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

[Charles Matthews]

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 2:10 AM, Charles > 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.
>>     
>
> Rightly so, no? You're placing a lot of trust in WMF and the
> developers of MediaWiki if you continue to edit "anonymously" and rely
> on that anonymity to protect yourself f rom harm.
>
>   
You should note that there has been extensive debate in the past. The 
WMF is somewhere on an axis labelled at one end "careless" and the other 
end "Swiss bank", in handling personal information. The formulation that 
the WMF, checkusers and so on take "reasonable care" with personal 
information just about says it. That's closer to "Swiss bank" than the 
other end of the scale, but hardly an absolute guarantee. And we're 
still almost all amateurs. The WMF systems couldn't satisfy security 
experts, if that's the criterion.

Charles