Non-anonymous users (narrow focus)

FT2 you may be right about these two choices but I really wish we coul com up with three or four ... I am not thrilled with either choice you present even if you may turn out to be right. Perhaps by discussing Nupedia and Everything2 and Danny Wool's project, we can come up with clearer ideas of what we want and do not want as mechanisms to promote quality.

This is what I really take issue with: "but to maintain good quality users need to show certain competences before editing certain specific pages." I do not think that there should be a barrier to entry to ediing an article. This to me is the essence of AGF. Someone with no recognizable credentials may nevertheless make a great edit.

I look at it from the other side. I'd rather give everyone the chance to edit any article but make it easier to block someone from working on an article once they have demonstrated sufficient ignorance of the topic to justify the block, than to change our policy of letting anyone edit.

The fact is right now many articles have a few people watching so that when an idiot makes a stupid edit it is corrected quickly.

Realistically, there are two big problems: there are some articles few people watch and seldom regularly so a stupid edit can be made without being reverted quickly. I' still do not want to deprive anyone of the right to edit - but maybe we can come up witah a way that any time an article of interest to a particular wikiproject is edited, a flag comes up at that project, so some member of the project can check it out?

The other problem is when the ignorant editor is persistent. This is a form of "disruptive editing" and perhaps we can come up with quicker mechanisms to block such people from editing such articles.

So, these are mechanisms I would prefer over your option #2