Board Thread:New Features/@comment-5275700-20150722200934/@comment-1724320-20150723021654

BertH wrote:

The motive, hopefully conveyed in the first paragraph of the blog post, is to increase the number of active registered users on Wikia. We believe that users who experience the benefits of having an account will be more likely to return again.

Why so scared? I didn't intend for "in many ways this is an experiment" to sound cavalier. Rather, this is one part of a larger effort around this goal. As was also mentioned in the blog, we'll be trying other ways of promoting account creation and will be making the process easier.

I think it’s also interesting to consider what being "anonymous" on Wikia versus having an account really means. What is an individual giving up by creating an account? There is no requirement to reveal anything about yourself to the rest of the community. Your username does not have to be your real name, and having a username displayed is arguably more anonymous than having your IP address displayed. Certainly there are valid reasons why someone may choose not to have an account, but as others have pointed out, on the internet of 2015 it's very common to log in to participate on a website. To clarify, giving admins the option to disable anonymous editing is not the scary part. I'm totally in favor of giving admins more flexibility around these kinds of issues, even if it's something that my wiki in particular would never seriously consider.

The scary part is your second paragraph, which, along with other official comments here, seem to strongly suggest that anonymous editing will eventually be disabled for all wikis. If that's not the case, then please correct me. My overarching concern is that disabling anon editing will (while perhaps dubiously increasing sitewide activity) seriously harm individual wikis. In most of the cases I've looked at where anon editing was disabled, activity actually dropped significantly: after a short initial wave of user signups, account creation leveled off to where it was before editing was disabled. Further, the users that signed up after the disable were not any more active than earlier cohorts. The end result, almost invariably, is that the registered users are no more active than before, and the unregistered users just don't exist anymore. So it's a net loss.

In 6 years of trying to get people to edit regularly, my main takeaway is that it's really hard to get people to edit. Any seemingly minor obstacles (like even moving the edit button slightly) had a massive impact on how many new people edited. I have to think that sticking a signup page between clicking the edit button and actually editing is going to drastically reduce those numbers. And I'm not sure I agree with the hypothesis that users with an account are more likely to edit or do community things just by virtue of having an account. I think the causality is backwards, but it's hard to test.

Maybe I'm totally misreading the data, and maybe this experiment will prove me wrong. If that's the case, I'll happily jump on the bandwagon, because what I want more than anything else is engaged editors making content. But I want to be able to make that decision for myself, after looking at the data and test cases and determining it's the best option. If this really is as much of a slam dunk as you're thinking, you shouldn't have anything to worry about. But forcing a change like this, if it's not clear that it's in our best interests, would go over extremely poorly.