On 12/12/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Yes, there are anonymizer tools, but
* most of them are quite slow
* they are not always built to be used on a per-page basis
* they may cost money, or contain spyware, etc.
And:
* they're all anonymous proxies and therefore banned from editing (generally).
The counterargument is that to gain transparency for the project,
participants should be willing to sacrifice some privacy, and that if
they aren't willing to publicly admit to their efforts, they're
immediately suspect. Needless to say, this counterargument becomes
more questionable when it gets to sensitive issues like gay midget
pornography and Scientology. I like the idea of transparency, but on
some topics at least we need some anonymity to get people to
participate, I suspect.
On 12/12/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
There are several possibilities to fix that.
Either the use of the tool is much more widely made possible, increasing
the check and balances (and thus reducing risks of abuse). Eg, giving
the tool to all admins.
I think this would be a nice compromise, with one proviso: the log is
made public as far as is possible without posting IP addresses. One
straightforward proposition would be to blank out IP addresses in the
log for non-admins, but leave usernames intact, and leave a record of
the IP address examination (just not which IP was examined).
This would give reasonable but not total protection to advocates of
gay midget pornography. Any admin could get their IP addresses on a
pretext, but if the pretext isn't good enough they risk getting sacked
(hopefully, although enwiki at least has a pretty poor track record
here).
The downside is it would require superficially radical privacy-policy
changes, and might alienate some users. I suspect the latter effect
would be temporary, though: as Tim says, if anything had been that way
all along, it would probably cause little complaint. As for the
former, I say "superficially" because in practice, it's not like the
privacy policy protects most editors anyway, given that they're
anonymous.
Or on the contrary, limiting the use of the tool by
reducing number of
people with access, strengthening the rules, and applying the rules
strictly (in short, in case of abuse, removing access rather than simply
whining).
Then people start banning sockpuppets on random suspicion when the
response time for checkuser gets too long. Transparency is the right
direction to head in.