User blog comment:BertH/Anonymous editing and your community/@comment-24473195-20150722235624

Interesting, my general policy is to keep anonymous users. What I do instead is to preemptively semi-protect high risk pages, (e.g. front page, important portals ) from being edited by "anomies".In my opinion the biggest barriers to editing are:


 * To make one atomic edit (e.g. fix a typo), you need to load a whole editor. By the time it finishes loading users have lost interest;
 * Anomies don't get recommendations about what to fix or what articles to see/read next;
 * Spellchecker doesn't highlight mistakes in webpages, so people are less likely to fix typos;
 * CAPTCHA - A necessary but seriously annoying evil that prevents editing to write "nonsense".
 * People don't know what and where to contribute
 * Lack of gamification for anomies - make editing fun and not a chore

To make the shift from anomie reader to editor, the reader must enjoy the content, must find small areas to fix, and gradually become more invested. I think the biggest limitation of wikia and wikipedia, is that it doesn't  have a good recommender system. If 3 people see a particular page after visiting 3 other pages, then they should get a recommendation to see another, or even to go and read more stuff in other wikias.

Although from what I've read recently, wikipedia is doing some research on sending emails to contributors with recommendations  to create or translate from pages existing wikis.

I'd say that the best thing is probably to give admins the ability to protect namespaces, I don't see much benefit in protecting the main namespace, but for example, anomies probably don't need to post in User pages.

P.S. I think there should be a cool-off period (maybe a week or a month) between enabling and disabling this option. I can imagine the frustration of a anomie suddenly loosing the rights to edit, and admins changing this option for "fun".