Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-4620507-20130806194950/@comment-4620507-20130808010526

Anywho, I've gone through the edits of anons over the past few days, and I have come to two conclusions:

1. Anons don't edit a lot. Sure, 50 edits a day sounds like a lot, but it's not if you compare it to the amount of edits registered users edit every day.

2. The best edits I've come across usually are just grammatical fixes. And even those are rare. Grammatical fixes are good, don't get me wrong, but if an anon wanted to change a pasta's font or its color, for example, they couldn't do it because of the 150 byte edit limit.

Point #2 brings me to yet another point, which is why do we allow anons to "freely" edit the wiki when we restrict them to 150 bytes? I'm not sure, but from memory I think that 1 letter is 1 byte (Maria feel free to prove me wrong on this point because I'm not sure of it myself XD). How much is 150 bytes? This comment, up to the last period, is over 150 letters. That's how much anons can change. Barely a comment. Why do we restrict them access to editing when we "assume good faith"? Shouldn't we give them secondary chances instead of banning them for changing the formatting of a page because they aren't used to the color scheme (or whatever) of this wiki? We shouldn't go halfway and claim we're all the way through. If we want to assume good faith, release the bans on the anons! Get the 150 byte-edit limit AWAY! Don't make it SEEM like we assume good faith; ASSUME good faith!

On the other hand, we can totally restrict everything about anons and "assume bad faith". How would we "assume bad faith"? Just don't allow anons to edit. Period. That's all it takes. It takes much more effort to truly assume good faith and allow free editing on this wiki than it takes to just revert it back. And this doesn't only apply to anons. Do we really want to assume good faith and make the Creepypasta Wiki a "free" wiki? Then get rid of our restriction on video game and holder pastas! I mean, if we do that, we assume that any and all of those types of pastas (among many others) are possibly very good pastas. Of course, if we want to keep order on this wiki, this would require an entire team of users to go through every one of those pastas to determine if it is good or not, rather than just relying on a bot to say "yes" or "no" to pastas based on their titles. Furthermore, if we really assumed good fatih, why do we ban users for a day based on their inability to place their pastas onto the article listing? I believe I have said this on another thread, but every night I see Sloshed placing talk page messages and banning users for not updating the article listing. None of these banned users get a warning at all prior to their one-day ban.

I know this is dragging on a little, so I'd like to quickly wrap this up. In conclusion, I see pros and cons in both directions: allowing anons to edit can possibly be this wiki's Golden Age, with pastas being fixed non-stop by anonymous users and more and more users registering every day due to this freedom. Allowing anons to not edit is safer and provides more order. However, I have not seen a drastic change in the months after we enabled anon editing. I have not seen a Golden Age of any sort. When I click "random page" and view that page's history, I see Majin's username pop up than any anon (I did this 20 times and an anon's IP popped up only once... that page was the anon's pasta.) I see anons writing spam blog posts (heck, this morning I even saw one being posted up.) Out of the multitude of anon IPs that I have scrolled through in the recent wiki activity page, only a handful have edited with good faith, fixing up grammar and puncuation in pastas. And this has been going on for months now. Should we allow this to continue? Should we assume good faith halfway for, what, a year? And then what?

I digress a little, but the Roman Empire's success was partly based on its tolerance of multiple races, religions and peoples. They would recruit mercenaries more suited to a specific type of terrain to help overcome an enemy. They would hire foreign talent to help their cities. They would draw from the people, and because of that, they became one of the most powerful powers the world has ever seen. This may seem weird, but this wiki is doing the same thing. We are drawing on the powers of the internet's multiple users. We wish to have their talent be used on us. But is there any talent that surpasses that of our own? With the edits that I have seen over the past month, I am not convinced that that is true, and forget about any more-than-minor-grammatical-fixes types of edits with the 150 byte limit on anons' edits.

When we look at successful online sites that have benefited from anonymous editing, such as Wikipedia, we might want to follow in their footsteps. But never before have I seen an admin ban a user for not updating something called an "article listing" in another site or wiki. This is the Creepypasta Wiki. It's not an encyclopedia where many people can work on one article and not get berated/banned for "harmful" edits. Instead, it's a database of Creepypastas, both user-submitted and off-site written. Anon editing may seem like the best thing for this wiki because of things such as fixing grammar and the such, but there's not much else that they can do, taking into account the VCROC, b-crats and admins.