Allow logged in user to reclaim previous anon edits
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Description

Author: bugs

Description:
Suggestion: Have a mechanism whereby anonymous IP edits can be reattributed to an editor who is editing from that same IP, within some timespan (eg, an hour).

Rationale: It's easy to accidentally edit while logged out, and to leave a permanent trace of your IP on the public record. For example, if you create an interwiki link from wiki A to wiki B (with your login name), then on wiki B back to wiki A (forgetting to log in), it's trivial to work out that the IP on wiki B corresponds to the username on wiki A. And there's nothing you can do about it.

Making it possible to reattribute these anonymous edits will/may/could ideally:

Help people who are particularly concerned about their IP being public
Reduce the disincentive to working outside one's home wiki

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference: bz10957

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		Status	Assigned	Task
		Open	MZMcBride	T95144 MediaWiki RFC: Exposure of user IP addresses
		Open	None	T12957 Allow logged in user to reclaim previous anon edits

Event Timeline

bzimport added a project: MediaWiki-History-and-Diffs.Nov 21 2014, 9:48 PM

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.

bzimport set Reference to bz10957.

bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

bzimport created this task.Aug 16 2007, 4:57 AM

Just the same IP isn't reliable -- frequently multiple people will have direct access on the same IP due to proxying (for instance a whole office, school, or ISP). Likewise, some ISPs such as AOL have some ugly proxying systems which cause multiple edits in the same session to be passed off through multiple IPs.

It might be more or less feasible, in theory, to authenticate the recently-made edits against an open session identifier, so as long as you didn't shut down your browser they could be confirmed as coming from the same place.

There are issues with data disclosure and updating of records, caching, and external data feeds, though.

It's probably a lot simpler to just make it hard to accidentally edit while logged in.

IIRC, re-assigning IP contributions to usernames used to be on demand but has been stopped AFAIK because of time consumption, since devs had to do it.

However, it would be nice to have perhaps some kind of special page with two inputboxes - revisionid and username. This would be available for bureaucrats only (or stewards?).

Anyaway, some kind of re-assigning mechanism independent on devs would be handy.

robchur wrote:

(In reply to comment #2)