User:Edkollin
| en-us -N | This user is a native speaker of American English. |
 | This user lives in the U.S. State of New York. |
 | This user lives on or hails from Long Island. |
 | This user is a 1979 graduate of the State University of New York College at Oneonta. |
| UAR | This editor believes that account creation should be required to edit on Wikipedia. |
Why This Editor believes in Account Creation should be a requirement
I did not come to this decision easily as I was a unregistered editor for my first 6 months and as such I do understand we will lose some good work if Wikipedia adds this requirement. While I understand account creation is not a cure all I believe that it will greatly reduce two problems vandalism and inclusion of unsourced and originally researched material.
To stop vandalism we now have to go ask for page semi protection. These will not be granted unless there are numerous attempts to vandalize over a short period of time. Meanwhile the vandalized material is in the article providing fodder for the media to make fun of or discredit Wikipedia. Semi Protection orders do work the majority of time.
While the arguments for or against account creation usually revolve around vandalism, the far more common and time consuming problem is unsourced or originally resourced material. In my experience the vast majority is caused by editors without accounts. This is done for two non-malicious reasons, not understanding the verifiable but not truth dictum and over exuberance. Another words an editor reads an article and notices an “obvious” error or omission that needs immediate correcting. Even with account creation “newbies” will still have these issues. But if a person goes through the process of creating their own account, he/she is showing a commitment, and is a better candidate to learn proper editing then a non registered person. Here is why this is important. A common scenario is an unregistered editor adds uncited material a registered editor puts a citation warning, the original editor will never visit the article again or even get an another impulse to edit Wikipedia and the unverified material remains with said warnings for months or even years. With this situation the majority of time editing is spent on make sure the articles do not get worse rather then on article improvement. And this is why the positive effects should outweigh the negative effects, should account creation become a requirement.
There is a discussion of this matter on my talk page. I also respectfully request that the discussion remain solely on my talk page instead of going back and forth between various user talk pages.