[Wikimedia-l] Update on IPv6

[FT2]

Wikipedia has held since the start, a philosophy that some aspects of
neutral accessible editing are enhanced by pseudonymity.  One only need
look at early policies and current policies to see they started with strong
strict views on this, and retain strong strict views.  Reasons where it
matters are codified in policies themselves - freedom to edit without fear
of social backlash, freedom to edit unpopular views and topics or those
which would be professionally harmful, freedom to edit from places and
regimes where uninhibited authorship would be dangerous, freedom to be
judged by the edits one makes and not the person one is.

Obviously there are negatives too - ease of abuse, reduced ease of
detecting bad behavior, and so on.  None the less over time the view has
stuck, pseudonymity is a cornerstone of the environment we offer users and
that users may rely upon.  In that context, improving pseudonymity is a
valid goal. That an area established 10 years ago has not yet been fully
revised or brought into the 2010-2020 era is not salient. The same could be
said of many Mediawiki functions. Pseudonymity is "de facto" in the
culture, and part of our multi-branched attempt to facilitate neutral open
editing. It is an area of interest and an area where improvemenet and
advancement are worthwhile to seek. It is odd to rationalize that a user
with an account has safeguards which users without accounts should not
"deserve".

Most of the rest of your questiopns are technical - how would this or that
be done?  Those technical questions need technical consideration, but the
basic question is a non technicval one, as is my comment.  This is a
desirable area to dovetail.  How that works and to what extent cost v
benefit means we do some things but accept limitations on others, are
questions that technical people will need to consider.

FT2

On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 7:09 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 1:36 PM, FT2 <ft2.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> (snip)
>
>


> Why is "improving anonymity" a goal? Our privacy policy governs the
> disclosure of non-public information, but the IP addresses of editors
> without an account have always been effectively public. Are IP editors
> clamoring for more privacy? Is masking IPv6 addresses more important than
> the uses to which IP addresses are currently put? Is masking a better way
> to solve the problem of potentially more identifiable information in IPv6
> than, say, a more prominent disclosure and disclaimer? Would masking the IP
> addresses only for logged-out users be a worthwhile change, given the ease
> of registering an account? Would they remain masked in the histories of
> project dumps? There are a lot of questions to answer here before it's
> reasonable to start suggesting changes be made, and these are only some.
>
>