Steve Bennett wrote:
On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 2:10 AM, Charles > As a
consequence of various
sustained dirty tricks campaigns, no doubt
all intelligent people editing Wikipedia
pseudonymously, and for whom
revelation of their real-life identity would be a disaster, simply
stopped doing that.
Rightly so, no? You're placing a lot of trust in WMF and the
developers of MediaWiki if you continue to edit "anonymously" and rely
on that anonymity to protect yourself f rom harm.
You should note that there has been extensive debate in the past. The
WMF is somewhere on an axis labelled at one end "careless" and the other
end "Swiss bank", in handling personal information. The formulation that
the WMF, checkusers and so on take "reasonable care" with personal
information just about says it. That's closer to "Swiss bank" than the
other end of the scale, but hardly an absolute guarantee. And we're
still almost all amateurs. The WMF systems couldn't satisfy security
experts, if that's the criterion.
Charles