Daniel R. Tobias wrot. e: > On Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:58:08 +1000, Steve Bennett wrote: > > >> Is anonymity important to many Wikipedia contributors? I had sort of >> assumed we provided anonymity as a sort of courtesy, not as any real >> right. >> > > You were apparently absent during the BADSITES Wars of a couple of > years ago, where one of the principle arguments for draconian stands > against linking to so-called "attack sites", and for McCarthyite > witchhunts against anybody seen as in any way connected with them, > was that those sites were engaged in "outing" Wikipedians. > > As a consequence of various sustained dirty tricks campaigns, no doubt all intelligent people editing Wikipedia pseudonymously, and for whom revelation of their real-life identity would be a disaster, simply stopped doing that. If we note that Steve is asking "is it important to many?", and the whole BADSITES business was not about "many" in any sense, we can conclude that your need to namecheck it rather outstrips your sense of proportion. It is true enough that some "attack sites" people aimed to make enWP in particular less governable, and they failed in that, though not without creating some fairly grim onsite situations which echo on. But I think Steve is approaching this from the wrong end, anyway. In Internet terms, it is not the uses of personal information that you know about that create the real issues, it is the uses you don't anticipate.
Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l