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(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- :: Andrea Forte :: Assistant Professor :: College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University :: http://www.andreaforte.net

On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 12:21 PM, Alan Liefting &lt;aliefting(a)ihug.co.nz&gt; wrote: I can't think about specifics but I will say that on a personal (as well as staff) level I'd be against mandating public identity for many reasons. The biggest one, however, is indeed the safety side. I also have edited under my real name since the start (my username isn't but I've said my full name and identifying info on my user page since I started getting more active) but I personally know far too many editors who have been dramatically harassed, threatened and abused by both private and public (governmental) individuals because of their on-wiki activities. Some of those editors did stupid things (but still didn't deserve the reaction they got in my mind) but most of them wrote good to incredibly good content that was well sourced and, as far as I could tell, completely correct and important to have in the public sphere. We need to be able to allow folks to edit in controversial areas (and depending on where you are the definition of controversial can be very different) with as little fear of retaliation as possible. There are some countries and topics where editors take an inherent risk upon themselves by editing (and they know that) but I want to keep that risk as limited as possible. James Alexander Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation @jamesofur

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 &lt;aliefting(a)ihug.co.nz&gt; wrote: