Jonathan wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#Daily_premi...
I'm sure if this feature described here ever gets implemented that this section title won't be used for it. The idea sparked above with the suggestions to divert or prevent edit wars and the users' desire to stay anonymous.
- When you see any entry for a change made, the user's name or IP
address is not shown in that entry. After you make an edit to the page that was changed, you then get to see who edited it in the entry, but that view is only available for a day from your last change.
This would encourage people to focus on quality of content rather than who made the content. The would also apply for administrators. Only stewards and bureaucrats can see who made the change at anytime.
<snip>
As you see, there is no significance to who made the changes in the above views. This does not prevent somebody that reverts vandalism to track down who made the vandalism, as, once the vandalism is reverted the users name is then seen as we common know. Anything further vandalism by that user can be tracked down as usual.
Of course, if anybody signs their name, who made the entry is always revealed. If we want a feature to doublecheck if the tildes were used to sign (in case somebody forges a name), an extra flag on the change entries could be made to denote that.
Some worry that I don't spend enough time in article space, but I also am a developer of a wiki.
Can I get some feedback for this kind of policy that is really more technological?
Recent changes patrol.
Suppose I see someone make a change to an article. If a username I recognise as being a "good user", I won't bother to check it. If it's a username I haven't seen before, or is redlinked, I'll probably check it. If it's an IP, I'm very likely to check it.
Removing usernames from contributions means that RC patrol becomes insanely harder. It also means that it's impossible to later go and say "User 127.0.0.1 vandalised articles X, Y and Z", because the username is removed from the contributions.
In a perfect world, we could have perfect anonymity in this matter (actually, we wouldn't /need/ anonymity), but the world is far from perfect. I'm not going to buy into the "this proposal amounts to trolling" argument, except to say this: removing usernames from contributions would be a troll's paradise.