[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia policy towards anonymous contributions and contributors

[Monahon, Peter B.]

" Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this
right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to
seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and
regardless of frontiers." - Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, Adopted and proclaimed by General Assembly resolution 217 A
(III) of 10 December 1948

(was Re: The price of providing privacy and free speech)

> Please take discussions of this 
> sort to a mailing list where it is 
> on-topic.

Hmm ... regarding "...discussions of this sort...", which I see as
"Wikipedia policy towards anonymous contributions and contributors" or
the use of http://tor.eff.org/ versus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_open_proxies, do you have a
suggestion of a better place?  

Personally I think we - Wikipedia - should stand up for Tor operators
who get abused.  We - Wikipedia - should at least understand the
difference between our own policy against anonymous contributions or
contributors on Wikipedia (a prohibition with which I disagree), versus
totally unrelated features and benefits of Internet anonymity (though I
think these issues are totally related to Wikipedia).  Just because we
may block anonymous contributions and contributors shouldn't mean we
think anonymity itself is always bad or that we are neutral to it.  

In fact, we - Wikipedia - have many layers of protection to allow people
to remain anonymous to everyone but ourselves (our admins, webmasters,
sysops know who you are!), so we should be very, very sympathetic to
such stories as
http://committeetoprotectbloggers.org/2007/09/17/german-tor-administrato
r-arrested/

--

> Apologies - I've now seen the 
> thread about AB being put on 
> moderation.  In future, I'll 
> queue posts for batch replying 
> after having checked out
> newer threads. Thank you to 
> the moderators.

I don't mind your goof.  I think we all contribute posts that we might
later want to rescind or edit afterwards.  I also don't mind what I
believe is your misunderstanding of what I believe is the very on-topic
nature of the previous posts.  However, I like your solicitation and
consideration of others here, and I wish we all were as forgiving of
each other's on- or off-point, accurate- or inaccurate-posts, as you as
ask to be towards you.