User:Kafziel/Wonkapedia
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Conventional wisdom says that closing Wikipedia to anonymous users is not a good idea because, "a significant part (~30%) of our good edits come from IP addresses."
I always thought that was a little shady. 30% of Wikipedia's edits come from anonymous users, but what percentage of Wikipedia's edits are vandalism? I wouldn't be surprised if it was around 30%. We spend a tremendous amount of time patrolling recent changes, reverting vandalism, removing spam, designing warning templates, issuing warnings, reporting vandalism, blocking vandals, blacklisting spammers, identifying shared IPs, protecting pages, unprotecting pages, deleting pages, undeleting pages, responding to unblock requests... it goes on and on.
Anonymous editing was a good policy when we were building an encyclopedia. But we passed our millionth article a long time ago. We're more than ten times the size of Encyclopedia Britannica, and now Jimbo Wales says we should be focusing on quality, not quantity. But if you expect quality then you need accountability.
Willy Wonka had the right idea.
Think of what we could accomplish if we suddenly—without warning—shut down all anonymous editing and account creations. If you're in, you're in. If you're not, you're not. Sure, we'd still need a few people to keep half an eye on 3RR (and on AIV, to weed out the last of the registered vandals who snuck in under the wire). But by the end of the first week, we'd all be like little Oompa-Loompas locked inside our own little wonderland.
Everyone who's still here after the probation period gets a mop and bucket, and almost everyone could spend all of their Wikipedia time on the articles. Fact checking. References. Copyedits. Meaningful policy discussions between experienced editors. Featured Article creation by the truckload.
Then, after just a month or two, when the encyclopedia is polished up and the first CD-ROM version is complete, we could open the gates again—with much media fanfare—and have stable versions of thousands and thousands of articles to fall back on.
Close the factory gates, Jimbo! We won't mind!