Anonymous edits

[Warren Schudy]

I recently read an article suggesting that most of wikipedia's content (not edits, but words) comes from anonymous edits. Unfortunately, I can't find it again, but here's a related article I have found indicating the quality of infrequent anonymous editors is good: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=B9CB44D9-0807-DCEF-D35BA51C831A1CF6 . Therefore it seems desirable to allow anonymous edits. Here's a proposal to hopefully get the benefits of anonymous editing while maintaining the benefits of CZ's real-name model.

1) Allow anonymous edits, but do not show such edits to the world immediately. Anonymous edits go in a queue, and any author or editor can then endorse an anonymous edit and make it go live. (This could perhaps be implemented by automatically reverting any change an anonymous user makes.) The endorsing author would take responsibility for the edit. Improper anonymous edits would not be endorsed, so there's no incentive to make them, hence, we shouldn't have to waste much time sorting through spam. This is similar to wikipedia where people watch pages they're interested in and revert vandalism, but the default would be reject rather than accept. This can also be compared to the way CZ user account requests are human-approved.

2) Anonymous users can edit talk pages, and such changes appear immediately. However, a constable (editor?) can lock a talk page to anonymous users if anonymous users are causing problems.

3) Anonymous users are required to defer to registered users, even if the registered user does not give good reasons for their position. This allows registered users to ignore obnoxious anonymous users rather than arguing with them.

4) People can create pseudonymous accounts without proving their identity. A pseudonymous account is treated like an unregistered (anonymous) user for all policies; the only difference is pseudonymous users are known by a pseudonym instead of an IP.

Summary: anyone can participate and suggest edits, but if you want the rights and responsibilities of a full user, you need to use your real name.

[a.a.s.]

You may be referring to this.

[Stephen Ewen]

All contributors to the Citizendium must do so using their own real names, unless special and unusual permission is granted by project management.

As part of http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Fundamentals, I understand this is not a matter open to debate.

[Warren Schudy]

All contributors to the Citizendium must do so using their own real names, unless special and unusual permission is granted by project management.

As part of http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Fundamentals, I understand this is not a matter open to debate.

The CZ fundamentals are analogous to the US constitution. Both are the law of the land and need to be respected. However, the US constitution was not born perfect, and has been changed many times. If the US government refused to amend the constitution, there would still be slavery. Larry Sanger has many great ideas, but it's unreasonable to assume that his vision cannot be improved upon. It would be rather ironic to have a dynamic encyclopedia with experts editing side by side with other people, but with the rules governing the encyclopedia so strongly fixed that no debate is allowed.

I don't see anything in the statement of fundamental principles that prohibits debate on this. The closest I see is:

Those who reject any of these commitments are hereby asked to abstain from participating.

I am agreeing to abide by those principles, so I'm not rejecting them.

If a government refuses to consider amendments to its constitution, it is not a democracy, but a theocracy with a holy constitution.

Larry [Sanger], can you please clarify when debating the fundamental principles is permitted?

Update: how about allowing debate that is primarily about the constitution, but not allowing constitutional arguments when the issue at hand is concrete (e.g. whether a particular article change is ok)?

Update 2: Would the Shared Knowledge mailing list (http://mail.citizendium.org/mailman/listinfo/sharedknowing) be a better venue for this discussion?

[Stephen Ewen]

Actually, that's a false analogy with the U.S. Constitution.  Its more like a founding document upon which the Citizendium Charter will be based, with the charter being analogous to the constitution.  Moreover, to say that the existence of founding principles means a system is theocratic is no more true than saying that the U.S. is a theocracy by reason of the constitution being based upon such principles.

[Robert_W_King]

I don't understand this demonization of the process; it's relatively straight forward.

[Russell D. Jones]

Warren, I think the idea means a lot of work for somebody who, really, would rather be editing.  A real names policy raises the commitment of contributors towards accuracy and credibility. 

I actually came on here looking for the rationale behind the real-names policy.  Could any one point me towards it?

[Aleta Curry]

Russell has gone to the crux of the matter:

Warren, I think the idea means a lot of work for somebody who, really, would rather be editing. 

And this is a highly significant point, too

A real names policy raises the commitment of contributors towards accuracy and credibility. 

Warren, there are some seriously flawed premises in the article you have referred us to.

"Researchers measured the retention rates of information posted by 7,058 contributors to the French- and Dutch-language versions of Wikipedia in March 2005. (The English-language version was too massive to adequately monitor.)"

You've got a problem right there.  So we've got people in one culture monitoring retention rates of information in wikis in two different languages.  How many questions do we need to ask about that, for Pity's sake?  The sheer volume of the English-language version was too much, so they used something else?

As for this:  "The most reliable contributions are those that undergo the least number of changes or edits from the open-source community—and remain on the site the longest.

Because contributors have the opportunity to add, edit or delete whatever content they choose, preserving information from earlier versions is taken as tacit acceptance of its quality. "

Oh my heavenly stars.  How can anyone expect anyone else to take seriously an argument built on such a premise?  One can "hide" something completely false in a WP article and have it sit for months.  Or, sensible edits to a contentious article get squabbled over within seconds.  How long an article goes without editing proves nothing as far as I'm concerned.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

The second link, posted by Alex, is very interesting indeed. It suggests that WP has as its primary information source a very large number of occasional anonymous authors; whereas Jumbo Scotland thinks that WP is run by 500 people acting something like a conventional encyclopedia staff.

Why is this so interesting, in my opinion?
(1) It shows that WP managers have no ****ing idea how WP really works, which means that they cannot possibly fix anything that goes wrong
(2) If the breadth of WP is predicated on mass anonymity, CZ cannot get that with a real-names policy [which is Warren's point]
(3) Which means, that either we continue with the real-names policy as orignally mandated and accept that we will never replace WP [which is my position]; or we change it.
(4) If we stay with real-names, we have to prioritise quality and reliability of articles, with "core articles" also being guaranteed to exist. We didn't finish with the core articles yet, folks!

