On Friday, August 23, 2013, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 4:38 PM, Tilman Bayer <tbayer@wikimedia.orgjavascript:;> wrote:
On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Brion Vibber <bvibber@wikimedia.orgjavascript:;
wrote:
I'd recommend some out-of-the-box thinking instead, perhaps:
- stop exposing IP addresses of any users at all (whether logged-in or
anonymous)
- replace "IP editing" with a simple solution for creating a consistent
anonymous identity with a minimum of effort (for example, automatically create an ID cookie which links to an anonymous 'account' which you can optionally turn into a registered, named, emailable user account in the future, or discard and replace every time if you're super-anonymous!)
- have much, much better inter-user communication and moderation tools that
can prioritize attention on activity of new users, low-reputation users, at-risk network origins or user-agents, etc without exposing individual IP addresses to actual users on the site
No, making a good system is not going to be easy. It's going to be hard, and require a lot of thinking. But I really hope we get to it.
This kind of proto-account for anonymous editors is something we've discussed among a shadowy cabal (i kid) of product managers in the past. I've also heard that the Ombudsmen have suggest similar things as well. I think there's probably pretty wide support for some or all of what you're suggesting Brion, but as you say, it's a ton of work. :-)
My team is strongly considering experiments this year to try and give more anonymous editors incentives to sign up. Some of what you described, particularly giving them a persistent unique identity that makes viewing an IP a progressive disclosure action or otherwise masks it to most users on-wiki, is something we might be able to tackle. This would be a good transition step toward removing use of IPs as public identifiers altogether.
We don't really have the bandwidth to take up actually replacing IPs though. If anyone is interested in working on this during the Dev Days pre-all staff in September, I'll put it in the list of topics and would be game to participate from a product/UX perspective.
As for better communication and moderation tools, I think Maryana and Brandon would agree that if we are going to ever roll out new user-user discussion pages, we are going to have to figure out how IP talk pages fit in to that.
Steven
Also, there is already
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advice_to_users_using_Tor#Need_an_ac...
(although I don't know how frequently/successfully it's being used currently)
At best, that's not very user friendly (and the page strongly discourages anybody to use it by reminding that it's only for trusted people under 'exceptional circumstances'). At worst, it exposes your shiny new login over plaintext email, so negative actors can sniff the data and associate your account with your person.
-- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l