On 20/10/05, Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org wrote:
A username is more anonymous than an IP, and provides a greater sense of identity. It's impossible to tell which of an IP's edits are good and bad, because good and bad users could be using it.
"A username is more anonymous than an IP, and [a username] provides a greater sense of identity"? I must not be understanding what you mean, because that statement seems to contradict itself.
If you edit as an IP which resolves to 452c.student-resnet.chicago.edu, I can tell a surprising amount about you. If you edit as [[User:Chicago_guy]], I can't.
But it's a lot *easier* for the community to attatch an identity to the one with a username, rather than the one with an IP. There's a couple of IPs that I know are good, reliable editors, people I have no reason to distrust, yet I keep checking their edits on my watchlist simply because I can't ever remember that 123.123.123.123 (or whatever) is the person who keeps working on the date pages. If they were editing under a name, after a week or so I'd easily remember the name, I'd know not to chase them around when I had no reason to...
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk