On 9 November 2014 02:51, Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > We're talking about a test, not a broad rollout (: > > I'm curious, Risker: if you don't mind my asking, what about being > required to supply a throwaway email address would have discouraged you > from opening a Wikimedia account? > > Pine >
I'd done enough wandering around the project to know that: (a) There were then and still are today a non-negligible number of really creepy people who edit Wikipedia; given that the vast majority of registered editors have email enabled, it seemed obvious to me at the time that if I entered my email address, I'd probably get emails from other editors. (Looking at today's "create an account", it's still not obvious to me whether "email this user" is enabled by default or must be turned on.) (b) There was pretty well no data security at the time - people gained access based on the quality of their coding, privacy expectations weren't articulated, and there was no serious auditing taking place to identify leaks or inappropriate access and dissemination; this isn't a criticism of those who were working at the time (as paid or volunteer developers/operators), simply a reflection of limited resources and the necessity of limiting priorities. (c) There wasn't then, and isn't even today, any promise on the part of Wikipedia that they won't spam my mailbox. There are a few places today that I get massive spam from but my account with them will be automatically disabled if I unsubscribe from their mailings. For all I knew then, Wikipedia could easily be one of those places. There aren't sufficient advantages to having a registered account to overcome the waste of time that comes with having a "verifiable" email address - and once again it's a rather western solution to a perceived problem. On the other hand, I will agree with every one here about the quality of the CAPTCHAs. Having just played around with the 'create an account' page, I was only able to make out 3 of 10 CAPTCHAs; the rest were so blurry that at least one letter was illegible. If account creation bots are able to bypass the CAPTCHAs we're not losing anything by disabling the CAPTCHA. And as someone who picks up on a fair number of spam accounts and account creations, I don't think they're the enormous problem that some make them out to be. In fact, they're probably a bigger problem on very small, lightly edited wikis compared to any of the big ones. Risker/Anne _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
