Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-26272757-20171007152523

I have always stood up for the anonymous contributors. I thought: let democracy and broad participation rule! Let's give them a chance and they will pay us back in many ways: new ideas, fixing overlooked grammar, and users may create an account after playing around with their anonymous IP adresses first. Because that's how I started here. As an anonymous contributor I created my Head Soccer 2 idea and that was the beginning of my tenure on the Wiki. I worked my way up to becoming Admin, but really, that was where it all started, at the very bottom. If anonymous editing was disabled back then, I wouldn't even be here in the present day. Could you imagine... I would have time for friends and homework! My life wouldn't be such a mess!

But Phil brought the cold hard truth under my attention: I estimate that 80% of the anonymous editing (and I'm even being indulgent here) must be reverted by users who don't want their hard work to be ruined by some idiot who thinks it's fun to remove content. My personal preference would be to block all users from editing, but still enable them to comment, for example so they could say what we, the users that can still edit pages, should edit. But this is only possible if we protect all important pages, but the disadvantage is that also new users WITH  an account will be ruled out from editing. That's why I want to hear YOUR opinion about this matter. Everyone can say something, but as the perfect democracy we are, FS's opinion is the most important.

My opinion? We gave them the chance, I passionately trusted them, and they blew it. I don't understand that someone in his right mind would go to a Wiki, and then just vandalize it. And then never come back again after being blocked. Because that's what happens most of the time. It's a cycle that we can't stop, except for when we decide to disable anonymous editing. 