Login to Edit? September 7, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Wiki , trackbackOn the mediawiki support list, an unnamed correspondent asked for a rationale as to why he shouldn’t aquiesce to a request from a coworker to change his wiki from allowing anonymous edits to requiring logins.
He already supplied this one: “the barrier to surf-by-editing is too high with logins required.” but had been told that the use of cookies makes it no trouble, so I added this:
I think that even in a limited internal corporate environment it will
be more fruitful to allow edits from users who are not logged in. That
way people have the option to contribute ideas which are judged on
their own merit rather than according to the idenity of the
contributor. Most people will want to be logged in and have their
words attributed, but the extra contributions from anonymous editors
will add more value which would otherwise be lost.
There then ensued a series of posts advocating LoginToEdit citing risk management, integrity of data, legal liability, due diligence, and litigation from shareholders.
In the public arena there are a lot of enforced logins as well, but this is usually done as a knee jerk reaction to being attacked by wiki spam. It’s a tightrope that takes some careful balancing to walk optimally, and I have ended up requiring login to create new pages but not to edit existing pages for this reason.
Wikiindex is a commendable project which aims to catalogue all the wikis out there in the wild, and one of the categories used in the database is called Wiki Edit Mode. From this we can glean some quantitative data on the number of wikis which have made it into the catalogue compared by type:
category “OpenEdit” There are 2,012 wikis in this category.
category “LoginToEdit” There are 1,041 wikis in this category.
category “ByInvitation” There are 77 wikis in this category.
category “ReadOnly” There are 183 wikis in this category.
( + 3 unknown ) Total = 3 316
Another category used is Status which attempts to summarise how active each wiki is, and it may be useful to be able to cross-reference the status by edit mode. I wonder if the mediawiki engine could do that - if not it should be possible for the domain administrator to write a mySQL query to extract it directly from the database
category “Vibrant” There are 231 wikis in this category.
category “Active” There are 2,778 wikis in this category.
category “NeedsLove” There are 98 wikis in this category.
category “Inactive” There are 434 wikis in this category.
+ about 50 others = 3591
Technorati Tags: wiki, mediawiki, wikiindex
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
Hi Andy,
Great post!
John just installed the Dynamic Page List extension ( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/DynamicPageList2 ) so now you can do whatever queries you like at WikiIndex. See http://www.wikiindex.com/DPL_Test_Page for more.
peace,
ted