On 11/25/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
Those of us with checkuser and oversight stand ready to do anything we can to deal with these situations, including deleting user and talk pages, and removing personal information using oversight. Best defense is maintaining anonymity.
Perhaps the worst cases of material harm to our users that we've seen are to users who thought there were anonymous and edited in ways which they wouldn't want made public... only to later discover that anonymity is terribly fragile.
We're not an anonymity service. Anonymity is by it's very nature terribly fragile. We take a great risk of causing harm if we encourage people to believe they are more anonymous than they actually are.
The world is a scary place at time, we can't solve that. We can, and do, avoid our own project being a fertile breeding grow for the worst of the loons.
We need to keep focused on culling the worst and not waste our time with impossible goals like providing a nutcase free zone or providing unbreakable anonymity.