User blog:BertH/Anonymous editing and your community



The logged-in user experience offers a number of benefits on Wikia. Registered accounts have features like Notifications, Chat, and the ability to follow articles and discussions, just to name a few. In the coming months we’ll be working to highlight these benefits more and see what we can do to drive more readers and anonymous editors to create accounts. With more motivations and prompts to return to a community, a user with an account is much more likely to become an active contributor and discussion participant.

Starting Thursday July 23rd, administrators on most communities now have the option to prompt visitors to create accounts by disabling anonymous editing. This can be accomplished via a new switch in WikiFeatures.

Anonymous editing has been part of most communities on Wikia for a long time. For many communities, it has been a very useful experience. For others, administrators have requested to disable anonymous editing to help control vandalism and promote better collaboration. The question of whether to have anonymous editing enabled or disabled is now one that individual administrators can answer themselves.



Aside from giving admins this option, in the coming months Wikia will also be working on other methods to promote account creation and prompt existing users to return more often. As we look at various ways to increase the number of active users on Wikia, we want to hear from communities who choose to disable anonymous editing. Stories from admins and editors about what the experience was like, as well as statistics about editing rate and account creation, will help us find what the most successful approaches are for accomplishing this ongoing goal. This means that this new switch may not always be available, but for now it will allow us to gather as much information as possible to make the final decision about the future of anonymous editing on Wikia.

We've started an ongoing discussion thread in the Forum on this topic. I encourage everyone to post there if you have more general comments about anonymous editing. The comments section of this blog post can then focus more on questions specifically about the new switch and its release. As always, please let us know your feedback!