Modifiche IP: Miglioramento della privacy e mitigazione degli abusi

Temporary accounts for unregistered editors will be a new type of user account. IP addresses of unregistered editors will no longer be publicly visible. Only those who fight spam, vandalism, harassment and disinformation will have access to IP addresses.

Currently, anyone can edit Wikimedia wikis without a Wikimedia account or without logging in. MediaWiki, the software behind Wikimedia projects, records and exposes your IP address in its public log if you edit without logging in. Anyone seeking your IP address will find it.

Wikimedia projects have a good reason for storing and publishing IP addresses: they play a critical role in keeping vandalism and harassment off our wikis.

However, your IP address can tell where you are editing from and can be used to identify you or your device. This is of particular concern if you are editing from a territory where our wikis are deemed controversial. Publishing your IP address may allow others to locate you.

With changes to privacy laws and standards (e.g., the General Data Protection Regulation and the global conversation about privacy that it started), the Wikimedia Foundation Legal team has decided to protect user privacy by hiding IPs from the general public. However, we will continue to give access to users who need to see them in order to protect the wikis.

We're aware that this change will impact current anti-abuse workflows. We are committed to developing tools or maintaining access to tools that can identify and block vandals, sock puppets, editors with conflicts of interest and other bad actors after IPs are masked.

Hello! We have published a new policy page: Access to temporary account IP addresses. It explains how users can gain access to IP addresses. Later, we will update the section on using IP addresses. In it, we will add information on how and where to access the IP addresses, and what is logged when IP addresses are accessed. There is also a new page with frequently asked questions. Both pages use the term "temporary user accounts". This name comes from the first version of the software (MVP). Soon, we will share more information about it. We welcome your comments on the talk page.

We are happy to announce our timeline and strategy for the temporary accounts deployments across all wikis. The plan was co-created by the Product and Technology, Legal, and Communications departments at the Foundation. We also consulted stewards and informed CheckUsers. All the date below are subject to change based on the extent of pending work. We will be informing you if anything changes.

• In late October 2024, we will roll out on approximately 10 small and medium-sized wikis. This phase is called the minor pilot deployment. We have pre-selected potential good pilots based on different factors. These include: the numbers of active admins and IP edits per month, lack of blockers related to the configuration of a given wiki, availability of potential ambassadors and technical members of the respective communities, and more. After we deploy there, we will be monitoring the impact of this project on collaboration on wikis. We will also be contacting community members of these wikis. Some time later, we will monitor what will happen when the initial IP addresses of temporary accounts are not available to patrollers.
• If the first deployments are successful and we don't have a ton of unexpected work, then in February 2025, we will roll out on larger wikis. We call this major pilot deployment. It may include some top10 wikis, but not English Wikipedia.
• Next, in May 2025, we will deploy on all remaining wikis in one carefully coordinated step. After that, we will be providing support, monitoring metrics, and solving issues as they arise.
• We will do our best to inform everyone impacted ahead of time. Information about temporary accounts will be available on Tech News, Diff, other blogs, different wikipages, banners, and other forms. At conferences, for example regional and national ones, we or our colleagues on our behalf will be inviting talk about this project with attendees. We will also try to have presentations there. In addition, we will be contacting affiliates running programs of support for editors with advanced permissions. Subscribe to our new newsletter to stay close in touch.

• Before we deploy temporary accounts to any non-test wiki, we need to complete our work on a few remaining tasks. These include:
  • Live-updated metrics on temporary accounts. Before the October deployments, we will build a dashboard presenting the impact of temporary accounts on communities. There will be different graphs showing, for example, numbers of reverts, blocks, temp accounts' IP address previews ("IP Reveal"), successful and abandoned edits, and more. All these will be updated very frequently, for instance, every day, to give everyone a good visibility of the actual work of temporary accounts on wikis. (T357763)
  • Allowing global autoblocks for temporary accounts (T368949), building a mechanism automatically giving the eligible users the right to reveal IP addresses of temporary accounts (T327913), and some other tasks.
  • You can also check the blockers for the major pilot deployments and the blockers for the full deployment.
  • Relatedly, we wanted to share a kind request to the maintainers of community-owned code like tools, bots, gadgets etc. We want to avoid any unnecessary disruptions to your software. If it uses data about IP addresses or is available for not logged-in users, please read our documentation , and in particular, the section on how your code might need to be updated . We will gladly help you out, and we're waiting for your questions.
• Graduating IP Info out of beta features. IP Info provides reliable information about IP addresses to some logged-in users. According to a dedicated policy, this tool may only be used for the investigation or prevention of violations of policies. Users can access it if they select a checkbox in their preferences, agreeing to use this tool in accordance with these terms. Then, they can see a button ⓘ displayed next to the IP address on pages like Recent Changes, Watchlist, and page history. The feature is also available for them at the top of the Special:Contributions page when contributions of a specific IP address are listed. Soon, we will make this a regular feature and remove it from the list of beta features. We will also make some changes to its functionality. For more information about IP Info, watch its project page or subscribe to our new newsletter. (T375084)

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• 
  Szymon Grabarczuk
  Movement Communications
  sgrabarczukwikimedia.org
• 
  Niharika Kohli
  Product Manager
  nkohliwikimedia.org