[WikiEN-l] Privacy policy, law and guessing identitites of anon users

Sat Jul 2 02:26:46 UTC 2005

Hi,

I'm a sysop in HuWiki and we have the following problem.
Some revert warriors took up the habit of logging out during a revert
war to get around the 3RR (we have the same 3RR rule as EnWiki).

So basically they are using their logged out IP as their sockpuppet
for revert warring.

When they were blocked since it was obvious from the anon users' edit
history and from the steps in the revert war that the anon and logged
in user was the same person, they started attacking the blocking
sysops for this, referring to their legal rights to privacy.

Also, for exactly the same reason, there is a collection of IP
addresses used by one of the revert warriors on a user page, so that
anyone can see where he edited from, even when he was not logged in.

The revert warrior and his friend claims that such a collection of IP
addresses is a violation of privacy rights and Wikipedia's published
privacy policy.

So my questions:

Is it against the privacy policy or the law to:

1a) publicly claim that an anon user is the same as a logged in User
when they take part in policy violations such as 3RR

1b) publicly claim that they are the same person when they haven't
violated any policies yet

2) publish a list of IP addresses assumed to belong to a user who have
already violated policy (3RR, personal attacks)

Thanks,
nyenyec