responding to your message first i believe that the thing you implied is not true i don't know of any commonly accepted policy or guideline that tells people to log in before making wholesale or substantial edits i think this is a notion of your own that you're using in good faith to discourage this editor from contributing as i understand there is for protected and featured articles which the san francisco article is i assume is a newcomer and not an established user someone who's made less than edits fits my concept of a newcomer someone who has no welcome message on his or her talk page also fits my concept of a newcomer i just went and added a welcome message using what you wrote in the edit summary was not in the spirit of welcoming newcomers to the project which is what the guideline i cited is about i think this is your fault as far as jumping to conclusions the user has made over a edits since february of last year and many to the san francisco page certainly not a newcomer under any objective evaluation and more of a casual editor probably not sure why you added the welcome message either when the user probably had one back in and deleted it furthermore if this person is going to editing pages for here on out then this helps my case as well you do not need to reveal your offline identity but having an account gives you a fixed wikipedia identity that other users will recognize while we welcome anonymous contributions logging in under a pseudonym lets you build trust and respect through a history of good edits it is also easier to communicate and collaborate with an editor if we know who you are at least who you are on wikipedia it is also easier for veteran users to assume good faith from new users who take the effort to create an account and you may well become a veteran user yourself some day you may well be afforded a great deal less leeway if you do not go to the trouble of making up a username this is especially true for a user that edits quite often a featured and or protected article i'm also worried that you're trying to communicate with this user via edit summaries which are easily missed even by experienced users with watchlists and all if the edits he or she is making aren't constructive you should explain why on the user's talk page focusing on the nature of edit itself instead of the to me unimportant detail that the person who made it was not logged in because the user is just using an ip and with no messages on its talk page i assumed that the user isn't ge