[Warren Schudy]

You may be referring to this.

You're right, that's what I had in mind. Thanks!

Actually, that's a false analogy with the U.S. Constitution.  Its more like a founding document upon which the Citizendium Charter will be based, with the charter being analogous to the constitution.  Moreover, to say that the existence of founding principles means a system is theocratic is no more true than saying that the U.S. is a theocracy by reason of the constitution being based upon such principles.

OK, so it's more like the declaration of independence than the constitution; as far as I can tell that distinction is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

I did not say that existence of founding principles implies theocracy as you imply. I said rejecting debate of the founding principles is theocratic.

Warren, there are some seriously flawed premises in the article you have referred us to.

It's difficult to quantify the value of someones edits, so they've naturally used somewhat dubious methodology. Can you point to any studies that use better methodology? I talked to a friend today who has written several wikipedia articles anonymously, so I have anecdotal evidence if you like that better than flawed attempts at quantification.

I don't understand this demonization of the process; it's relatively straight forward.

I'm afraid I don't follow you; who is demonizing what process in which post?

Warren, I think the idea means a lot of work for somebody who, really, would rather be editing. 

Thank you for responding to the core idea rather than side issues. Do you mean lots of work to modify the wiki software to support this, or lots of work to process anonymous edits? I'll assume you mean the latter. As long as the software makes the endorsement process no harder than editing, endorsing edits should produce more improvement in the encyclopedia per hour invested than editing articles oneself. As you imply, there is a potential issue with endorsing being less fun. I don't really have a good answer to this criticism other than my gut feel. Wikipedia seems to get enough people willing to revert spam to keep it more or less under control, so my guess is there should be enough people willing to do the more rewarding task of endorsing beneficial edits.

From another thread in this forum (about times you need anonymity):

Alternatively, contribute to WP, then email someone your edits, and have him/her incorporate your edits into the article.

I'm essentially proposing that such a process be semi-automated to make it practical for smaller edits too.

I think CZ will survive just fine without anonymous edits, but it would likely be even better with them. Surely there are lots of people who care enough about something to write a quality article, but wouldn't find it fun to fill out a form to prove their identity?

[Warren Schudy]

I just read some more archives and found a similar discussion about a year ago (click on "quote from" to see the complete thread). The biggest difference between my proposal and the previous one is I propose making the suggestions be in the form of machine-readable edits so they can be accepted easily.

Hello. This project is certainly intriguing to me, but I value my privacy above all else, which I guess runs counter to the fundamental policies of this place. And no, I am not willing to give out my personal info to Constables. In the future, would there be a way for me to voice my opinion on articles through a pseudonym? Would I be able write drafts and submit them to the community for review? Or perhaps copy-edit articles and submit those versions for review? I could care less about the instant gratification of seeing my edits appear "live", so I would be perfectly fine with having Authors/Editors vet my contributions. I do feel that completely closing off the community to those unwilling to give out personal information (as I'm sure there are many) is not the best way to grow.

Interesting point.  I do see merit in allowing some sort of ancillary stream of content (a comment forum) for each article, open to unregistered people.  It will no doubt be many months before we get around to adding such a thing, though; we have much higher priorities right now, I'm afraid.  There also remains the question whether we want input from people who we (not even constables) don't know.

[Paul Wormer]

In my days at WP I had some very good improvements from IP's (anonymous) and some very lousy ones from old hands with funny nicknames. [It beats me why the latter are considered onymous (non-anonymous)]. So, I think Warren's suggestion is worth to be taken serious (and I agree that the "CZ declaration of independence" is not chiseled in stone).

[Derek Harkness]

I was thinking the same as Paul. Are not 99.999% of Wikipedia edits anonymous. Even logged in users remain anonymous. So the stats brought up above have no bearing on whither we use real names on not. It's entirely based on he effort of registration and logging in.

The circle of logic isn't complete either. Many wikipedia edits are done by people who are not logged in. OK. However, that does not prove that requiring logging in will reduce the number of edits. It only proves that given the choice of being lazy and doing unnecessary work, people will not do one jot more than they have to. A great many other projects, such as facebook, flikr, myspace, youtube and so on and so on require a log in and a verified email address before you start adding material. There is no doubt that they are successful. The argument that logging in puts people off is not proved.

[Derek Harkness]

As for the issue of debating or not debating. If debate was not encorraged, then there would be no 'Real names policy' section in the forums.

[Kim van der Linde]

With the current setup at CZ, anonymous editing is strongly advised against. However, if one would accept a  system in which draft articles can be edited by anonymous editors (not IP-'s), but the rest only by established editors, you will attract many many more editors. This can be done by defining a Draft namespace Draft:Title and adding several conditional statements to the localsettings.php file, similar to this

$wgExtensionFunctions[] = 'wfProtectNamespaces';
$wgWhitelistRead = array('Special:Userlogin', '-','MediaWiki:Monobook.css');
function wfProtectNamespaces() {
        global $wgUser,$wgGroupPermissions;
        $title = Title::newFromText($_REQUEST['title']);
        if (is_object($title) && $title->getNamespace() == 0 && $wgUser->isAnon())
             $wgGroupPermissions['*']['read'] = true;
        }

What you can do wit this is restrict reading of IP's to the main namespace and other selected namespaces, while logged in, non-confirmed editors canonly edit the draft namespace, making vandalism useless, as it is not seen by the target public. Approved material is moved to the main namespace as soon as an editor deems it good enough. A simplification of the current approval process would be very advisable anyway. For example, just approving a new section should not be an issue, same as a well rewritten paragraph, etc.