On 20/10/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam(a)inbox.org> wrote:
A username is
more anonymous than an IP, and provides a greater sense of
identity. It's impossible to tell which of an IP's edits are good and
bad, because good and bad users could be using it.
"A username is more anonymous than an IP, and [a username] provides a
greater sense of identity"? I must not be understanding what you mean,
because that statement seems to contradict itself.
If you edit as an IP which resolves to
452c.student-resnet.chicago.edu, I can tell a surprising amount about
you. If you edit as [[User:Chicago_guy]], I can't.
But it's a lot *easier* for the community to attatch an identity to
the one with a username, rather than the one with an IP. There's a
couple of IPs that I know are good, reliable editors, people I have no
reason to distrust, yet I keep checking their edits on my watchlist
simply because I can't ever remember that 123.123.123.123 (or
whatever) is the person who keeps working on the date pages. If they
were editing under a name, after a week or so I'd easily remember the
name, I'd know not to chase them around when I had no reason to...
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk