On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 3:18 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
The original Wikipedia platform (lo those long years ago) published only partial IP addresses. Today, "significantly less transparency" seems to mean "create an acccount" to many people. However, that is antithetical to the "anyone can edit" principle on which our projects are based. "Anyone can edit, as long as they don't mind that everyone in the world will know where they're from, what ISP they use, and possibly even the physical location from which they are editing and what equipment they're using to do so, unless they create an account" is what it has become.
I'm not sure I understand how "create an account" is antithetical to "anyone can edit". Are you saying there is some bar to creating an account that prevents some people from editing? People can choose to use an account name or choose to edit from an IP address. You're suggesting making account names mandatory and dynamic, I'm not seeing how that is a necessary outgrowth of "anyone can edit."
We want the edits. We don't need to know the rest, and never have. If we needed to know that information, we would have decided not to permit account-based editing in the first place. There's no template at the bottom of the talk pages of editors with accounts that allows identification and geolocation of their IP. If it's useful for logged-out editors, it is just as useful for logged-in ones, according to the "transparency" logic.
Sure - the same principle that makes IP information useful for transparency purposes works as well on IP editors as it does on account holders. But account holders have chosen to restrict access to that information, and IP editors have not. A better solution to mandating automatically assigned account names is to provide reasonable education and disclosure (say, a pop-up on first edit or something else fairly prominent) to people editing without an account. That way we let users judge privacy for themselves, and preserve the usefulness of IP data when a user chooses to disclose it.
Risker wrote:
"I am struggling to think of any other website of any nature that I have ever visited that publicly identifies editors/posters by their IP address, except for a few other wikis. I've seen "unregistered user" before, and similar nomenclature. Can anyone think of another site (regardless of purpose) that links the editor/poster publicly to their full IP address?"
IP address, no. Facebook profile (which is, as for most people, under my real name)? Sure. Even so, a comparison between Wikimedia and Google or the NY Times or Facebook or Gawker etc. fails because it does not recognize the many philosophical and practical differences between those sites and a Wikimedia project.