Board Thread:New Features/@comment-5275700-20150722200934/@comment-4403232-20150724190714

"Why don’t anonymous editors create accounts?"

To me, the answer may simply be "There's no push or motivation to do so." When you go onto an article without being signed in, nothing there makes you want to sign up and have an account. A few pages may be protected, and you can't upload photos, but that only effects SOME of the editors. Furthermore, that makes no difference to someone who's come to VIEW the page only. The only real motivator that may apply to someone to make an account while looking at an article is the chat feature, however, there's a large amount of wikis that simply don't have active chats at all times. If you're on a mobile device, you may not even notice the chat feature at all.

When you're signed out and on a page, nowhere do you see "Sign up." You'll see a small "Sign in" at the top right, but nothing encouraging you to JOIN the site. There's nothing that answers "Why should I make an account". There's still space dedicated to "Start a wikia" to signed out users, there's the "Must Watch Videos". There should be a priority to show reasons to/encourage people to sign up, rather than a near-identical interface to those already signed up. By having more encouragement, this could even get "lurkers", people who simply read articles and don't edit, to create accounts and try helping out on the community.

Speaking from personal experience, the sole reason I originally made an account is because I didn't want my IP address plastered all over the place. However, I'm sure there's plenty of other people who have been turned off from editing because they didn't want their IP all over, but didn't want to be bothered making an account for something like fixing a single typo.