--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
Some people who are engaged in controversial conversation that may endanger their lives may very well feel the need for the protection of an anonymous proxy. An example might be a Chinese dissident operating secretly from within China to rally pro-democracy, pro-freedom support overseas.
None of those kind of uses applies in the case of Wikipedia.
This is an incorrect argument. In fact, for someone living in a typical repressive regime, writing articles that we would all agree are NPOV is quite good enough reason to get into trouble.
Let me now reveal my personal interest in this issue. While I'm at home I use my family ISP with no special anonomity except a made-up username. When I'm at work, I use an anonymizer. I can't claim that this is seriously important, but for reasons I don't choose to explain I think I would stop writing from work if this method became unavailable. I'd be surprised if I'm alone in this.
In addition, I have not yet seen a case being made that an anonymizer is essentially different from an ISP that assigns dynamic IP numbers. As far as Wikipedia is concerned, what distinguises someone editing through an anonymizer and someone with an IP randomly assigned from a pool of IPs belonging to a large ISP? In the latter case it may be possible to determine the approximate geographical location, but why does that matter? I suggest that there is no essential difference at all.
Zero.
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