--- Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote:
Some people who are engaged in controversial conversation that may
endanger their lives may very well feel the need for the protection
of
an anonymous proxy. An example might be a Chinese dissident
operating
secretly from within China to rally pro-democracy, pro-freedom
support overseas.
None of those kind of uses applies in the case of
Wikipedia.
This is an incorrect argument. In fact, for someone living in a
typical repressive regime, writing articles that we would all
agree are NPOV is quite good enough reason to get into
trouble.
Let me now reveal my personal interest in this issue. While I'm
at home I use my family ISP with no special anonomity except a
made-up username. When I'm at work, I use an anonymizer.
I can't claim that this is seriously important, but for reasons I
don't choose to explain I think I would stop writing from work if
this method became unavailable. I'd be surprised if I'm alone
in this.
In addition, I have not yet seen a case being made that an
anonymizer is essentially different from an ISP that assigns
dynamic IP numbers. As far as Wikipedia is concerned,
what distinguises someone editing through an anonymizer
and someone with an IP randomly assigned from a pool of
IPs belonging to a large ISP? In the latter case it may be
possible to determine the approximate geographical location,
but why does that matter? I suggest that there is no essential
difference at all.
Zero.
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