Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-1251315-20140825123912/@comment-26474238-20140828165100

Dire Skeever wrote: In an ideal situation, all of this wiki vandalism wouldn't exist at all. Every anonymous user on the Internet would respect other contributors, and they would edit this wiki with the entire community in mind and only with the best of intentions. But that is not the case. We are dealing with vandals here, people who for reasons of their own enjoy deliberately making a mess of other peoples' hard work. I don't understand them or their motivations, but then again, I don't understand graffiti either.

Obviously, vandals do not fit into the "pro-wiki" philosophy that some have mentioned. We all agree that vandalism is occuring, and we all agree that it must be stopped. What we are debating is the HOW.

We need a way to separate the vandals from the rest of the Internet community. And in my opinion, there is only one way to do that: require anonymous users to register before they can make edits. Yes, I realize this might chase away a percentage of people who would otherwise have meaningful contributions...but it would chase away a much larger percentage of vandals who seek to undermine the wiki.

This seems like the easiest and best option, in my opinion. But I am open to other suggestions. I am going to quote myself here:

Where? Yesterday, as in the entirety of the 26th and part of the 27th when I first said this, there were less than 4-5 vandal reports. As for bans, only 2 anons were banned during the 26th, with the only bans before that for the past few days being a single anon ban on the 25th, 3 anon bans on the 24th, and 3 anon bans on the 23rd. If you go through the logs, these numbers typically stay around the same number. Do not believe me? Look for yourself:


 * Vandalism History


 * Public Logs

So I implore of you: please show me where all of this rampant anon vandalism is, and why we should punish hundreds of thousands of productive anons, just because we ban 1-3 of them on average per day.