On 16 February 2013 20:06, Tyler Romeo tylerromeo@gmail.com wrote:
Keep in mind we already do log IP addresses (to an extent, for CheckUser and whatnot), so the issue isn't actually capturing information, it's the use and display of that information, especially since such display would be public. Like Brian said, de-anonymizing such information might not be difficult, *especially* on articles that are edited by only a select group of users, e.g., most Wikipedia articles.
I'm assuming you've added an extra "not" there - for many articles that have a very small number of editors, it would be vanishingly easy to start geolocating people, especially with a couple of cross references.
I'll throw in for the record that geolocation is really problematic for countries with very limited numbers of IPs (which coincidentally are often countries with censorious governments), and there are huge regions where IP data cannot be considered at all accurate: for example, most of the Middle East.
Risker/Anne