Anonymous edits

[Stephen Ewen]

I suggest to allow anonymous editing only in users' talk pages, on one condition: any user could disable/enable this feature.

That still presents work for constables.  The only thing that would work is a separate feedback page viewable only to contributors and not the public. 

[Robert_W_King]

Any anonymous contributions or edits I think will severely impact the project in a negative way.

[Patrice Gross]

I suggest to allow anonymous editing only in users' talk pages, on one condition: any user could disable/enable this feature.

That still presents work for constables.  The only thing that would work is a separate feedback page viewable only to contributors and not the public. 

Indeed, my suggestion was for the feedback. I like and support your idea. Otherwise, we'll have to arrange the forums which are allowed to the public.

[Joe Quick]

End-user feedback I am very supportive of.  Anonymous edits I dislike very much. 

I would like to know which parts of an article that I've worked on are helpful and which sections need more work.  This is an important feature to have in order to ensure that we are serving the public as well as possible.  A responsive system will be a popular system.

But I don't see how anonymous edits will help us in any real way.  Sure, there are people who have good things to contribute who do not want to share their names.  But those people can leave feedback for us in other ways than to directly edit an article.  The Wikipedia experience shows that many people who make helpful edits do so anonymously, but there is no evidence to suggest that they aren't doing so out of simple convenience.  I wouldn't log in either if I didn't have to.  Providing a real name and logging in to a site amount to such a low threshold to participation that I can't believe it is going to prevent a whole lot of people from participating.  In cases where people have a legitimate reason to maintain their anonymity, they need only apply to the constabulary with an explanation.

[Warren Schudy]

End-user feedback I am very supportive of.  Anonymous edits I dislike very much. 

Scenario A:

Suppose a reader is looking at http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Composting. They click on "send us feedback on this article" and send the following feedback:

In the introduction, "Actually it is one of the oldest forms of recycling of waste." in the introduction is not good english. Consider removing "actually", yielding "It is one of the oldest forms of recycling of waste."

A Citizen reads this feedback and does the following:
* finds the sentence in question
* deciphers the English change instructions and evaluates the edit.
* If the edit is a good idea, actually does the edit
* Marks the feedback as "resolved" in some way so another citizen does not repeat the work.

This is an unnecessary amount of work, both for the reader, who has to express a diff in English, and for the Citizen who parses, evaluates and executes it. Shouldn't we use computers to make this easier?

Scenario B:

A reader notices this error and clicks "send us feedback on this article". The reader puts "bad english" in the feedback box. Below the feedback text box is an ordinary Wiki edit interface, which the reader uses to fix the problem. The reader then submits the feedback. (Readers are of course free to use just only the feedback text box and ignore the edit box.)

A Citizen views the feedback and is presented with a diff for the proposed edit. If the Citizen likes the edit as proposed, s/he can endorse it with one click. If not, s/he can write a comment on the feedback.


Scenario B is less work for the reader and the Citizen alike. Scenario B is also essentially the first bullet point in my anonymous edits proposal. What's so bad about allowing readers to submit feedback in a form that the Wiki software can understand?

Of course, feedback of the form "I don't understand X" would not benefit from the machinery of scenario B. Often readers will know how to fix it, so why make it harder than it needs to be in those cases?

P.S. I recognize that writing the software to implement scenario B might be more effort than it's worth. I don't know anything about the structure of the Wiki software, but I don't see why it should be very hard. If an experiment were authorized I'd be willing to try implementing it over the holidays.

[Robert_W_King]

My problem with any kind of anonymous input is that it will lead to flame wars and arguments on the wiki grounds, and then I can forsee CZ gaining negative reputation for it.

[Matt Innis]

Perhaps any anonymous input should not be public?  That would render "flame" talk from anonymous people against real named users useless?

[Robert_W_King]

Perhaps any anonymous input should not be public?  That would render "flame" talk from anonymous people against real named users useless?

It's a good idea in theory, but still "someone will see it"; whoever is doing the screening or viewing of the comments may become incensed or objected to.

Also, here's something to consider:

Assuming that (if ever) one of these "proposals" goes through one of these things will happen:

1. It doesn't work, and we kill it. 
     A. We will get the appearance of being "more elitist" by killing public input. (it's practically a trap)
     
2. We put it in, and leave it in.
     A. Something is likely to go wrong; we will be spammed, trolled, flamed, and it will end up being a lot of work (almost a day job) just to prevent the tool from being abused and it will more than likely detract from regular editing or authoring.

I think anyone who really has a desire to improve the project and make real contributions of value will sign up just like the rest of us.

[Warren Schudy]

I've been convinced that allowing anonymous users to edit talk pages is not worth the risk of vandalism. I therefore no longer support #2 and #4 in my original post. I currently support machine-readable reader feedback, as described in "Scenario B" of my recent post. I'm leaning slightly towards having feedback only be visible to Citizens.

1. It doesn't work, and we kill it. 
     A. We will get the appearance of being "more elitist" by killing public input. (it's practically a trap)

Firstly, if we get spammed, trolled, flamed etc, we can just ignore all feedback and continue editing. There's no need to actually disable feedback.

Secondly, one cannot create an account without confirming one's identity. People in middle-class jobs can easily confirm identity with a non-free email address, but McDonald's minimum-wage employees probably do not have that option. Vandalism forces us to act elitist. I think it's far better to accept feedback and risk *looking* elitist if we change our mind than *to be* elitist by assuming that people who lack the connections to prove their identity are not worth listening to.

[Robert_W_King]

You can't just "ignore" flames, trolls etc.  Those posts not only take up server processing time, storage(in the case of spam), but a real person's "active time" to sort through.

[Stephen Ewen]

A feedback mechanism would need not be any different from the look and feel of email or posting to a blog.  Comments would be aggregated on one separate page.  These would not be interactive.  No one can see what another has posted.  Only contributors can see what is there, if they want to. 

I've pointed to this before, but WikiHow has a clever feature like this.  See for example http://www.wikihow.com/Compost and scroll down to the bottom for the link "Thank the authors" and note that the authors are named there.  The way this works is that the messages go to a separate "My feedback" sort of tab for the authors.  They aggregate there and can be read at leisure but not replied to.

[Jitse Niesen]

My problem with any kind of anonymous input is that it will lead to flame wars and arguments on the wiki grounds, and then I can forsee CZ gaining negative reputation for it.

There already is a venue for anonymous comments, namely some of these forums, and non-members are encouraged to use it. I find it hard to believe comments posted on a separate section of the talk page (or something similar to the Wikihow system) that can only be read by CZ members are more probable to lead to flame wars. Furthermore, some of the comments will be very useful, and thus I hope that we'll implement some easy way for non-members to comment on our articles.