[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia privacy

[Oliver Pereira]

Hello,

On Mon, 7 Apr 2003, Toby Bartels wrote:

> I can see the argument that the GFDL requires that we keep track of
> every contributor -- I buy that "the Wikipedia community" is
> insufficient. What I don't understand is the difference between a
> pseudonymous ID like "maveric149" and a pseudonymous ID like
> "12.246.119.xxx" (which is not *anonymous* either).

The difference is that a user name identifies a user, while an IP address
only identifies the computer they happen to be working on at the time, or,
worse, only what ISP they are using. The IP address is therefore not an
identifier of a person, because many different people can use the same IP
address at different times. Of course, the same applies to the user name
if someone allows their account to be used by someone else, or if their
account is hacked, but this only happens very rarely.

> Your contribution will be logged under the identifier ~~~. Depending on
> how your Internet service provider works, future contributions by you
> may or may not have this same identifier, and future contributions
> logged under this identifier may or may not always be from you.

That last point is important. If contributions with this "identifier" may
be from different people, then by definition it is not an identifier at
all. As a mathematician, you should know this. :)

I'm going to ask something terribly controversial now. What sort of
serious encyclopaedia allows anonymous contributions anyway?

As far as I know, none. Okay, so the fact that nobody else has done it
before is not itself a strong argument. We're *supposed* to be pioneers
here, after all! But I think that a lot of people are put off the
Wikipedia because of a perception (partly justified, I think) that if
people can just drop in at any time, post something, and then slink away
again without anyone seeing who they are, then it's going to end up
containing a lot of nonsense. If we made people give their real names,
then I think people would be less inclined to post incorrect information.
I think people would take the project more seriously, and although we
would lose a few contributors, I think we would gain just as many by
appearing to be a more serious project. And for the same reason, the new
contributors would largely be terribly sensible people who had previously
dismissed the project as being too silly for them. So quite likely they
would, on average, be better contributors.

Okay, I do have sympathy with those who argue that people who post
political information that their government might not approve of should be
free to do so without fear of being harassed by their government. But I
think that the aim of the Wikipedia should be to become a serious
encyclopaedia more than a refuge for political dissidents. Since we are
only supposed to be adding verifiable information, anything which an
oppressed person in one country could add should also be available in
other countries, and so could easily be added by someone in another
country who is less fearful of their government.

Oliver

P.S. - Any opinions expressed in this e-mail are entirely those of section
346 subsection 8730-a of my brain, and do not reflect the views of any
other sections thereof, some of which are far more liberal and/or
paranoid, but I like to give them all an airing from time to time. ;)

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+