Forum:Anonymous Users

Good Day, Based on the current events relating the the Fairy Tail series ending, I would like to open up a discussion to know what does the community thinks about not allowing Anonymous Users to edit the fairy tail wiki.

According to Ultraprime2 "The consensus in 2013 was that we wouldn't ask for anonymous editing to be disabled."

The way i see it the overall situation in 2013 is very different compared to the current situation of the fairy tail wiki in 2017. Back then the series is still ongoing and there are so many users who are actively visiting and contributing in this wiki but compared now that is no longer the same, based on this blog post many of the active users visiting this wiki is only here to have fairy tail related discussions, some might no longer even visit since the manga ended, also its very evident that this wiki is losing dedicated users maybe because of real life situations or they just moved one with a new series. Just look at the various project guilds this wiki used to have such as the Fairy Tail Wiki:Referencia Guild, Fairy Tail Wiki:Fight Summary Guild, Fairy Tail Wiki:Anime Summary Guild, Fairy Tail Wiki:Grammar Guild, Lightning Update Tribe and more, its been months since those groups did something to improve the wiki, meaning this wiki is already losing qualified users to maintain it and that also includes users who knows the existence of the Fairy Tail wikia policies and other rules or decisions this wiki or some admins made that was just discussed in the Wiki Activity summaries.

That is why I would like the idea of not allowing anons to edit the wiki because it will work as a deterrent for people to not vandalize the wiki and give them a second thought if vandalizing this wiki is worth enough to make an account and be accountable to what they will do and might end up being banned. If they really want to contribute then whats stopping them to make an account, its already proven if you're a frequent visitor of the wiki activity page that majority of anons actually contributes poorly in the wiki and majority of reliable editors are people with accounts, some of them might mess up but they still stick around and improve.

Once the anime returns theres a possibility of new users to visit the wiki but are we sure that the remaining active users can handle overseeing the wiki and guide those new users specially if majority of them are anons. With the declining number of users they are bound to overlook some edits that wont be undone or fixed. By blocking anons from editing it is also helping the wiki itself to preserve the established standard and contributions that various editors have provided in this wiki.

Ive read this concern in the forum, and it was responded by WonderfulUnicorn with "What du you expect us to do with the contributions that, although written in good faith, consist of absolute gibberish nonsense (language-wise and/or content-wise)? You surely can't expect us to just leave such content on our articles? As you stated yourself, we wish for the quality of our wiki to be as high as possible. That doesn't at all mean that we do not appreciate new users who want to contribute, but in order to maintain the current quality of our site, reversion is a necessary tool that we simply cannot work optimally without."

Miskos even said "We always encourage users to go to us and ask what they've done wrong in case they don't understand it. The trafic on the wiki is still quite high and we're busy people so it's virtually impossible to go to every person whenever we undo their edit and babysit them, that is even more impossible for anons whose IPs may just change at any time, so they won't even get to see the message, if they even know how talk pages work. As a matter of fact, the last user I actually tried to teach about how things work here (because I felt they showed a promise as a new user), leaving messages on their talk page multiple times (and not just me) resulted in them completely ignoring our warnings and advice, and now, that person, for whatever reason, keeps coming back every day on a new account to break policies the same way, every time. Now that is demotivating to us, if I say so myself. I'm guessing those are the rollbacks that you keep seeing so often."

The reason i included those is to show that those are some things that will be avoided if people are forced to make an account and be encouraged to learn more about how to edit the wiki. I also told Zetarion that "The reason why im undoing them (bad edits) is first they violates the wiki policy, so whats the point of that if we just disregards it, second another admin has mentioned before its not the job of its members to always clean up other people's edits, ..... i just believe spoon feeding them will not make them improve as editors and as you can see there are less active users who actually knows how to edit as before so if we just accept random people's edits even if they violates the wiki policy sooner or later this wiki will be full of edits that doesn't fit with the wiki format making it harder to fix and be consistent. "

Can you imagine in the next five years some users who used to be active in this wiki or a fan of the series visited this wiki out of nostalgia will be welcomed by a wiki that is already destroyed by various anons and users by editing the wiki with vandalism, made up information, inconsistent flow of the summaries and fan made pages.

I apologize for the long post and feel free to share your thoughts. 16:25, August 13, 2017 (UTC)