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Ban on IPs on ptwiki, paid editing for Tatarstan, IP masking

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By Érico, Bri, Smallbones and Tilman Bayer
Information placed on English Wikipedia is paid for by the Government of Tatarstan (Дом правительства Татарстана – Cabinet of Ministers building, Kazan, Tatarstan shown).

Portuguese Wikipedia bans IP editing

Disclosure: the author Érico actively participated in the discussions on ptwiki

In early October ptwiki banned editing by unregistered editors, who are often called anonymous or IP editors. The ban is already being implemented.

The issue has been debated many times since the beginning of Portuguese Wikipedia and has always been very controversial. In recent years the ptwiki community came to an unofficial common understanding that vandalism by IP editors was out of control. IPs were responsible for 85% of vandalism. Despite all the anti-vandalism systems being used, from Huggle to dozens of editing filters, vandalism was no longer being effectively controlled.

The project routinely received complaints that vandalism remained in articles not just for days or months, but for years. It was rare to see IP editors making useful edits within the rules. The community discussed the topic and decided to vote on the subject. More than 70% of voters were in favor of preventing edits from IPs in the main domain and 82% were in favor of preventing article creation by IPs.

This was one of the largest and most decisive votes in the project's history: 169 votes in favor, 69 votes against. The community then contacted the WMF Board of Trustees to argue in favor of the new rule. The WMF has not responded so far, but neither have they interfered. It is not necessary for the WMF to take action, as IP edits are being prohibited through edit filters and IP range blocks.

One community concern is that there could be other interference from people outside the community, who might not listen to their concerns. Such interference has happened before with the developers community, which simply said that banning IP editors was impossible - "this isn't going to happen." Can someone with no experience on ptwiki say "it is simply not possible to ban IPs"? Since the ban was carried out, there has been a substantial increase in creation of accounts and vandalism rates have decreased significantly, allowing editors to spend their energies creating and referencing articles. – É

Government of Tatarstan paying for editing

Kazan written in embellished Arabic script

The government of the Republic of Tatarstan, part of the Russian Federation, will be paying for articles on the Russian Wikipedia, which will then be translated for inclusion on the Tatar Wikipedia and the English Wikipedia, according to reports on Russian Wikinews. Farhad Fatkullin, 2018 Wikipedian of the Year, helped organize the tender with the Tatarstan Investment Development Agency (TIDA) which was won by Anna Biryukova. According to Fatkullin, "TIDA is interested to have Tatarstan-related materials available also in at least 8 more languages, which are German, French, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean."[1]

Vladimir Medeyko, director of Wikimedia RU, said that the chapter assisted in the tender "to help formulate its conditions in the most correct way. In my opinion, this has been achieved, and I am grateful to Farhad." However, they did not place a bid. "We studied the issue of participation in it. I must say that in general we were wary of this in connection with possible reputational risks."

The contract, which has not yet been signed, covers 51 articles, or sections of articles, on ruwiki, plus the translations for tawiki and enwiki, with payment expected to be 990,000 rubles (about $12,500).

Biryukova is a well known commercial paid editor on ruwiki, according to Ymblanter,[2] and declares her paid status on her enwiki user page. According to that page she's worked as a paid editor on 7 articles.

Ymblanter compared the project to Gibraltarpedia, a troubled project paid for by the Gibraltar government which worked with a former board chairman of Wikimedia UK to increase tourism. Ymblanter says "I am not sure why this project should turn out any differently."

He continued "The government of Tatarstan is not the most democratic institution in the world. I expect that most edits would be uncontroversial, but some probably would not be, and we might very well be in a situation when a user is being paid to add POV to articles. In the English Wikipedia, these articles are poorly monitored, and users prefer not to deal with Eastern European topics which have a well-deserved reputation of … POV pushing and edit-warring."

