Talk:IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/Archives/2020-01

Tools for improving current workflows

Hi all! Over the past few months we’ve been collecting existing use cases for IP addresses and brainstorming ideas for tools that can improve upon our existing workflows that involve IP addresses. A lot of work is involved a number of the current processes. Hence we came up with several ideas for tools that can automate some of necessary work and empower users to focus on the things that computers cannot take care of. This includes things like automatically fetching information about an IP address without needing a search engine and also automating some of the steps to find IP editors editing in proximity to a given IP editor or exhibiting similar behaviors. Our goal is to help save time for the communities, rather than add more work. We have put out these ideas on the Improving tools page. We would love to hear your thoughts about these on the talk page. Thanks in advance. -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 05:13, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

@NickK, MER-C, Someguy1221, SQL, Ruthven, Doc James, ChristianKl, Arthur Rubin, Ah3kal, Pelagic, and Nick-D: - Pinging some folks who have chimed in about tools earlier on this page. Your thoughts on the ideas put forth on improving tools would be very valuable. Thanks for your time. -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 22:31, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

@NKohli (WMF): Thanks for the ping. There is one argument in your statement that does not get any answer: It takes significant time and effort for new users to get accustomed to using IP addresses for blocking and filtering purposes.. None of these tools really improves it. Replacing a set of digits 198.73.209.241 with a set of digits 12345 simplifies nothing, it is still a set of numbers that don’t make sense (just not seemingly random but really random). However, for those who know how to use IPs it is more complex — NickK (talk) 13:46, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

@NKohli (WMF): Off the cuff? Being able to search UA's in the checkuser tool. It's already something we use (a common first step is to control-f part of the UA). Being baked in would be a huge help. Access to more browser headers. Being able to search those browser headers. SQL^{Query me!} 08:40, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

"Our goal is to help save time for the communities, rather than add more work" I would be more confident into that being your goals if it would be listed as in the goals of the project. Currently, those goals don't list anything about making it easier for admins to do their job then it's at the status quo. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 16:58, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

The main goal for this project is to get better at protecting unregistered user privacy, obviously. Because important workflows depend on that information, we need to do further development, at least going for status quo in how much time they consume, but definitely aiming to make it easier than it is today as opposed to harder. Does that make sense? I mean, "hide IPs" is not going to have "make it easier to fight vandalism, harassment and spam" as the main goal, but "better tools to fight vandalism, harassment and spam" is a necessary part of it and this would describe our goal for that. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 18:15, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

I don't speak for anyone but myself, but, unless the tools, without access to the IP addresses, make vandal-fighting easier than no tools, but with access to the IP addresses, IP masking should not be implemented. That seems a minimal metric to determining whether the tools goal has been met. — Arthur Rubin ^{T C} (en: U, T) 22:10, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Arthur Rubin's opinion. Any tools that's being made must be making it easier to fight vandalism, or else its function is just for hiding IPs (hence making it difficult for vandal-fighting). XoXo (talk) 03:13, 27 February 2020 (UTC)