On 11/25/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info> wrote:
Those of us with checkuser and oversight stand ready
to do anything
we can to deal with these situations, including deleting user and
talk pages, and removing personal information using oversight. Best
defense is maintaining anonymity.
Perhaps the worst cases of material harm to our users that we've seen
are to users who thought there were anonymous and edited in ways which
they wouldn't want made public... only to later discover that
anonymity is terribly fragile.
We're not an anonymity service. Anonymity is by it's very nature
terribly fragile. We take a great risk of causing harm if we encourage
people to believe they are more anonymous than they actually are.
The world is a scary place at time, we can't solve that. We can, and
do, avoid our own project being a fertile breeding grow for the worst
of the loons.
We need to keep focused on culling the worst and not waste our time
with impossible goals like providing a nutcase free zone or providing
unbreakable anonymity.