On 12/12/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Yes, there are anonymizer tools, but
- most of them are quite slow
- they are not always built to be used on a per-page basis
- they may cost money, or contain spyware, etc.
And:
* they're all anonymous proxies and therefore banned from editing (generally).
The counterargument is that to gain transparency for the project, participants should be willing to sacrifice some privacy, and that if they aren't willing to publicly admit to their efforts, they're immediately suspect. Needless to say, this counterargument becomes more questionable when it gets to sensitive issues like gay midget pornography and Scientology. I like the idea of transparency, but on some topics at least we need some anonymity to get people to participate, I suspect.
On 12/12/07, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
There are several possibilities to fix that.
Either the use of the tool is much more widely made possible, increasing the check and balances (and thus reducing risks of abuse). Eg, giving the tool to all admins.
I think this would be a nice compromise, with one proviso: the log is made public as far as is possible without posting IP addresses. One straightforward proposition would be to blank out IP addresses in the log for non-admins, but leave usernames intact, and leave a record of the IP address examination (just not which IP was examined).
This would give reasonable but not total protection to advocates of gay midget pornography. Any admin could get their IP addresses on a pretext, but if the pretext isn't good enough they risk getting sacked (hopefully, although enwiki at least has a pretty poor track record here).
The downside is it would require superficially radical privacy-policy changes, and might alienate some users. I suspect the latter effect would be temporary, though: as Tim says, if anything had been that way all along, it would probably cause little complaint. As for the former, I say "superficially" because in practice, it's not like the privacy policy protects most editors anyway, given that they're anonymous.
Or on the contrary, limiting the use of the tool by reducing number of people with access, strengthening the rules, and applying the rules strictly (in short, in case of abuse, removing access rather than simply whining).
Then people start banning sockpuppets on random suspicion when the response time for checkuser gets too long. Transparency is the right direction to head in.