[Wikimedia-l] Update on IPv6

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Nathan, 13/06/2012 20:37:
> In my view, no. I think we need to balance the "risk" argument for
> anonymity (dissidents, whistleblowers, people editing topics they wouldn't
> want to be publicly associated with, etc.) with the benefits of partial
> anonymity. Among these benefits I'd cite the many news items regarding the
> discovery of fishy editing patterns from Congressional offices, corporate
> offices, government agencies, political candidates, etc.  We're an
> organization with competing aims: we'd like to be as transparent as
> possible, and by and large believe in the value of radical transparency,
> but we also want to protect our users from undue harm.

I'm quite surprised that only Nathan seems to be voicing this concern.
For many years when people criticized the lack of responsibility in 
Wikipedia's authors we've repeated that every word and comma is 
attributed to a person, either by pen name or IP, and that there's no 
need of a real name policy. The most important feature of MediaWiki is a 
[user] "tracking" feature: the diffs, the history, the contributions 
page; everything is transparent.
This is not needed to please some big brother fans but rather for the 
wiki (the community) to work; replacing IPs with unusable 
non-identifying strings would be a bad thing and it's not obvious at all 
that "improving privacy" is the prevalent aim here. In fact, the main 
problem with how IPv6 addresses are exposed in MediaWiki is that the 
bytes of information random users have to digest and remember to 
identify users are just too much and in a user-unfriendly format (even 
for the standard sysop). On the other hand, IPv6 will improve 
identification in a very good way; ISP are already heavily using NAT, 
and quite often hundreds or thousands of users in my city have been 
blocked on it.wiki by blocking just a single IPv4 address, not to 
mention community drama around dubious CheckUser results.
That said, we've used domains before IPs and it's surely possible to 
invent something new, although I don't have enough imagination to find a 
solution.

Nemo