Wikipedia:Accountability

Accountability is an underlying basis for all Wikipedia policies and guidelines. Accountability means that editors should generally explain the reasoning behind their edits, especially when making questionable changes to articles. This guideline, therefore, reflects ideas underlying other guidelines and policies, and should not be seen as contradicting WP:BOLD or WP:IAR.

Reasoning
In order for it to be generally accepted that the Wikipedia encyclopedia project is useful, and that the practice of free editing by anyone, any time, is beneficial, accountability is essential. It's also simple and easy.

From the viewpoint of rights and duties
All Wikipedia editors have the rights and duties to fulfil accountability for the good of Wikipedia. As such, all editors are also encouraged to help with the development of wikipedia's policies, guidelines, and practices. The rights and duties of accountability of all Wikipedia editors, however, are limited to matters concerning their edits or Wikipedia. Such an ordinary accountability is common sense and fundamental to the ethics prevalent advanced countries all over the world.

Edit summaries
A key method to ensuring accountability it to always fill in "Edit summaries" meaningfully and with a full, clear explanation of the edit. Where relevant, the reason for the edit should also be mentioned.

Non-article namespace pages
This Wikipedia encyclopedia project has a variety of policy and guideline pages. Please look up and read the pages in which the matters you are concerned about are described. If you don't understand the information regarding your concern, feel free to ask questions, propose a new system, discuss with others, and seek consensus on the appropriate page. If everyone involved does this, then you will generally feel satisfied with the outcome, even if your proposal was rejected.

There seem to be at least two different levels of accountability on Wikipedia.
 * 1) All editors have rights and duties to explain, question, propose, agree and object about whatever seems to be involved in this Wikipedia encyclopedia project.
 * 2) * Such an ordinary practice of accountability seems to embody freedom of speech ideally.
 * 3) However, there may be sensitive cases or controversial ones in which you should make more effort in order to perform your accountability as well as these ones in real society. In such cases, you should edit more comprehensibly, reasonably, kindly, politely, perseveringly, neutrally or attributably, if you don't want to be reverted, ignored, blamed, accused, blocked or banned by other Wikipedians or admins. But, it's very obvious that, occasionally, it's hard to explain to everyone's satisfaction.
 * 4) * Such a heavy burden of accountability seems to be necessary for the higher Consensus, nonetheless ( and unfortunately ). Probably it may be not so easy, but, please be as cool as possible, as kind as possible, and remain as objective as possible, because this is just Wikipedia encyclopedia project in which anyone is expected to be cool, kind and objective.

From the viewpoint of merits and demerits
Creating an account and logging in helps to improve your accountability, identity and reliability among the community. This means that, when you become a registered editor, you can communicate more easily with other registered editors.
 * 1) Registering, although generally seen as desirable, is not compulsory. IP editors often make good contributions.
 * 2) As a registered user, you may, in future, be in a position to be considered as a potential administrator, and feel able to accept that responsibility.
 * 3) When you register your account, you can create get your own user page and talk page to aid in accountability, etc., and you will become able to edit semi-protected pages, move pages, and so on.
 * 4) Even if you choose to remain an IP editors, you can and should work towards accountability in much the same way as log-in editors.

<!-- If you don't have a login, it is often too hard for others to recognize you as you and to contact you to raise any comments or concerns with what you write, unfortunately. Therefore, some users find it frustrating to deal with users who are not logged in, so you may find that they take your contributions less seriously and are more suspicious of your motives.

But it's not that others' frustration is, alone, a valid reason to revert your edits. Rather, that drastic changes to articles is a reversion, usually, of articles that have some invested discussion in them. The quality of Wikipedia articles comes as a result of the process of democracy, and the trust other Wikipedians learn to place in you (and your history of quality work) makes the editing process more an aspect of teamwork, rather than showmanship. However this democratic process is not always perfect. As an example, some people, it is believed, when unsuccessful in making edits under their own identity (because this would mean participation in a process of discussion), resort to logging in anonymously to make major edits. This might yield an increasingly unsatisfactory result over time, especially where working together to write an article with a neutral point of view.

Benefits of Accountability Log In

 * 1.) Promotes discussion on User Talk pages over edit disagreements and reduces spam on Article Talk pages. While IP addresses do have talk pages, the anon nature of their edits does not promote active discussion on those pages.
 * 2.) Allows Admin, other editors, and the Welcoming Committee to interact with new users more easily on their Talk Pages to encourage better editing skills.
 * 3.) Adds one more obstacle for vandals.
 * 4.) Adds one more obstacle to the creation of sock puppets
 * 5.) Easier to track a User's contribution. When a User must log in to edit, you are more likely to get an accurate representation of the User's contribution to Wikipedia. This is particularly beneficial in discussion about proposed admins and request for arbitrations.

Lack of need for Anonymous Edits
Anyone can create a name, maintain a presence on Wikipedia, and be completely anonymous (you don't have to give us your real name or important email address), free of charge. This way, you can stand by your work, and in doing so, send a message to all Wikipedians that you think your work is worth standing for.

Someday, some people may create views of the Wikipedia that specifically exclude anonymous changes. This is by no means certain; it's not clear that many Wikipedians would support adding this capability to the main Wikipedia website. However, anyone can create such a view from the database (e.g., for a CD-ROM), so this is yet another reason to avoid posting anonymously. For more information, see Wikipedia approval mechanism.

A related suggestion is to sign your posts on talk pages as it makes the discussion easier to follow. -->