[WikiEN-l] Ramifications to wikipedians of unmasking of police blogger?

[Charles Matthews]

Daniel R. Tobias wrot. e:
> On Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:58:08 +1000, Steve Bennett wrote:
>
>   
>> Is anonymity important to many Wikipedia contributors? I had sort of
>> assumed we provided anonymity as a sort of courtesy, not as any real
>> right.
>>     
>
> You were apparently absent during the BADSITES Wars of a couple of 
> years ago, where one of the principle arguments for draconian stands 
> against linking to so-called "attack sites", and for McCarthyite 
> witchhunts against anybody seen as in any way connected with them, 
> was that those sites were engaged in "outing" Wikipedians.
>
>   
As a consequence of various sustained dirty tricks campaigns, no doubt 
all intelligent people editing Wikipedia pseudonymously, and for whom 
revelation of their real-life identity would be a disaster, simply 
stopped doing that. If we note that Steve is asking "is it important to 
many?", and the whole BADSITES business was not about "many" in any 
sense, we can conclude that your need to namecheck it rather outstrips 
your sense of proportion.  It is true enough that some "attack sites" 
people aimed to make enWP in particular less governable, and they failed 
in that, though not without creating some fairly grim onsite situations 
which echo on. But I think Steve is approaching this from the wrong end, 
anyway. In Internet terms, it is not the uses of personal information 
that you know about that create the real issues, it is the uses you 
don't anticipate. 

Charles