The Signpost asked Fatkullin about concerns that accepting money from the government to write Wikipedia articles had ominous overtones. He responded, in part:

I love the fact that Wikipedia … is seen by many as the place where people manage to find consensus around phrasing their differences in a civil manner & that diversity of views present benefit its readers, promoting the mission of free knowledge. I would clearly like to see institutions and individuals from around the world contributing to and otherwise supporting as many Wikimedia projects in as many languages as they find attractive. … Our main safeguards against "officially approved" government, private, NGO or individually-pushed POV is in following m:Founding principles and WP:5P, whilst democracy without pluralism is indeed the road to hell paved by good intentions.

Biryukova replied to our questions by saying: "The work doesn't imply any influence on the text on the part of the customer. Wikipedia rules are always more important." She added that the work was not profitable from her point of view. "The authors, whom I have involved in this project, understand and accept this fact. From their side, [the] work is more like volunteering". – S

Notes:
  1. ^ Email – October 30, 2020
  2. ^ Email – October 29, 2020

Mandatory IP masking

See today's Op-Ed for the WMF's view on this issue.
An un-masked IP address is currently displayed for edits made by logged-out users.

Mandatory IP masking is coming to Wikipedia; it's not a question of if, but only of how and when. The Wikimedia Foundation has told all communities that its counsel has determined that displaying IP addresses of logged-out editors can not be permitted,[a] and a technical solution is being sought that would stop short of disallowing logged-out editing altogether (see prior Signpost coverage). The technical solution would show "a human-readable identifier instead of the IP address", aka IP masking.

There is strong opposition to IP masking from administrators and others involved in combating vandalism. At a discussion on Meta, MER-C states that admins need better tools to combat abusive edits. Removing a simple tool like an IP address will have generaly negative and unpredictable effects for fighting vandalism. Cullen328 says that "Unregistered users can either affirmatively consent to public logging of their IP addresses, or register an account. Let's not pursue complex, expensive and divisive solutions when a very simple solution is readily available." OhKayeSierra notes that non-admins also help in fighting vandalism, and is "concerned at the fact that non-administrators weren’t seemingly taken into account with the report, and I would vehemently urge the team involved to keep us plebs in mind going forward with any decisions made." SQL and 6 other editors insisted that vandal fighting tools should be greatly improved before the IP masking issue is considered.

As of 21 October, WMF has tentatively proposed technical changes and a new user right:

  1. The vast majority of people who access our wikis would see the IPs fully masked.
  2. All admins could see them partially masked (the first three octets of an IP address being visible).[b] This could be helpful to see patterns even if they don’t have the new user right. Partially masking them reduces the privacy risk for the unregistered user.
  3. The new user right – in addition to checkusers and stewards – would have access to the unmasked IP.

Existing edit histories would retain the full IP address as currently implemented. – B

Notes:
  1. ^ Their actual words were If the Legal department tells us we have to do something for legal reasons – which they unfortunately can't explain publicly in more detail without risk to the projects – we have to take this and do the best we can within the bounds we've been given: the status quo can't remain, and we have to do something about the ways we handle IPs for non-registered users.
  2. ^ WMF engineering stated "parts of an IP address" in the original, apparently not considering IPv6 addresses.

Branding postponement

The WMF announced a postponement of its branding initiative, on September 30. The initiative was expected to include the word "Wikipedia" in the foundation's name, perhaps as the "Wikipedia Foundation". COVID-19 and a Community open letter on renaming were cited as reasons for the pause. The open letter which requested the pause was signed by 970 individual Wikipedians and over 70 affiliate organizations. An ad hoc subcommittee of the Board of Trustees, consisting of James Heilman, Raju Narisetti, and Shani Evenstein Sigalov, will discuss the initiative with WMF staff until 2021, at which time the initiative will resume, perhaps in a different form. – S

There's a birthday coming up

Visualization of a billion edits: if each edit on English Wikipedia is represented by the tiniest dot and weighs one grain, like a single grain of wheat, then the entire encyclopedia circa the end of this year is the billion-unit cube weighing 65 tonnes.

