[moate]

Because that seems to be what the people in charge actually want but are half-assing in the name of optics.

IDGAF one way or the other, but if you're going to be banning millions of users from editing via their IP, just commit to saying "We need to be able to identify you vandals, and a user account is the easiest way".

You're either true to a mission statement, or you should stop virtue signaling beliefs you don't hold with your mission statement.

[fennecfoxen]

> Because that seems to be what the people in charge actually want but are half-assing in the name of optics.

Most certainly not. The people in charge actually want it to be open. You are simply watching those ambitions splinter somewhat as they are beset by the crashing waves of the harsh reality that is the Internet.

[KennyBlanken]

"Want it to be open" but ban mobile network IP addresses, which basically guarantees people below a certain socioeconomic status can't contribute. Loads of people don't have a desktop/laptop, or even internet service at home - just cell service.

[hombre_fatal]

They can thank abusers for that.

But note that requiring authentication to edit doesn’t necessarily change anything about abuse, yet this thread seems to suggest that people think it does.

Just means you need to farm a POST /register. You can attach a one time use account to every abusive edit and it’s no big deal.

[Kim_Bruning]

If the concern is socioeconomic status: One could still edit from a library, for instance.

But yeah, the internet has changed over time, and it is not as nice a place as it used to be.

I think it's important that there are still sites where people don't need an account to be able to participate. Wikipedia is one of the last holdouts in the West, and they clearly are having some amount of trouble keeping it 100% that way.

Given that you need to prevent abuse, how would you propose to keep things (more) open?

[moate]

>>If the concern is socioeconomic status: One could still edit from a library, for instance.

Just to be clear, your response to "disadvantaged people would likely have a hard time editing Wikipedia from an 'anon' IPs" is "take time and energy (finite resources that are in many cases more valuable than money) and travel somewhere to edit". This is...not a very good argument in your favor? Also, it makes the extremely bold assumption that the library (or whatever publicly available resource) is not IP banned itself because some vandal had the exact same thought.

>>I think it's important that there are still sites where people don't need an account to be able to participate.

Why? If this is important, why isn't it important for everyone? The point I, and other commenters have made, is that you shouldn't say "We care about a free and open internet" when what you mean is "We care about a free and open internet as long as nobody does anything we don't like and we're able to regulate it as we see fit".

These things are a binary, not a scale, despite what some people want to argue. When you start blanket bans that harm people who have done nothing wrong, you're taking a step towards authoritarian and away from pure openness. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" is pointedly saying "we are not prioritizing your needs" and that's what moderation is.

>>Given that you need to prevent abuse, how would you propose to keep things (more) open?

You're admitting defeat here, and showing how useless a word like "free" or "open" is. The site is not more or less open, it's open or closed for some. You being able to freely edit does nothing for my inability to freely edit. You can't average these things together and say "99% of people are free to do what they want" as if that was a meaningful statement for the people who can't. Moderation is antithetical to "free" or "open" speech. I'm for moderation, I just want people to stop pretending that you can have it both ways.

[Kim_Bruning]

I appreciate your advocacy for Wikipedia to continue to allow everyone to edit anonymously. When I was a wikipedia regular I also pushed for this.

Unfortunately, as with everything, some people do abuse this facility. Some abuse it to place misinformation on wikipedia. Other people (like bored teenagers) might vandalize the wiki by deleting all the content on the page and replacing it with a pithy epithet. Then there are bots that skim the internet looking for mediawiki sites and filling them with adverts.

Sometimes you need to block these kinds of activity. Sometimes such abuse comes from a shared address or range, and sometimes such a block thus leads to (hopefully temporary) blocking of innocent bystanders. That is bad.

There are facilities in place to help prevent innocent bystanders from getting caught up. But it's a constant arms race. And if nothing is done at all, wikipedia would quickly cease to operate.

The community discussion is about this situation. Current internet trends have more people editing from behind proxies or shared IP addresses. If these trends continue, perhaps wikimedia will have to figure out new ways to fight abuse and while still allowing people to continue to edit anonymously. This is not something that has happened or will happen by itself. It takes and will take constant monitoring.

I don't think it's a good idea to then just go ahead abolish anonymous editing like some people suggest. Being anonymous on the internet is a great thing that should be a right. We need to continue to find ways to preserve anonymity (and pseudonymity!), and also continue to find ways to keep bad actors from ruining it for anyone else.

Having anonymous participants is orthogonal to whether your community is moderated by the way. In fact you can even have anonymous moderation (which has been a part of how wikipedia works) .

[moate]

I think you make valid points pretty much top to bottom. Less tracking on the internet would make me feel better. "Bad" content on a site will corrupt or ruin its ability to function.

I just (ironically?) hate crusaders, and the type of people who proclaim (as wikipedia does) that they're Doing Their Best(tm) to adhere to their stated goal(pseudo-anon editing with IP based tracking) while doing something that undercuts that goal for millions (blanket IP bans).

I guess my ultimate complaint is that the continued mercy of the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents causes people to do things antithetical to what they say they want. That people refuse to live in nuance and continue to pretend they hold themselves to a higher standard that they frequently do not when pressed with any sort of complication.

I understand we live in a society and in order for it to function there are tradeoffs, and I'm not one of these "free speech has been completely killed by cancel culture" nutjobs, but I hate when people speak out of both sides of their mouth which is what Wikipedia does (IMO) when it comes to their moderation/contributor policy. Abolishing anon editing puts everyone on a level playing field (you want to contribute, you have to sign up).

Am I being Just or just Vindictive? IDK, and I'll admit that's open to interpretation. It just feels more fair to me to throw your hands up and admit that vandals are why we can't have nice things than to say APR users are collectively lesser than AT&T users. One feels defensibly, the other feels like logical contortion.

[moate]

This is a semantics debate, and a good faith read of each our comments seems to show agreement in our understanding of the situation. "Want" does a lot of lifting, and they want 2 contradictory things (no vandals, anyone can edit) and are prioritizing those wants.

I'm saying that by prioritizing the want of "no vandals" you are making want of "open to everyone" untenable. I'm sure their actual top priority is "the best, most accurate listing of information" and everything else is in service of that goal, but I don't really care.

My point stands: If you want anyone to be able to edit anywhere at any time, you can have that but you make trade-offs. Saying "vandals are bad and need to be stopped" is actually not an objective fact, it's a choice about what information you hold valuable.