Talk:IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/Archives/2023-10

IP as an indicator of reliability of edits

quite often i would click the "geolocate" link to check the location of ip. it helps to determine whether certain edits are probably helpful (made by people with the specific knowledge), or test/vandalism (made by people who're quite unlikely to have the knowledge).

now this use would be gone for most editors. RZuo (talk) 18:06, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Hello @RZuo. Yes, you're correct, this will be gone for most editors. Even though most patrollers continue to have access to the full IP info feature, using geopositioning to assess if the edit may be factually correct is not within the purpose of having this information in the first place. It's more like a side-effect. Privacy-related reasons do take precedence.

I think this may be a good topic for conversations in individual communities – what to do with unclear cases given that less data about internet users is public. And that is an external trend. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 19:07, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

you talk about privacy. do you also include an option for ip users to willfully reveal their ip? there're users that deliberately edit without logging in, because they think revealing nothing but their ip is safer than an account.

it's not so straightforward to track down a person who's using different ips, but using an account makes it super easy to find out an account holder is using certain ips, which in turn would reveal more info about their real life.

in big cities, it's also common when those users edit using public computers/networks, which are often used by multiple persons. without an account it's harder to tell them apart. that's the art of hiding in the crowd.

so, all the talk about privacy is rather bullshit. ips are better than accounts in terms of privacy consideration.

in fact, the best thing to enhance privacy protection is to allow proxy ips. how about that? RZuo (talk) 19:34, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

If editors are not given the option to refuse all cookies and be identified for attribution purposes by IP address the scheme will not be legal [1]. 89.240.116.163 22:55, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

"Any time", really?

Moved from Talk:IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/FAQ

Should "Any time you publish an edit on Wikipedia or other sites hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation without logging into a registered account" (why mention Wikipedia in particular?) be replaced with something like "any time you publish an edit ... without logging into a registered account or being logged into à temporary account" (because a new temporary account will generally not be created for each edit)? Apokrif (talk) 10:14, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks @Apokrif, that's a good point, I will change this sentence. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 13:19, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

Will this be a feature on just Wikimedia's sites...

...or will it be native to the MediaWiki software itself in the near future? (H/T mw:Project:Support desk.) --Slgrandson (talk) 23:46, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

It is a MediaWiki core feature, controlled by $wgAutoCreateTempUser (plus disabling IP editing by setting $wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false for some reason, maybe just to make sure? or does it make a difference?). —Tacsipacsi (talk) 22:44, 28 October 2023 (UTC)