Talk:IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/Archives/2020-03

Regarding a kind of single-IP block

Some schools and institutions use fixed IPs. There are always sort of vandalism from these IP. Consider the following situation:

IP 111.111.111.111 belongs to a primary school whose students are under 12. There're always some naughty kids making fun by corrupting some Wikipedia articles. Though their edit pattern are totally different, sysops still block this IP for 2 years, since this IP has been abused for at least 3 years.

In this case, different trouble makers in the same school could be identified as different "Anon User"s, as mentioned in the proposal, because they use different cookies, have a significant gap in time of editing and other possible reasons. Thus, sysops will not apply a long-term block on one "Anon User" because each "Anon User" acts differently and the next time they will be a new "Anon User". We lose the connection (that they share the same IP) between them. Therefore, we are not able to know that an IP should be blocked, even though the new tools provides IP-block function in a way not revealing the IP. The consequence is more energy spent for anti-vandalism works.

This may be an issue related to how "Anon User" are identified. If all the trouble makers in this school are identified as the same user, then their privacy seems to be weakened because the public will know that they were once in the same school in a specific area (rough information about the IP will be provided instead of the IP itself as proposed).--Tiger- (talk) 15:41, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Thank you. Just to be clear, it's very possible that we'd suggest an implementation where this case would actually show up as one user, similar to today in that sense. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 07:54, 20 March 2020 (UTC)