Real name editing is a very different obligation depending on how common your real name is and how many edits you make. There are only a handful of people who share my real name, if my surname was Smith then real name disclosure would be a much lighter imposition.
It is also a very different thing depending on your subject area. No one is likely to make a fuss about my fixing typos on Wikipedia, but we need to protect those who seek to keep our articles on businesses honest and neutral. If we insist on real names there, then it will be much more difficult to deal with companies who can write legal letters to anyone who disputes their version of the wikipedia article on them.
There are also likely to be some people who write about topics that would be controversial in their real life community and don't want their real life identities linked to that, for example if we had an editor in the Bible belt writing about evolution or atheism..... And of course people who do things that they don't consider overly controversial but which provoke rape and murder threats on IRC, here or elsewhere.
Then there is the question of what level of authentication you go to. Simply requiring people to state that their account name is their real name will exclude a proportion of goodfaith editors who aren't prepared to do that, but it won't get rid of any badfaith editors. Verifying identity by requiring all new editors to pay $5 by a credit card in the same name as their account would get rid of most vandalism, but make it much harder to recruit Wikipedians. It would also lose us a lot of editors especially those who come from cultures where $5 is a lot for a hobby and or credit cards are rare. Authentication by Facebook would make vandalism a little more difficult, though I know people whose pets have accounts, but I'm pretty sure that those of us who support the open source lobby could prevent such a path. Over the years we've had lots of people propose that we move to real names, but I've not yet seen a proposal that would do so in a way that would keep almost all of our current and future goodfaith editors whilst losing a significant proportion of the badfaith ones.
Jonathan
On 8 April 2015 at 20:21, Alan Liefting aliefting@ihug.co.nz wrote:
I use my own name on WMF sites. I was warned against doing that not long after I started editing back in 2004. Ten years later and as a hothead editor having my real identity known does not seem to be a problem.
Most editors use an alias. I don't know why. What are they afraid of? Editing wikis, if you are doing it right, is a laudable task and editors should be proud of the fact that they are helping to share knowledge in an altruistic manner.
Rather than ensuring privacy of editors the WMF should DEMAND that editors make their identity known. I am sure that this may cure some of the many problems that we are seeing on WMF projects.
Having said all that there is of course a problem in some of the dodgy countries where speaking out gets you killed. It has happened with journalists, bloggers, activists etc. It could (has?) happen with WMF project editors.
Alan Liefting
On 09/04/15 00:06, Andrea Forte wrote:
The discussion here has been great. I've been keeping out of it since I have an active research project and I don't want to seed my own ideas, but to circle back to the original post... if anyone here would like to contribute their experiences with privacy on Wikipedia to our project, please consider doing an interview. This is not related to the lawsuit, btw, we started the project before that happened.
The consent form is here: http://drexel.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_elzNLEUeTjIphrv
Thanks, Andrea
On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 9:00 AM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:
There is an important difference here. The WMF does not publicly log the
IP addresses of visitors to the site. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy#your-use-of-wm-sites It does however publish the IP addresses of editors who are not logged in.
I could understand the elitist claim if the WMF were more privacy conscious of editors than readers. But it isn't, if anything the divide is a three way one, with unregistered editors as the ones who by default have least privacy
Regards
Jonathan
On 5 April 2015 at 21:18, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
I propose we run a study. We will survey random editors
I always find it curious that we had dozens or hundreds of threads on having IPs in history: this worry is very elitist, at most few millions people ever edited.
What about the hundreds millions users who never edited? What are *their* IPs being logged for? It would be rather trivial to do as the IA does:
internet-archive/
I'll start worrying about the millions when we have solved privacy issues for the billions.
Nemo
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