How to encourage non-anonymous editing on MediaWik

Question

Problem

At work we have a department wiki (running Mediawiki). Unfortunately several persons edit without logging in, and that makes it very difficult to track down editors to ask questions about the content.

There are two strategies to improve this

• encourage logged in editing
• discourage anonymous editing.

Encouraging

For this part, any tips are welcome. But of course there is always risks involved in rewarding behaviours.

Discourage

I know that this must be kept low or else it will discourage any editing. But something just slightly annoying would be nice to have.

[update] I know it is possible to just disallow anonymous editing, but that will put a high barrier to any first time contribution (especially for people outside our department!), so I do not think that is an option. [/update]

[update2] Using LDAP or Active Directory does not solve the problem since the wiki is also accessible and used by external contractors. [/update2]

[update3] I am no longer working for this company. That does not mean that I completely have lost interest in this question, but from my current interest point the most valuable part is the "Did you forget to log in?" part below, and I will accept answers based on this part of the question. [/update3]

Confirmation

One thought was to have an additional confirmation step for anonymous users - "Are you really sure you want to submit this anonymously?", although with such a question there is a risk that people will give up or resist editing. However, if that question is re-phrased in a more diplomatic way as "Did you forget to log in?" I think it will appear as much more acceptable. And besides that will also capture those situations where the author did in fact forget to log in, but actually would want to have his/her contributions credited his/her user. This last point is by itself a good enough reason for wanting it.

Is this possible?

Delay

Another thought for something to be slightly annoying is to add an extra forced delay after "save page" displaying something like "If you had logged in you would not have to wait x seconds". Selecting a right x is difficult because if it is to high it will be a barrier and if it too low might not make any difference. But then I started thinking, what about starting at zero and then add one second delay for each anonymous edit by a given IP address in a given time frame? That way there will be no barrier for starting to use the wiki, and by the time the delay is getting significant the user has already contributed a lot so I think the outcome is much more likely to be that the editor eventually creates a user rather than giving up. This assumes IP addresses are rather static, but that is very typically is the case in a business network.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

If this runs within an internal network, you could pull Active Directory information so that no one has to log in, ever. That's how I do it at work. That is, if they are logged into their windows machine, then my webapps can pick up their username and associate that (or their userid) with their edits.

I don't know if this would be easy to add to MediaWiki, though.

Answer 2

I think you should discourage anonymous edits by forbidding them - it's an internal wiki, after all.

The flipside is you must make the login process as easy as possible. Hopefully you can configure the login cookie to have a decent length (like 1 month) so they only need to login once per month.

Answer 3

I'd recommend checking out wikipatterns.org - a great site about the social aspects of wikis

Answer 4

Explicitly using some form of directory service (LDAP) would probably be a good idea, so that your users are always fully identified. On the other hand, wikis are subject to their own dynamics, in fact some wikis are so successful because they can be anonymously edited, so that's another thing to keep in mind.

Apart from that, personally I'd try to create some sort of incentive for users to contribute openly and identifiable: this could be based on a point/score system so that there are stats shown for all users who have contributed to the wiki each day, this could possibly even create some sort of competition.

Likewise, the wiki could by default not show any anonymously contributed contents without them being reviewed first, which would be another incentive for users to contribute openly.

Answer 5

Make sure users don't get logged out if they look away from the screen or sneeze or scratch their head. You want long, persistent, sessions. Once logged in, stay logged in.

That's the problem with the MediaWiki our company is using internally - you log in, do stuff, then come back later and it logged you out, but the notification of not being logged in anymore is so insignificant on the screen that the user never notices.

Answer 6

Play to the people's egos, and add a rep system kind of like here. Just make a widget for the home page that shows the number of edits made by the top 5 users or something. Give the top 1 or 2 users a MVP reward at regular (monthly?) intervals.