Fred Bauder wrote:
There are a few people (for example sitting judges) who need anonymity. For some other people it may be desirable, if not necessary. However most of our anonymous users have no real reason for anonymity.
Well, I side generally with those who say that we should respect anonymity. But I also still say that allowing sysops to access signed-in-users ip numbers for the purpose of stopping logged-in-vandal-attacks is not a significant compromise of anyone's anonymity.
People seem to have a wrong idea of how much information an ip number contains. Usually, very little. An ip number gets you as far as an ISP, no further. There may be rare exceptions, but in the main, knowing an ip number doesn't tell you very much that's personally identifiable about a person.
We should respect anonymity, but we should also recognize that there are a lot of myths about anonymity. Just think how many people refuse to log in because they want to remain anonymous. They don't really get it, I think.
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I think a useful distinction can be made between anonymity and privacy. Privacy is impossible in the wikipedia context -- people can see everything that we do. But anonymity is pretty easy -- people can see everything that we do, we can associate individual edits with individual markers (accounts, ip numbers), but we have *no* real way to get at who people really are, without going through some actual process with an ISP.
--Jimbo