If you remember one week ago we rolled out a feature on ProleWiki so that any reader could edit without an account (we now call it anon editing internally).

I’ve been keeping detailed stats on this feature for one week and to be honest I’m getting too tired of this to do it for another week, so here are the 1-week results that I’m gonna stop at:

**Contributions so far:**
28 sent in total, of which:
21 approved
7 rejected
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**Rejection reasons:**
Sources issues (3)
Possible wrecking attempt (1)
Trolling (1)
Duplicate edit (1)
Null edit (1)
already merged (1)
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Note that these stats count each individual edit sent to the moderation queue as a different instance. For example, if a reader submits an edit that is rejected and then fixes the issues and resubmits, and the second one gets accepted, it will count as 1 rejection and 1 approval.

However I didn’t count edits that were approved and then undone, which allows us to notify the editor of the rejection reason through the changelog. These count as 1 rejection only until the user makes another contribution that’s approved. I don’t know if that makes sense.

As you can see, we approved most edits (75% of them). The most common reason for rejecting was due to source issues of any kind (missing, incorrectly filled, not entirely filled, etc). We’ve had one troll (probably a liberal. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t even a funny joke), one possible wrecking attempt that we preferred to reject, and otherwise the rest was just technical quirks. Null edits for example are when you commit an edit to the wiki, but without having changed anything. Yes, you can do that for some reason. I think it’s a testing feature.

I didn’t keep logs for the approved contributions, but they were largely made by 2 users whom I believe had requested accounts in the past. Many contributions were very small in size (correcting typos or grammar, which is always appreciated), but some were also a bit lengthier – one or two paragraphs worth. One reader asked for a page to be made on a video game (Crisis in the Kremlin) and filled it out despite not having an account. The longest contribution filled out the entirety of the page on the PRCF (Pole révolutionnaire communiste français), but unfortunately we had to reject it as it had very few sources. If sourcing applies to our editors it applies equally to our anon contributors!

All contributions are valuable though, and it’s great that we’ve had not only 21 in just one week (an average of 2.5 a day), but also that they were there at all! This is now content published on ProleWiki that we didn’t have one week ago, so all contributions are valuable and appreciated.

This pilot project also allowed us to gather some data and refine our relationship to anon edits. One thing I want to show the anon editors is the documents we send to every new editor before they start editing, so they can see what makes a good edit and how to make it. That way we could also avoid sourcing issues and overall fewer rejected contributions. Gonna have to think about how to do that.

Being able to talk directly to the anon editors would be cool too, but no idea how we could make that possible. The system as a whole isn’t really set up for that. Their best bet is to join our Discord, maybe we’d make a channel specifically for regular anon editors. Though at this stage you’re probably better off just joining as an editor.

What’s next?

We’re totally going to keep the anon edit feature up. I can’t guarantee we’ll always go through them quickly and that we might not disconnect it sometimes for reasons, but it’s becoming a permanent fixture of ProleWiki.

We’re hoping to be able to open it to the library and even to creating pages, but no word on that yet as it depends on what we are able to make this thing do.

Should you still request an account

Yes, you totally should! It gives you greater access to the community, no more moderation log, and allows you to participate in shaping ProleWiki’s direction. But in the meantime, you can help share your knowledge without having to go through a long vetting process.