On January 15, 2021 Wikipedia will mark its 20th birthday. The October publication of the book Wikipedia @ 20 starts the celebration by covering almost every aspect of the encyclopedia in its 22 chapters. The book's publication is covered in The Signpost with an interview with the editors, Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner. Reagle's chapter on "The many (reported) deaths of Wikipedia" is published here and a book review. Coincidentally, the billionth edit on enwiki will likely occur in December or January.

If your chapter, affiliate, WikiProject, or other Wiki-entity is planning a birthday event, please let us know at Suggestions for publication in our December issue. – S

Brief notes

Proposed new logo for MediaWiki
  • Winner of MediaWiki logo vote announced: After a second round of voting, the outcome of the selection process of a new logo for MediaWiki was announced. The winning logo, created by User:Serhio Magpie, continues to evoke the sunflower featured in the old logo, but drops the square brackets (symbolizing wikilinks), while the accompanying wordmark still uses camel case in a reference to a linking syntax used in early wikis. As explained in the original proposal for changing the logo, the main concerns about the old logo included its large "number of colors and shades that make it hardly usable for applications like t-shirts or other swag", and the "too realistic" details of the photo-based sunflower image that don't render well in small sizes. The new logo is still undergoing review by the Foundation's legal team.
  • The WMF Transparency Report for January–June 2020 was released this month.
  • New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of this week's newest Wikimedia movement affiliates, the Indic MediaWiki Developers User Group which has 16 members and designers; and the Kurdish Wikimedians User Group with 11 members.
  • New administrator: We congratulate Wikipedia's newest administrator, John M Wolfson.
  • New functionaries announced: Arbitration Committee expanded the functionary team membership as follows. Anarchyte was appointed as an Oversighter; EdJohnston, Oshwah, and Yamla were appointed as CheckUser.
  • Forced logout: Another defensive forced logout for every Wiki user (see prior Signpost coverage) was announced on October 1. Some discussion occurred at Village Pump: Technical over whether it should have been more clearly announced on enwiki.
  • Code repositories to move from Gerrit to GitLab: Following a developer community consultation, the Wikimedia Foundation's Release Engineering team announced that the code repositories for MediaWiki and associated software parts will at some point in the future move to a self-hosted GitLab instance. Many details still need to be worked out, but the team plans "to have a GitLab installation ready with a few self-contained repositories moved to it by this coming June [2021]". Gerrit, an open source code review tool developed and maintained at Google, has been used for MediaWiki since the 2012 switch from Subversion to Git. According to a summary of the consultation, "the overall sentiment was mostly neutral with serious and discerning discussion", with enthusiasm about moving to GitLab's more intuitive user interface (Gerrit has long been criticized for being hard to use), but "concerns about the impact of moving to a PR/MR methodology" and the general disruption that is to be expected from such a platform switch. It is especially hoped that GitLab's interface will make it easier to become involved in MediaWiki development, although several discussion participants cautioned that the most important barriers to code contributions by newcomers are likely to be social instead, in particular the code review process (where commits or pull requests have to be inspected and approved by senior developers, often WMF employees).
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  • I understand that when legal says you have to do something you have to do it, but this could lead to issues down the road. I have a Wikipedia account, but often edit as an IP. For many of the small corrections I make and removing of vandalism I do, I do it as an IP. For many edits, the extra step of logging in would be enough to push me away from making the edit. I don't like to be logged into all my accounts all the time, and spending time logging in to fix a small error or mark a link as dead is just not worth it when I have other things to do. 2601:14A:C300:61D:52A0:6B4F:F7BF:CC4F (talk) 20:16, 1 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This seems to be a misunderstanding - the Portuguese Wikipedia community's decision to disallow IP editing is separate from the legally mandated introduction of IP masking on all projects. That said, the latter might well motivate other communities to follow ptwiki's lead, given the masking's significant impact on the existing privacy-accountability tradeoff. Regards, HaeB (talk) 20:24, 1 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, the masking being mandated by legal is more like what you see on credit card receipts (and presumably for analogous reasons) — instead of your card number it will show something like **** **** **** 1234. When masking goes into effect, IP edits will show up for most of us as something similar to 192.168.123.*** Nothing changes for the IP users, only for the rest of us.
