On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 9:35 PM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466@gmail.com> wrote:

Two good posts.

Bear in mind though that there is also a half-way house solution, whereby contributors would identify to the Foundation, but remain at liberty to use a pseudonymous user name.

This would involve incredible overhead on the Foundation's role. It also wouldn't provide any real protection for the individuals being harassed.

Let's be clear here; there are really two types of harassment we should be concerned about. The first is, simply, illegal; where such harassment occurs, and a complaint to the police results, the WMF has procedures in place to provide (for example) IP addresses and other identifying information on receipt of a valid request from a court, and these can then percolate back through ISPs and such to identify the person responsible for the statements or actions. All very simple, all very well-handled. I'd argue our failing here is not in not having a mechanism for illegal harassment, but simply a greater societal issue; internet harassment is, while a crime, something with few benefits for the police to prosecute. We can't solve for that; we could reduce the barrier a bit by cutting out the middle man and being able to provide the police with the real-world identity of contributors, sure, but again, that's going to be a ton of work.

The second type of harassment is motivated by, well, John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.[1] Some people, to be cynical, behave well because people see and judge them by their behaviour. As a result, when you get anonymity or pseudonymity - more specifically, a type of pseudonymity that does not overlap with their real-world reputation, or reputation in other domains, you get people misbehaving, because their actions and the consequences of those actions cannot follow them back to a reputation they care about. It's as simple as that. Merely knowing that someone, somewhere, knows who they are is not going to get these people to act differently; there is no immediate action/reaction interaction between "them misbehaving" and "this biting them on the backside".

[1] http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

Identification might then be a prerequisite for certain community roles (as indeed it is today).

Then the change is...?

The difference might be for example that editing biographies of living persons would be a right reserved to editors who have identified to the Foundation. I am pretty certain that this would have prevented cases like Johann Hari's, for example.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-green/2011/09/hari-rose-wikipedia-admitted

It would also prevent people from returning with sock after sock to add negative material to the biographies of people they don't like, or indeed fluff up their own.

Let's not forget that a significant number of editors and administrators have for years edited under their real names, or have their identities known. At the moment, I believe the only editors required to identify are arbitrators and chapter members. It would be conceivable to expand that requirement to various other user rights.

Andreas