# About the idea: IDENTITY = EMAIL

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/about-the-idea-identity-email/34642>\
**Category:** Site feedback\
**Tags:** email\
**Created:** [October 18, 2015, 12:41am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/about-the-idea-identity-email/34642 "2015-10-18T00:41:12Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 16

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**Author:** ![Stephen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/stephen/32/95011_2.png) [@Stephen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Stephen)\
**Post date:** [October 16, 2022, 3:23pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/about-the-idea-identity-email/34642/16 "2022-10-16T15:23:52Z")

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And it’s probably the exception in that regard. When you consider what Wikipedia is - shared content curated by a group - their goal is to reduce friction to collect knowledge. The concept of identity is less relevant because individual contributors aren’t surfaced unless you go digging behind a topic. Misleading content is called out by the ‘hive mind’ and if you lose an account you can sign up again with no real material loss.

Discourse on the other hand rotates around the concept of identity, everything is attributed to users, their identities matter. If users forget their password the lack of email would mean that they can’t easily recover it, nor can the site staff verify that they were the original owner.

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