Board Thread:Site Policy/@comment-4750363-20130703214523/@comment-27706245-20130707202559

41488p wrote: Did... did Reading just call NeveR "Lee"?

Anyway.

Let me ask you a question: How long does it take to make a universal Wikia account? Now, taking the time to create an original and untaken username may take a minute, the password should take around 30 seconds, email's fairly simple, 30 seconds too. There may be other stuff that I don't know about so 2 minutes for that.

It's not even 5 minutes, people. Creating an account takes 3 fucking minutes.

Now, I ask you this: If you genuinely want to contribute to this site in big ways (as I see 98.253 is trying to do- congrats you now have 2 more edits to your anon account) it takes 3 minutes just to create an account. There are no drawbacks to creating an account. Anonymity is already destroyed with the IP address that's displayed on all anons' accounts, so there's no issue there. Really, there's no need for enabling anons to edit, if all they can do is create an account.

Oh, so you're an anon who REALLY wants to contribute to the wiki? Even if it's just an edit? 3 minutes! Do you have 3 minutes in your schedule? Or maybe I'm wrong and it takes 2 extra minutes for you to create that account. Really, is it really necessary to "hide" behinid a giant IP address? With a Wikia account, you can

1. Get friends because you can access chat rooms and chat with them!

2. Get possibly promoted to extra rights if you're a prominent user!

All I see are benefits to creating an account.

And, if you didn't get it, I anon editing since it's just redundant. I see some issues with this:

1. Every post a user makes will be connected to their account. This means that one post somebody does not like can shatter that user's reputation.

2. People can prematurely judge a user's contributions based on that user's reputation, regardless on whether the contributions are good or bad.

3. Registered users are unable to stay out of the livelight, and they are much more suspect to things like attention whoring or "circlejerking" (narcisstic discussion regarding a person or other subject).

And finally, I believe forcing users to register an account in order to participate goes against the very nature of a wiki (that is, the free, open contribution and improvement of articles).