Talk:IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/Archives/2020-07

Local discussions about the tools

Hi everyone, we had a number of local discussions to gather information about workflows we could be missing due to differences between wikis and things we didn't know because of the language gap. To keep you informed about what we're doing and the tool feedback we're getting, we've written a simple report at IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/Improving tools/Local discussions 202006. You can see the post that was used on most wikis in English here if you want to know what we were asking: IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/Improving tools/Discussion starter. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 10:12, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

• @Johan (WMF): For a set to tools to even be a viable claim of compensating for the damage done by a limitation in those who can't see and utilise all the information they could, we should logically have some criteria for that - with an assessment for some period of time before and a trial run of some length after. If extra tools will come on in the interim before masking may then grabbing some figures before then would be important. These criteria would need to be somewhat mixed, but would involve things like the level of time to handle bad edits, block negative editors, and dealing with IP socks (one of the more relevant bits on IPs), there's also an accuracy aspect that's a little trickier to determine, perhaps on viable unblocks etc. There's also a perception effort of users - if users drop parts of their efforts we'd be worse off even if the reduced remaining pool of editors were individually quicker. All this is open to probably a significant amount of discussion, but if you bring in a change and a local community is worse off it's not going to aid. This is particularly the case with a low-hanging fruit issue - I've still not heard (or, I hope not, missed) how the tools will make IPs as easy to identify they are now (i.e. changing cookie/session should not be enough). Nosebagbear (talk)

Yes, we agree that we need to find criteria to figure out impact, and we're aware this remains to be done. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 15:42, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

• On a different tack, and hoping some negotiation might aid us, (despite the fairly convincing poll above), the archived discussion included some consideration from editors and NKohli on who would be able to see unmasked IPs. Obviously CUs can see everyone's IPs (in line with policy) and everyone can currently see IPs. I think there'd be functionally no resistance were that visibility set at AC or EC, but that appeared to be insufficient. A huge amount of work in this area is done by non-admins, so just limiting it to them would be an insufficient action. Perhaps a distinct userright at an agreed set of criteria might be the way to go (and as an additional benefit, particularly from the local community answers, local communities being able to limit to either "just CUs", "Just CUs & admins" and "CU, admins, userright holders" might further answer certain focuses. Nosebagbear (talk) 19:46, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

Yes, we're aware of the feedback here and the implications of a very narrow number of people with access to this data – I'm a CU myself in my volunteer role, and I've got no desire to add this to my volunteer workload. This isn't because we have ignored the feedback and are keeping silent about decisions made, but because this is largely an investigation, not a proposal with solutions. I know the typical Wikimedia thing to do is to say "we want to do this thing, and here's our solution", and a lot of people feel it seems like we should figure out more things about what we want to do first before we waste people's time, but we're not really certain about exactly how we want to solve this, which is why this is a long-term development project where it's difficult to give straight answers about how we plan to solve things. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 15:42, 13 July 2020 (UTC)