On 30 March 2015 at 00:24, Brian J Mingus <brian.min...@colorado.edu> wrote: > Just like the Netflix Prize, knowing which topics an entity is interested > in, and having access to text they have written, is, in many cases, enough > information to reveal who that person is, where they live, etc. You just > plug the data into Google and correlate away.
Then if we want to stop being being able to identify our users, we would have to stop allowing our users to write things... More seriously, yes, we *could* do radical anonymisation of all contributions to Wikipedia - it would be technically possible to make every non-account contribution labelled "anonymous" (one giant pseudo-account?) rather than an IP number, removing any linkage between those edits. But that would have immense social costs on the Wikipedia community - we would lose a substantial proportion of our capacity to prevent spamming, vandalism, defamation, or other forms of abuse, and put substantially more work on our volunteers handling these problems. I really doubt our overworked community would be able to cope with that. Some kind of semi-anonymisation, as James suggests, is workable, obfuscating IPs - but not complete disconnection. The other alternative would be to close off unregistered contributions, which has been discussed repeatedly in the past and is generally unpopular. But it's achievable with our current setup, and if you want to change things advocating for that might be a better approach. A. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l