Wikidata:Requests for comment/Stop allowing unregistered edits

Imo, unregistered edits/ anonymous (IP-based) edits are creating more harm than benefit. It takes a lot time to clean up. They often go unnoticed for months and harm the data integrity/quality when doing SPARQL queries. I think if people want to do anonymous edits, they can still sign up and edit something immediately. But it will deter most, as it is an extra step. I personally don't know any website that allows anonymous edits of data. Germartin1 (talk) 07:16, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You can filter unpatrolled edits in Recent Changes. Also see m:Limits to configuration changes. GZWDer (talk) 21:38, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Conversation moved to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Stop_allowing_unregistered_edits Germartin1 (talk) 04:42, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Agree that something needs to be done. It could also be that unregistered edits need to be reviewed but if so it would probably be better to limit them to certain kinds of items such as normal items about concepts but not e.g. scholarly article items. There are millions of scholarly article items. It's entirely unfeasible that all of them are monitored sufficiently to prevent problematic and vandalism edits. People can just enter e.g. a random person to its authors and nobody will notice. Lots of things like that can and are being done, including adding nonsense into non-English descriptions because watching editors can't read it (it would be better anyway to use modern machine translation for these which could also sync changes). I think one could lock items for any non-bot edits such as all scholarly article items. It also needs scans that identify and undo past covert vandalism and detect registered users who did problematic edits (e.g. via a large share of reverted edits) to undo all their problematic changes because this issue is not limited to unregistered edits. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:33, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]