[Wikimedia-l] Update on IPv6

[Nathan]

On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 3:18 PM, Risker <risker.wp at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> The original Wikipedia platform (lo those long years ago) published only
> partial IP addresses.  Today, "significantly less transparency" seems to
> mean "create an acccount" to many people. However, that is antithetical to
> the "anyone can edit" principle on which our projects are based.  "Anyone
> can edit, as long as they don't mind that everyone in the world will know
> where they're from, what ISP they use, and possibly even the physical
> location from which they are editing and what equipment they're using to do
> so,  unless they create an account" is what it has become.
>

I'm not sure I understand how "create an account" is antithetical to
"anyone can edit". Are you saying there is some bar to creating an account
that prevents some people from editing? People can choose to use an account
name or choose to edit from an IP address. You're suggesting making account
names mandatory and dynamic, I'm not seeing how that is a necessary
outgrowth of "anyone can edit."


>
> We want the edits. We don't need to know the rest, and never have. If we
> needed to know that information, we would have decided not to permit
> account-based editing in the first place.  There's no template at the
> bottom of the talk pages of editors with accounts that allows
> identification and geolocation of their IP.  If it's useful for logged-out
> editors, it is just as useful for logged-in ones, according to the
> "transparency" logic.
>
>
Sure - the same principle that makes IP information useful for transparency
purposes works as well on IP editors as it does on account holders. But
account holders have chosen to restrict access to that information, and IP
editors have not. A better solution to mandating automatically assigned
account names is to provide reasonable education and disclosure (say, a
pop-up on first edit or something else fairly prominent) to people editing
without an account. That way we let users judge privacy for themselves, and
preserve the usefulness of IP data when a user chooses to disclose it.

Risker wrote:

"I am struggling to think of any other website of any nature that I have
ever visited that publicly identifies editors/posters by their IP address,
except for a few other wikis.  I've seen "unregistered user" before, and
similar nomenclature. Can anyone think of another site (regardless of
purpose) that links the editor/poster publicly to their full IP address?"

IP address, no. Facebook profile (which is, as for most people, under my
real name)? Sure. Even so, a comparison between Wikimedia and Google or the
NY Times or Facebook or Gawker etc. fails because it does not recognize the
many philosophical and practical differences between those sites and a
Wikimedia project.