Board Thread:New Features/@comment-5275700-20150722200934/@comment-24852144-20150808160826

I posted earlier in the thread, but I'm another major contributor and admin at Doctor Who Answers and thus work with both Imamadmad and 89.

As they said, at an answers wiki almost everything is done by anons. In fact, we don't have any regular registered users except for the admins. If wikia turned off anon editing everywhere (I know they claim they have no intention of doing this, but I'm suspicious), answers wikis would almost certainly die. Of course, wikia would probably not care much, as they've already withdrawn most other support for answers wikis.

I think this feature shouldn't be available. If you don't want anons editing pages, protect them! That's the whole point of that feature. Getting rid of anon editing is quite possibly the worst possible thing wikia could do for business. Most people try out editing as anons first before creating an account, so if anon editing is disabled wikia won't gain many new contributors. There'll be a stagnation of creativity, and in the very long run, wikia will lose users, which will make the content old and bad, which will lose readers, which will make wikia earn less money from advertising.

It might be alright for an optional feature to prevent anons from creating or moving pages to be implemented, but a unilateral IP ban is silly and detrimental to wikia.

Really, there aren't that many benefits to creating an account. Yes, it makes it easier to identify particular contributors, easier to track recent changes, and easier to message a particular user, but those are relatively minor. Wikia isn't a social site. It's a network of free, user-driven encyclopedias about a variety of subjects. Messages can just as easily be on an article's talk page as on a user's talk page. The only true benefit to creating an account is that it makes it easier to see changes people have made to "your" articles, or to respond to messages people leave for you. Everything else is trivial. People just dislike anons because of the simple fact that they're anonymous. People like to be able to go into their contributions and profile page and talk page and find out everything they can about a user. It's a silly social habit of humans.

One fundamental law of wiki-editing is that you don't own your wiki, or the articles you edit. Wikis are group projects and democracies, so they won't always be the way you want them to. Also, the goal is to make the wiki better, not to gain more respect/power/recognition. Even though these are fundamental laws of wikis, almost everyone tries to get wikis to follow their visions, almost everyone tries to gain power, and almost everyone wants recognition.

When I was just proofreading articles and making one edit per week or so, I didn't have anything to be proud of in the wiki world, nor did I want to, so there was no point in wasting time to create an account. Once I began editing more often, this was untrue, so I created an account (also to gain the few benefits I mentioned two paragraphs back). I also wanted to gain respect in my community and become an admin.

The thing is, humans want to gain power/recognition/status. On wikis this is just as true, only people have to suppress selfishness and use this power/recognition/status to make the wiki better instead of using it for their own benefit. Anons are actually as helpful if not even more helpful than normal users, as they cannot be admins and cannot gain recognition, and thus only work for the satisfaction of making the wiki better.

If 89 made an account, he would surely become an admin, but he simply doesn't have a burning desire to be one. He's happy to wait in the shadows and make helpful edits. He doesn't need an account for the social aspect, as we see him on our talk pages and in the forum enough to get to know him, he doesn't need one for the recognition, as we all know from looking at recent changes that he edits the most, and he doesn't need one for the ease of viewing recent changes as he spends enough time on the wiki for it to be easy to find new changes.

I don't share 89's acute paranoia for wikia encouraging everyone to create an account, but I do agree with his sunglasses metaphor. I don't like how wikia has a hidden agenda.