[Foundation-l] Privacy policy and editing anonymously notice.

[Robert Scott Horning]

Chris Jenkinson wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> As the Board have been rather slow with publicising the new privacy 
> policy, I have taken the step of adding a notice to the bottom of 
> [[MediaWiki:Copyrightstext]] on the English-language Wikipedia (the 
> text which is displayed when you click "Edit this page"), which 
> mentions that if you are editing anonymously, your IP address will be 
> publically and permanently associated with the edits, and if you're 
> editing while logged in, your IP address will be stored for around 2 
> weeks.
>
> Someone has also added a link to the privacy policy on the bottom of 
> every page.
>
> I urge admins on all the various projects to update their project with 
> this information - make it clear that editing will mean that some 
> personally-identifiable information is kept about the contributor.
>
> Chris

As a matter of policy is this reasonable?  I'm just thinking out loud 
here, but might it be reasonable after a certain length of time that 
anonymous edits from IP addresses could be turned into simply a user 
with the name "Anonymous" instead?  It would require a minor change in 
MediaWiki, but I don't think it is that difficult of a challenge 
technically.

I'm raising this here to suggest that perhaps another policy could ben 
enacted for anonymous users.  After a year or so it would be very 
difficult to even find logs to claim that you used a particular IP 
address unless it was on a permanent IP table for an organization and 
somehow dated.  Besides, we are using IP addresses anyway to help 
distinguish trolls from honest contributors who are trying to add 
reasonable content but just want to stay anonymous.  Why not purge these 
IP address records as well?  I'm talking about the social policy aspect 
of doing this, not actually implementing this in MediaWiki software.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning