Board Thread:New Features/@comment-5275700-20150722200934/@comment-5285329-20150723012335

What does anonymous editing bring to your communities now, if it’s available there?

Anons don't add a lot of content to pages in the communities where I edit, but they are the main readers, and they fix a lot of typos, little facts, and names, for example. Sometimes, we get a vandal, but the good edits outgrow the bad ones. I’ve seen a lot of wikis on my time on Wikia, sometimes, the anons are the worst, destroying almost every article of an inactive wiki, but some other times, they are the ones adding content.

Why don't anonymous editors create accounts?

Lots of reasons:
 * Sometimes they are just not interested, maybe they found something to be corrected, and they jump in to help, but that doesn't mean that they want to do it every day. They're just not that type of people.
 * They are not regular editors, why would they have their Facebook or email address linked to another site they won't use that much?
 * They are people having fun blanking pages or replacing the content with the popular internet phrase of the moment.
 * They don't see the point, they like the anonymity, or they ignore what lies behind the articles.

As someone in the group of being just readers, this was my personal experience. I came across Wikia in the year 2008, I was only an occasional wiki reader, looking for more information about games and TV shows. My first edit was to fix a typo, and then I started editing a little bit more updating articles. That was what I did until 2012. I had time to waste, so I signed up to focus on collaborating on one wiki. Signing up gave me a lasting voice to talk to other users, to be noticed by them, and to build a community.

What would motivate them to create accounts, besides disabling anonymous editing altogether?

Showing them the benefits of an account, maybe in their welcome messages, if only they could get that notification on wikis that use the message wall. Maybe as a notice somewhere, like that message we get about the wiki being available in another language.

Was it beneficial?

Not at all. That's when I saw how important anons are for articles, sometimes they add a little bit of information that could be better written, and when they brought that article up, users helped to make it better. With anons gone, those old pages are less noticeable, especially in communities with a small amount of users or a system to improve old articles.

Was there a change in activity level immediately?

Yup, less activity. Sometimes the wiki had a new wave of editors after that, but some other stayed with almost the same amount of registered users as before.

What was the level of activity a few months after the change?

Sometimes the wiki had a little bit more of editors, and that trend kept going, but I've also seen wikis with less activity as time went by. Can't say I've been following those wikis constantly and checking their activity every day, so I'm not sure about this one.

Personally, I don't like the idea of giving the option to admins. I know that there are a lot of responsible admins out there, but there is a ton of unexperienced admins who might do it just because one bad edit. I've seen people trying to get anonymous editing disabled after two vandals in one day, without any previous history of vandals on the wiki. There are some questions that come to my mind regarding education to these last type of admins, maybe they'll end up harming their community, and why not adding an option to the Special:Contact form to disable anonymous editing, so staff members can assist the user with their particular situation.