Forum:Can we disallow anonymous editing on our wiki?

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Hi, I wonder if its possible to turn off anonymous editing for a wiki. I want this because I've accidentally edited anonymously a few times: but I philosophically disapprove of anonymous edits anyway. (I'm an admin for the geomag wiki).

--Karl Horton 19:42, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm not a Wikia staff member, but I think the answer there is "almost certainly not", because of the principle that wikis are meant to be open to edits by the public. As a practical matter, there is little difference between having an account and not - the IP address is just another sort of pseudonym, albeit a somewhat impersonal one. You are on the other hand encouraged to block anonymous proxies and other ban-avoidance techniques if you find them.

Many people's first edits are also anonymous. If they do not have the immediate option to make them, they may choose not to, and you lose out on contributors. The second-largest contributor by edit count on WikiFur (and one of our administrators) started out as a long-term anonymous user. --GreenReaper^(talk) 20:15, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually, The Muppet Wiki has prcisely this policy. See Muppet Wiki:User Name policy. Jaywin 17:08, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

It sounds like a good policy. Especially because of the "first five edits" thing. --Steinninn 07:14, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

They have a community policy, not a technical policy. wikia.com sites are not really allowed to remove the 'edit' right from anonymous users (wikiality.com and some other hosted sites do, but are not wikia wikis per-se). --Splarka (talk) 08:47, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Muppets' way also gets new editors to register, while technically disabling it would probably make registering to edit too much of a first step for some, and your number of new editors would be tanked. Scottch 09:40, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Speaking of which, how about requests.wikia? -Afker 10:26, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

What about it? Anonymous users can still edit (just not create new pages). Also, I think I've just talked wikiality into allowing anon editing. Yay. --Splarka (talk) 06:59, 6 June 2007 (UTC)