can still create talk pages, but if you want to create an article, you have to go through the bore of Articles for creation. Also, while this may not apply to you in particular, unregistered editors cannot obtain administrative privileges.
More info: Wikipedia:Why create an account?
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Doing such a study requires checkuser access, which is something only a few people on Wikipedia have. Fortunately, I am one of them. I just sampled ten users out of the new user log. I am assuming a 1:1 mapping between IP and user (that is, that a user made no anonymous edits except with the IP he used to register his account). The number of anonymous edits prior to registeration for each user was:
A - 0
B - 0
C - 0
D - 2
E - 0
F - 0
G - 0
H - 0
I - 0
J - 0
In short: most of the people registering accounts had made no edits prior to registering. It's common knowledge on Wikipedia that something like half of all accounts registered never make any edits at all, so this makes sense.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
This is a troll, and is patently false, but I'll bite nonetheless: the Foundation's privacy policy (which governs the use of checkuser) strictly limits the conditions under which "personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database via the CheckUser feature" may be released. The release of aggregated, anonomyized data, such as I did above, is perfectly acceptable under the privacy policy and is a common practice in web traffic analysis
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
You have described the dilemma of the Wikipedia editor/administrator.
There are edits that are obviously unhelpful; there are others that are clearly helpful. But there is a gray area of edits that falls in between, and for which editors' reactions vary a lot.
A good example is an anonymous/new editor adding unsourced information to a carefully-sourced Featured article. You can't let the information just remain there, as editors have gone through that page, double-checked the citations and validity of the statements, and generally polished the article to have its prose crisp and clean. But you cannot just revert the edit wholesale, as the edit was not done in bad faith. While sometimes the edits can be fixed, there are many times that the edits are incorrigible, and need to be completely reworked or removed (such as introducing widespread, irrelevant rumors on the biography of a celebrity).
So, at this time, some editors remove the text, with an explanation in the edit summary. Sometimes anonymous editors read the edit summaries, sometimes they don't. Often they wonder why their text got removed, justifiably so. Some users take that personally and begin accusing us of being "grammar Nazis", or even "suppressors of the truth" (I've heard that one before). But in a way, we're just trying to keep everything in order.
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A large portion of new users never make edits after they register. See here the new user log. New users that have made edits will have the word "contribs" shown in blue; otherwise, it is shown in red. For many new users that have made edits... those edits turn out to be vandalism and the account, a vandalism-only account that is blocked.
How many of those new users you selected have made edits since registering? I think many of those you sampled will never edit, period. Not before, not after. To make the "study" meaningful, you need to select new users who have made edits (and not vandalism).
Happened to me once. I noticed a list of "movies about the Mafia" was full of titles just about crime, so I deleted those I knew were not Mafia related. Then later I see they've been reverted by some asshole (later I worked out it was a bot) that had decided I was a vandal (as stated in the comment).
Well, did you provide a reason why you deleted the content?
The bots are not infallible. They do catch a ton of the really ridiculous crap that people add to Wikipedia, but they miss some, and have a few false positives as well.
If you are not some random vandal, one thing that you could (actually, should do, as I strongly recommend it) is that you specify why you remove content in the "Edit summary" box. If you say, "Removing movies unrelated to mafia", the bot leaves you alone, or if someone sees the bot revert your removal for an invalid reasons, they can always revert the bot. I've done that myself many a time.
Remember: Humans watch the Recent changes feed too. If you provide a reason for the human, the human may leave you alone. Otherwise, you're just a random IP that is removing content for no reason whatsoever, which happens all day, every day. ~~~~
You realise that you are calling me a liar?
had his mother raped. Guy Number Three had his ancestors' graves desecrated,
I told you exactly what happened. I didn't exaggerate or claim malice, just careless arrogance. Some twat sent a bot to delete stuff without bothering to check what it was, and ignored my attempts to discuss it with him. Fuck you if you don't believe me.