Talk:Submissions/The Wikipedian Condition

IP editors

Does this presentation take account of the fact that many Wikipedians choose to edit as IPs, don't create accounts and thereby don't opt in to the reputation building/scrutiny that comes with creating an account? WereSpielChequers (talk) 22:32, 24 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. While my presentation mostly focuses on regular users, IPs are taken into account as well, particularly when discussing panopticism, as they are normally subject to the same scrutiny (if not higher) than established editors. I don't agree necessarily that they don't opt in to the scrutiny that comes with making an account: whether they like it or not, they're still subject to some level of scrutiny, if not higher than regular editors, and usually as a collective group rather than as individuals. (In the Philippines, for example, the high incidence of vandalism has led to a general suspicion of anonymous editors in general.) --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 02:13, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It isn't just the Philippines where IPs are mistrusted, general experience on the English Wikipedia is that most vandalism is done by IPs. But whilst a registered editor is associated with every edit they've done on their account, with an IP editor you don't know if they did the previous edits on their account, and you don't know how many times they've changed their IP address during their last 100 edits. This is something that will vary by country and indeed by ISP. Some ISPs maintain consistent IP addresses for individual household clients for years at a time, whilst in other countries there is a culture of editing from Internet cafes where manny people share an IP address and each cafe you use has a different IP address. At an extreme there is one Gulf country which routes all of its Internet traffic through one IP address. So IP editors are always under greater suspicion but may be under greater or lesser anonymity than registered editors. You might want to be aware of that in your presentation. Another thing that you might want to consider is socking, either abusively or legitimately - I don't know how many wikis have similar rule to the English Wikipedia on this, but someone using an alternate account in accordance with EN:Wikipedia:SOCK#LEGIT may well be opting out of part of the scrutiny that you mention. WereSpielChequers (talk) 10:23, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]