On Friday, August 23, 2013, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 4:38 PM, Tilman Bayer
<tbayer@wikimedia.org<javascript:;>>
wrote:
On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Brion Vibber
<bvibber@wikimedia.org<javascript:;>
wrote:
>
I'd recommend some out-of-the-box thinking instead, perhaps:
* stop exposing IP addresses of any users at all (whether logged-in or
anonymous)
* replace "IP editing" with a simple solution for creating a consistent
anonymous identity with a minimum of effort (for example, automatically
create an ID cookie which links to an anonymous 'account' which you can
optionally turn into a registered, named, emailable user account in the
future, or discard and replace every time if you're super-anonymous!)
* have much, much better inter-user communication and moderation tools that
can prioritize attention on activity of new users, low-reputation users,
at-risk network origins or user-agents, etc without exposing individual IP
addresses to actual users on the site
No, making a good system is not going to be easy. It's going to be hard,
and require a lot of thinking. But I really hope we get to it.
This kind of proto-account for anonymous editors is something we've
discussed among a shadowy cabal (i kid) of product managers in the past.
I've also heard that the Ombudsmen have suggest similar things as well.
I think there's probably pretty wide support for some or all of what you're
suggesting Brion, but as you say, it's a ton of work. :-)
My team is strongly considering experiments this year to try and give more
anonymous editors incentives to sign up. Some of what you described,
particularly giving them a persistent unique identity that makes viewing an
IP a progressive disclosure action or otherwise masks it to most users
on-wiki, is something we might be able to tackle. This would be a good
transition step toward removing use of IPs as public identifiers
altogether.
We don't really have the bandwidth to take up actually replacing
IPs though. If anyone is interested in working on this during the Dev Days
pre-all staff in September, I'll put it in the list of topics and would be
game to participate from a product/UX perspective.
As for better communication and moderation tools, I think Maryana and
Brandon would agree that if we are going to ever roll out new user-user
discussion pages, we are going to have to figure out how IP talk pages fit
in to that.
Steven
Also, there is already
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advice_to_users_using_Tor#Need_an_a…
(although I don't know how
frequently/successfully it's being used
currently)
At best, that's not very user friendly (and the page strongly discourages
anybody to use it by reminding that it's only for trusted people under
'exceptional circumstances'). At worst, it exposes your shiny new login
over plaintext email, so negative actors can sniff the data and associate
your account with your person.
-- brion
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