This interesting bot showed up on hackernews today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8018284
While in this instance the access to anonymous' editors IP addresses is
definitely useful in terms of identifying edits with probable conflict of
interest, it makes me wonder what the history is behind the fact that
anonymous editors are identified by their IP addresses on WMF-hosted wikis.
IP addresses are closely guarded for registered users, why wouldn't
anonymous users be identified by a hash of their IP address in order to
protect their privacy as well? The exact same functionality of being able
to see all edits by a given anonymous IP would still exist, the IP itself
just wouldn't be publicly available, protected with the same access rights
as registered users'.
The "use case" that makes me think of that is someone living in a
totalitarian regime making a sensitive edit and forgetting that they're
logged out. Or just being unaware that being anonymous on the wiki doesn't
mean that their local authorities can figure out who they are based on IP
address and time. Understanding that they're somewhat protected when logged
in and not when logged out requires a certain level of technical
understanding. The easy way out of this argument is to state that these
users should be using Tor or something similar. But I still wonder why we
have this double standard of protecting registered users' privacy in
regards to IP addresses and not applying the same for anonymous users, when
simple hashing would do the job.