Another point that it raises is that the majority of
people are still on
dynamic IP's. (Wikipedia probably has a higher
proportion of static IP's
than most websites due to the number of contributors
who are staff at
academic institutions.
So with a not-logged in contributor on a dynamic IP,
the only means of
identifying the person is by asking the ISP who had
that IP at that time.
And most ISP's will flatly refuse to divulge that
information. Under New
Zealand's privacy laws I think the only grounds on
which they are obliged
or even allowed to release such personal information
is a police
investigation or as part of a civil lawsuit. A
copyright enquiry simply
doesn't cut it.
--
Richard Grevers
Between two evils always pick the one you haven't
tried
...therefore, we cannot be expected to list anon
users. They know perfectly well that they cannot get
credit as anons, or are complete newbies, and wouldn't
know that credit exists (in that case, they soon
will). I knew an anon user who made many great edits
on a static IP. Even as an advanced user, he didn't
make a username because he didn't <em>want</em> any
credit for hist work. Eventually, he created a
username, I think CrusadeOnIlliteracy or something
like that, so that he could move pages and upload
images. (On a related note, anons should be able to do
those tasks.) He still didn't want to have credit. I
think that there are many anons like that, and we
don't need to give them credit because they don't want
it.
LDan
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