The interesting question is going to be what happens with IP "User" pages, since they'll presumably no longer be able to be individualized (without effectively giving away the IP editor's full IP). I guess all the edits from a given masking prefix might end up being aggregated together, which is especially unfortunate. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 21:50, 1 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The implementation remains to be designed in conjunction with the communities, however at present the idea is to have a unique identifier in place of the IP address, which would be associated with the IP address. Alternatively a browser cookie could be used to associate the identifier with the editor (when they use the same browser on the same computer), or both IP address and cookie information can be used. Using both would avoid aggregating different editors who got assigned the same dynamic IP at different times, or multiple editors behind a common gateway, though the individual association would be broken if editors switched browsers or erased their cookies. Thus individual talk pages can still exist with masked identities. isaacl (talk) 22:10, 1 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Isaacl: Yeah, I realized that as I was in the middle of reading one of the later articles. Took me a bit, but I got there. So, yeah, maybe it's not all that bad.
In fact, the cookie-based identification is an interesting idea. If that's something that would follow a not-logged-in "IP" user around even across multiple device IPs, then it could actually be a considerable benefit to anti-vandalism efforts and sockpuppet investigations. At least, against miscreants sloppy enough that they forget to clear their cookies when switching IPs. (Which, if experience has taught me anything, would end up being most of them. At least over the long run.) -- FeRDNYC (talk) 22:51, 1 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd certainly be in favour of banning IP editing. Nigej (talk) 21:46, 1 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, on balance I think you may have a point Nigej, and personally I applaud the pt.wiki for taking this step. I'm not necessarily saying it's right for en.wiki yet, maybe it is and maybe it isn't. But at pt.wiki, given that it was explicitly mooted to solve a demonstrated problem affecting the quality and accuracy of their project, it's right that they should act. I can obviously see the benefit of it having been allowed historically, making it immediately obvious to potential new editors that this really is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The drawbacks of IP editing are there though - (1) people hopping around different IPs, which is quite legitimate since many ISPs do that by default, but making it hard for us to spot editing patterns; (2) the fact that editors may unwittingly have their edits publicly linked to their IP addresses, allowing the whole world to pinpoint their institution and geographical locale; (3) ease of vandlism, as seen at pt.wiki. As far as I can recall (and maybe someone will correct me on this if I'm wrong), being the encyclopedia that anyone can edit is not actually one of our most important principles, and Jimbo has said in the past that if at some point the project would be better served by having a more restrictive model, then there's nothing to say that wouldn't happen - and indeed, the Wikipedia:Five pillars do not specifically mention allowing anyone to edit. The idea mentioned at that phabricator report, that the change to ban IP editing is "compromising on our values", doesn't ring true. Everyone is still free to sign up for an account and start editing straightaway anyway.  — Amakuru (talk) 23:20, 1 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • I notice that (2) is solved instead by the WMF's unpopular but confirmed IP masking approach. I oppose prohibition of unregistered editing on en.wiki, but I can see the point on smaller language editions and believe that pt.wiki made the right decision for them. — Bilorv (talk) 07:45, 2 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • It would be interesting to compare metrics from ptwiki post–IP ban with a similar Wikipedia that retained unregistered editors (maybe itwiki?) – Teratix ₵ 23:45, 1 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • - I have mentioned the simplest response to the problem of IP vandals that also preserves the dearly idealized "everyone can edit". Limit IPs to one edit per day. On second edit suggest they login or create an account. No more competitions to see how many ha-ha edits to numerous pages one can do before WP:AIV reacts. It would limit the quantity of vandal edits tremendously. If you really want to contribute to WP, a contribution history is not a defect, and a login is not a problem.
