On Apr 8, 2015 11:12 AM, "Kevin Wayne Williams" <kwwilli...@kwwilliams.com> wrote: > > Cristian Consonni schreef op 2015/04/08 om 3:00: > >> 2015-04-05 17:31 GMT+02:00 Brian Wolff <bawo...@gmail.com>: >>> >>> Things that come to my mind: >>> *range blocks become impossible, and its impossible to tell if vandals are >>> using near by ips >>> *cant do a whois on the ip to see if its a library or something >> >> >> Oh, I didn't think about this! >> >> What about: >> * creating a new permission group (say "IP watchers") that can see the >> IP in non-hashed form? >> * compile some sort of list and automatically tagging edits from >> schools and libraries? (this could be useful regardless of hashing >> IPs) >> > You are solving a problem that doesn't exist and creating more serious ones. There really is no "right to privacy" as it extends to editing Wikipedia, and that the WMF has manufactured one is more a source of trouble then benefit. > > As it stands, pretty much any technically literate user can look at editing histories and begin contributing in analyzing vandalism patterns and making reports and decisions about them. I rely heavily on well-formed reports of vandalism by users that have already done the preliminary grunt work of detecting similar edits from people in the same geographic region or carrier, and I don't want anything that makes it more difficult for them to do it. Vandalism and block-evasion are *real* problems. The imaginary right to carry out public actions anonymously shouldn't get in the way of solving them. > > KWW > > >
Systemic bias due to real life consequences (or precieved real life consequences) to online actions is also a real problem (or potential to be anyhow. I don't know if anyone has attempted to measure that). For some people that might be fear of the nsa (or equivalent agency/evil big gov) but one doesn't have to reach for the gov boogyman to see legitament needs for privacy - harrasment campaigns by groups like wikipediocracy demonstrate why privacy is important. Which is why we have things like logged in users for pseudoanonoyminity. Privacy and abuse mitigation are both goods but they are at odds. Where the appropriate balance is, is debatable but i think everyone would agree that extremes in either direction are not good for wikis (on one end you have citizendium - not very much vandalism on that site, not much of anything else either. On the other end you would have what would happen if we totally eliminated users (anon and registered) and all edits are independent of each other, which sounds unworkable to me at least but maybe extreme soft security [1] advocates would like it) Tl;dr: both privacy and abuse mitigation are important. Extremes in either direction would suck, it is important to discuss trade-offs and find the best balance, which potentially might even be the status quo. --bawolff [1] http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/SoftSecurity _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
