Talk:IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/Archives/2022-12

Questions about timeline of these changes + the new user right

Just stumbled upon this subject and the ID-of-IPs change so forgive me if my questions have been asked & answered before...

1)When will this change maybe show up in the Eng WP?

2)Will non-admins be able to apply for this new user-right? I do a fair amount of vandal-fighting in my day-to-day editing around Eng WP and this upcoming tool/user-right would be really useful.

3)How will the Eng WP pages like "User contributions" and "User talk" for IPs be impacted? Will editors with the new user-right be able to see these pages? Or are those pages going to just disappear...

Thanks. Shearonink (talk) 22:07, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Hey, @Shearonink, if you don't mind an unofficial answer, here's what I'm hearing:

1. Not soon. Hopefully sometime in 2023, but we'll see. In the meantime, something you can do that would be helpful is to go to w:en:Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures (or Special:GlobalPreferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures for all wikis), enable the IP info item, and then use it on Special:Contribs for IPs (it produces a collapsed box at the top, and I think you have to officially agree to keep information confidential the first time). It automatically provides, e.g., the country that the IP is editing from, which can be useful if you're trying to figure out whether the person reads English well enough to understand the message you've left. Then post here to let the team know how well it is/isn't working for you. Maybe one question to ask is: How often is the stuff in the box inadequate for your purposes? When you need more information, what information is missing, and how do you use it?
2. Maybe. Probably. But that's just a guess. This is a question for Legal, not for the devs, and I understand that the devs are hoping they'll get an answer from Legal (maybe in February?). In the meantime, volunteer-me suggests that you e-mail a friendly admin or two, and have a candid discussion about whether you'd like to be an admin.
3. The method they describe in the previous update suggests that it will be easier to communicate with IP editors. They're looking at a sort of temporary account system, complete with an automatic, unique username (like "Temporary user 12345"), so you'd look for Special:Contributions/Temporary_user_12345 and leave messages on User_talk:Temporary_user_12345. This system could be pretty awesome.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:37, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

@Shearonink, I hear that the answer to #2 is going to be "yes", but they're still sorting out the details. It could be a couple of weeks before anything's official. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:45, 13 February 2023 (UTC)