CZ Talk:Election July-August 2013/Referenda/4

Previous open registration system

Many years ago, in the project's infancy, we actually had something like this: for a brief period, anyone could register an account and immediately get started. I say "brief" because within a short space of time, the wiki was bombarded with vandalism, including a lengthy series of very nasty edits directed at individual project members. The experiment was shut down and we've required verified real names ever since. Because of that experience, I think I could only support this if we had flagged revisions on every page, checked by reviewers whose identities had been verified. ('Flagged revisions' is a setting where an edit is held in a queue, invisible to general readers, until someone else comes along and approves it.) That requires some technical set-up that would probably not materialise. John Stephenson 15:31, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

You are absolutely right that there will be negatives if this referendum passes. However, there will also be negatives if it doesn't pass, and I feel that the community as a whole will need to decide which set of negatives it wants to choose. When I wrote this, I didn't feel that it was going to pass unanimously; my purpose was to initiate such a decision. Right now, CZ has the exact opposite problem: It has no vandalism, but it also has absolutely no new members. Without new members, the community, already very decreased in size, will continue to shrink and eventually die. CZ is a lot different now than it was in 2006; back then, it was newsworthy and so attracted a lot of people, both helpful and unhelpful. Having some sort of process to weed out the unhelpful people may have made sense then. Now, however, we don't have the volunteers to do that (and finding another person to do it is merely a stopgap measure until that person leaves). With CZ being off the radar now, I don't think that it will be a magnet for vandals (also, the flip side of that coin is, that if vandals can register easily, people who notice vandalism can register easily and fix it). Other wikis with similar activity levels to CZ are not overwhelmed with vandalism. Others may disagree with my assessment, but, regardless, this is an issue that I think needs to be considered. Cheers, James Yolkowski 16:39, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

P.S. If others have other proposals that would be somewhat of a middle ground between what we have now and this one, it would be interesting to see them. Cheers, James Yolkowski 16:40, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Bad idea

I also don't think this referendum is the best solution and invites, as per John's reminiscences of CZ's past, vandalism. If the problem is that there is no one to approve the creation of new accounts, then this power should be vested in the Managing Editor or the (soon-to-be) CZ Council. Russell D. Jones 15:59, 16 July 2013 (UTC)