Wikipedia has held since the start, a philosophy that some aspects of neutral accessible editing are enhanced by pseudonymity. One only need look at early policies and current policies to see they started with strong strict views on this, and retain strong strict views. Reasons where it matters are codified in policies themselves - freedom to edit without fear of social backlash, freedom to edit unpopular views and topics or those which would be professionally harmful, freedom to edit from places and regimes where uninhibited authorship would be dangerous, freedom to be judged by the edits one makes and not the person one is.
Obviously there are negatives too - ease of abuse, reduced ease of detecting bad behavior, and so on. None the less over time the view has stuck, pseudonymity is a cornerstone of the environment we offer users and that users may rely upon. In that context, improving pseudonymity is a valid goal. That an area established 10 years ago has not yet been fully revised or brought into the 2010-2020 era is not salient. The same could be said of many Mediawiki functions. Pseudonymity is "de facto" in the culture, and part of our multi-branched attempt to facilitate neutral open editing. It is an area of interest and an area where improvemenet and advancement are worthwhile to seek. It is odd to rationalize that a user with an account has safeguards which users without accounts should not "deserve".
Most of the rest of your questiopns are technical - how would this or that be done? Those technical questions need technical consideration, but the basic question is a non technicval one, as is my comment. This is a desirable area to dovetail. How that works and to what extent cost v benefit means we do some things but accept limitations on others, are questions that technical people will need to consider.
FT2
On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 7:09 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 1:36 PM, FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
(snip)
Why is "improving anonymity" a goal? Our privacy policy governs the disclosure of non-public information, but the IP addresses of editors without an account have always been effectively public. Are IP editors clamoring for more privacy? Is masking IPv6 addresses more important than the uses to which IP addresses are currently put? Is masking a better way to solve the problem of potentially more identifiable information in IPv6 than, say, a more prominent disclosure and disclaimer? Would masking the IP addresses only for logged-out users be a worthwhile change, given the ease of registering an account? Would they remain masked in the histories of project dumps? There are a lot of questions to answer here before it's reasonable to start suggesting changes be made, and these are only some.