| 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) . |
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.