[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia privacy

Thu Apr 3 17:51:31 UTC 2003

Fred Bauder wrote:
> There are a few people (for example sitting judges) who need
> anonymity. For some other people it may be desirable, if not
> necessary. However most of our anonymous users have no real reason
> for anonymity.

Well, I side generally with those who say that we should respect
anonymity.  But I also still say that allowing sysops to access
signed-in-users ip numbers for the purpose of stopping
logged-in-vandal-attacks is not a significant compromise of anyone's
anonymity.

People seem to have a wrong idea of how much information an ip number
contains.  Usually, very little.  An ip number gets you as far as an
ISP, no further.  There may be rare exceptions, but in the main,
knowing an ip number doesn't tell you very much that's personally
identifiable about a person.

We should respect anonymity, but we should also recognize that there
are a lot of myths about anonymity.  Just think how many people refuse
to log in because they want to remain anonymous.  They don't really
get it, I think.

--------

I think a useful distinction can be made between anonymity and
privacy.  Privacy is impossible in the wikipedia context -- people can
see everything that we do.  But anonymity is pretty easy -- people can
see everything that we do, we can associate individual edits with
individual markers (accounts, ip numbers), but we have *no* real way
to get at who people really are, without going through some actual
process with an ISP.

--Jimbo