- IP masking is disabling, as patterns of abuse by IP hopping vandals would become impossible to prove/research. I could try to convince the dubious here, but instead...
- I would wish everyone treasuring IP editing and apologizing for IP vandals would dedicate their first half hour of Wikipedia time daily to tracking IP edits. Give it a month. That's only 15 hours of your time, rather than someone else's time. Prove that vandals are not a timesink for others, by soaking up your time and goodwill. Your values will change to embrace pragmatism much more. Shenme (talk) 03:05, 2 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Banning IPs is something I'd support on en.wp. Maybe it should be given a month-long trial to see what happens. Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 09:05, 2 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • The major reasons not to ban IPs are: wiki principles, the considerable long-term effect on recruitment, and the loss of good IP edits on their own from those who won't create an account. The last one of these should be measurable already; has anyone gathered stats? --Yair rand (talk) 09:09, 2 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'd argue that the bigger problem here is retention not recruitment. Many prominent and experienced editors have left in recent times. And if masked IP editing takes hold this could considerable increase. Jules (Mrjulesd) 13:05, 2 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • The Foundation can ban IP edits or not, but I support us banning masked edits. No matter how much the Foundation tries to minimize the harm, masked edits will cause more a lot more disruption and headaches than IP edits. I'm a techie and I have a pretty good handle on the possible implementations. The least disruptive method (a permanent Crypto-PAn encoding of IPs) would be a significant hindrance, while being vulnerable to cracking the privacy protection. And any more effective masking methods increasingly obliterate our ability to deal with problems. Alsee (talk) 11:37, 2 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • SUPER obvious that proposed Mediawiki logo has too many pedals. And it's just a matter of time bbefore it's "simplied". Jason Quinn (talk) 13:18, 2 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes. Must have fewer petals. Not so far as to look like a daisy, but yes. Jim.henderson (talk) 02:30, 3 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yup. 12 or 16 petals would be enough. 45.251.33.20 (talk) 06:43, 3 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I am against an IP ban (though I do have an account which is locked by Wikibreak Enforcer till June 2021) for obvious reasons. But, I would be okay with certain restrictions. For starters:
  1. IPs' first few edits in 3 days (let's say 5 edits) will be subject to review by a stricter version of Cluebot or by human reviewers
  2. IPs that have a history of vandalism will be subject to stricter restrictions before being blocked
I am also against IP masking (because I really don't understand how it helps Wikipedia). It can hinder anti-vandalism efforts. For example, assume that someone uses their Wi-Fi to vandalise and gets blocked. Then they switch to 4G and again get blocked or just unplug and plug in their Wi-Fi. It can actually make it easier for vandals to vandalise.
PS - if I understand correctly, Trump hates Section 230 and wants to destroy it, which can result in making Wikipedia accountable for what its editors write. But Biden has said that he will modify the law only to hold websites accountable for hate speech. Will Biden's actions affect Wikipedia in any way assuming he does what he says? 45.251.33.20 (talk) 06:09, 3 November 2020 (UTC) Last rephrased at 06:43, 3 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I am against an IP ban on the English version. We have much more sophisticated spam filters, more manpower, and different editing patterns than the Portuguese Wikipedia. The Portuguese version just doesn't have as much manpower, weaker abuse filters with fewer experts to create and manage them, and many more bored kids doing mobile vandalism. On the English version, there is definitely a far greater proportion of IPs that makes positive contributions. — Sagotreespirit (talk) 18:52, 3 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm a fairly frequent contributor on the Portuguese Wikipedia (or as we lovingly call it in Portuguese, "A Wikipédia Lusófona"). I had actually voted against IP banning out of principle and believed that this could have been solved by improving edit filters. But afterwards, I saw the immense positive changes that happened. There were still just about as many regular positive contributions, while childish vandalism was greatly reduced. Before the IP ban, the number of registered users always hovered at just under 6,000, but now it's over 9,000 and growing.
