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Poor, Edmund W wrote: <snip>
- Because Steve is right about the term 'anon'. Actually more than 95%
of our contributors are anonymous. Choosing a recognizable pseudonym does not remove the mantle of anonymity; it just substitutes another.
<snip>
I try to avoid the term "anon" when talking about IP address editors, but I still think the term is valid in some sense.
A registered editor has said to all who ask, "Hello, for the purposes of editing on Wikipedia my name is $(nick)".
The "problem" with IP editors is akin to knowing people by the barcode or dewey number of the last book they checked out from the local library.
While it might be possible to say "edits A, B and C were done by this IP, and they all look roughly the same, so we can assume that they were all done by the same person", there is also the possibility that they were done by completely different people. Conversely, two IPs might have been used by the same person, or they might have been used by different people. It's very difficult to tell who is doing what.
You can draw all the conclusions you want about an IP by doing WHOIS lookups and the like; you might find that it's a dynamic, static or shared IP, but it actually tells you very little about who is using it.
Going back to the book example: Two people borrow the same book, so they both get the same IP. You can't tell them apart. One person borrows two books. You don't know they're the same person. One person only borrows one book a year. They look like a static IP. A dozen people are in a speed reading club. They look like AOL users.
The greatest problem with IP editors is ease of recognition. Because we think in words, not numbers, it's very easy to recognise and tell apart names; it's not so easy to recognise and tell apart numbers, especially [[dotted quad]]s.
Just wait until we get IPV6 usernames...
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