On 11/2/05, Poor, Edmund W Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: steve v [mailto:vertigosteve@yahoo.com] Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2005 8:10 PM To: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: Article creation (was Re: [WikiEN-l] More fodder
foryoureditcountitis)
I kind of agree with Charles in the sense that some institution computers dont allow cookies to cache - meaning all edits must be IP edits (dont use term 'anon').
It would be interesting to hear from the regular IP community what their concerns are - anonymity, caching, too busy to log in, dont care to have a web ident, dont want to get personal, etc?
SV
I sympathize with this POV for two reasons:
- Because Steve was recently taken down a peg (he lost his sysop
rights) but he STILL is contributing to the encyclopedia and trying to find ways to improve the community.
- 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.
I'm sure no one means anything derogatory by saying 'anon' - it's just convenient shorthand for "non-logged in user". But it still can grate on the ears. It can offend, in the same way that Mark Twain's use of 'nigger' in his otherwise anti-slavery novel [[Huckleberry Finn]] offends. (The relationship of Huck and Jim clearly showed the moral superiority of an adult black man to an adolescent white boy. And Twain would not have put this in his novel, if he hadn't meant Southerners to take the point. It may even be one of the reasons that he moved up north, to Connecticut.)
The marginalized, the downtrodden, the people with no formal education have a voice, and Wikipedia is listening to that voice. We are not storming the citadel of Academia by the gates, but we are (like bloggers rebutting TV networks and Matt Drudge scooping news magazines) LEVELING OUT the playing field. This is democracy in action.
Uncle Ed Former Bureaucrat
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If we shouldn't call them "anon" then what should we call them? It could be worse. We could call them Anonymous Cowards like some forums do. The problem I have with non-logged-in users is that when you find one (or several?) engaging in edit wars or other anti-social behaviour, it's very difficult to address them by name, let alone hold them accountable for their edits. Particularly when the similar edits come from within a block of ip addresses. Could be one person using different terminals on campus, or getting different ip's via a dhcp server, or a group of separate people who just 'look' the same.
-- Anonymous Coward