On the Portuguese Wikipedia, the majority of IP edits are mobile edits from Brazil. There was a lot of sneaky vandalism that was difficult to track down, like changing birth dates and adding subtle but patent nonsense. Things appeared to get a lot worse this year when millions of Brazilian youths were locked down with nothing to do except vandalize Wikipedia on their phones. User:Yanguas, the Portuguese Wikipedia's most active admin, was furiously reverting IP after IP, but the admins couldn't catch every single vandal.
This discussion has been a huge deal on the Portuguese Wikipedia for several weeks, so I was a bit surprised that this wasn't discussed more on the English Wikipedia or on Meta. And I was the first (and as of now, still the only) English Wikipedia editor to update the Portuguese Wikipedia article about this major change to ptwiki.
So overall, I am pleased with the results that the community IP ban had achieved, and I would strongly advise against outside communities reverting this community decision. — Sagotreespirit (talk) 18:47, 3 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • There was also a minor backlash right after the IP ban, when someone created a Wikipedia essay called "A Wikipédia não é uma tirania da maioria" (Wikipedia is not a tyranny of the majority). That got sent to the Portuguese version of AfD (called PE), which you can see here. Nearly everyone voted delete. If anyone is interested, I have a copy of it and can archive it here with an English translation, but just for historical interest of course. — Sagotreespirit (talk) 18:59, 3 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Correction: The essay was created by Quintinense in 2014. Invites were sent to everyone who had voted at the IP ban referendum. — Sagotreespirit (talk) 19:27, 3 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question: Which other wikis hosted by the WMF currently ban IP edits? — Sagotreespirit (talk) 19:16, 3 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Sagotreespirit: wikitech: and wmf:. No content wikis other than ptwiki ban IP edits. --Yair rand (talk) 19:27, 3 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      • @Yair rand: Thanks. I don't see the need for most other wikis to implement IP bans, maybe except for the Spanish Wikipedia. IP vandalism problems on eswiki resemble the ptwiki problems, but eswiki appears to have more manpower. — Sagotreespirit (talk) 19:31, 3 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I find this article very sad. I respect, as we must, competent legal advice but I cannot respect laws that force IP Masking. A prominent banner that appears when when you attempt to make an IP edit that says, "Warning! Your IP address will be publicly visible. To hide your IP address you must log in." should be enough. But alas some legal systems award damages to clumsy oafs who scald themselves on coffee that they know to be boiling hot. So just as all of us have to endure lukewarm coffee, we now have to allow vandals anonymity. We now have two choices. Either we ban IP edits (and is there any excuse for them?) or we have to accept that imbeciles can vandalise our pages with impunity. OrewaTel (talk) 00:03, 4 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
There have been several cases including one in Australia. I have been offered a lukewarm coffee here in New Zealand with the reason being, "We aren't allowed to serve it hot for legal reasons." Absolutely crazy since NZ has a no blame compensation scheme. (If you are hurt in NZ you claim compensation from ACC, a Government Agency. We don't have ambulance chasing lawyers here.) OrewaTel (talk) 22:02, 4 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This is getting off the subject. Please ignore the example of people too stupid to to be able to handle a coffee cup. My point remains that making IP addresses anonymous is an open invitation to vandals. OrewaTel (talk) 06:33, 5 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Bri: if that comment is addressed at me then I think you've misunderstood (or rather, I've miscommunicated) the nature of the video, which doesn't make fun of the victim of the incident. — Bilorv (talk) 20:11, 5 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Beyond this latest issue, it seems like there should be a working group or something re: reducing the bad impact of IP editors--not just direct vandalism, POV warring, etc., but also the time and effort wasted to monitor and correct these issues. Does anyone know if there is a central page for this? --Hobbes Goodyear (talk) 17:47, 5 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
One of the village pump boards would be a good starting point. Possibly Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). ☆ Bri (talk) 18:17, 5 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]


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