Project:Why have an account?

Creating an account is quick and completely free. You don't need to be registered to contribute, but getting an account allows you to:

• Have a username associated with your edits, so you can take credit and be identified easily.
• Create your own user page, to collaborate, share information about yourself, or just practice editing and publishing in your own sandbox.
• Communicate with other editors via your own talk page.
• Get automatic notifications that alert you when someone undo's your edits, talks at your talk page, etc.
• Use custom preferences to change the look and behavior of the website.
• Be able to be assigned permissions which will allow you to contribute to the project in different ways.

Once your account exists for 3 days and you edit 10 times, you'll unlock:

• Editing pages which have been protected from editing by new accounts or IP addresses.
• Creating and moving pages.
• Uploading files.
• Use of 2-factor authentication for increased account security.

Anonymity

If you choose to edit without an account, which is a perfectly valid form of editing, one of the downsides is that your IP address is used in leu of a username to identify the edit. This means your IP address is available to the public, as page history can be viewed by anyone. This is necessary because attribution is needed for copyright reasons.

Should you decide to edit without an account at first, and then make one, a suppressor could be asked to hide your IP address from public logs and history.

Blocked?

An administrator may have to block an IP address or IP range in order to combat disruptive editing or vandalism. This may also block you despite the fact you did nothing wrong. Possessing an account circumvents this issue.

At least one revision of this page incorporates text from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_create_an_account which is released under CC BY-SA-4.0. (view authors)