Research:Anonymous mobile editing in Italian Wikipedia
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Since the release of mw:Extension:MobileFrontend, unregistered users have not been allowed to edit via this mobile interface on Wikipedia projects.[1] This restriction is somewhat controversial.
In October 2014, a configuration change has been decided by the Italian Wikipedia[2] and applied to the wiki[3] which let unregistered users edit between 2014-11-01 00:01 (UTC) and 2014-12-31 23:59 (UTC). The change is now permanent after T85317 (following a further discussion).
- The first edit was made shortly after the midnight to w:it:Daddy's Gone from an Italian dynamic IP.[1]
- bugzilla:72855: the cache prevented from editing pages, until Brandon Black purged them all on 2014-11-03 20 UTC.
- Between 2015-01-07 and 2015-01-24, unregistered editing was disabled for a configuration error. [2] See phabricator:T91372#1139994.
- Before 2015-04-01, another bug sometimes prevented the unregistered user from clicking the "Continue" or "Next" button to do/save the edit: phabricator:T94419.
- Both bugs seem to have caused a spike in new active editors, probably because the edit buttons were in effect a huge registration CTA. [3] shows the rolling new active editors jumped from 450 to 650 in January 2015 and dropped in April when all bugs were fixed. Similar curves are seen on other wikis: [4].
- phab:T74852 required 3 clicks to reach the editor. The fix reached Wikipedias on 2014-12-17.
- gerrit:186591 made the "2 clicks" process more intuitive and was deployed on 2015-02-11.