What?
- There is a Legal directive to move away from storing and publishing IP addresses on Wikimedia sites for all users.
What does the future look like if this is achieved?
- IPs will no longer be visible to everyone.
- Some users with advanced rights may still unveil the IP addresses for patrolling purposes.
- The Foundation will be better protected from data regulators.
- Privacy of unregistered editors will be better protected.
- Anti-vandalism patrollers, including admins, will have access to the data & tools they need to protect the sites against vandalism.
Supporting document: IP Masking business case
What happens if we do nothing?
- WMF faces the risk of litigation if we continue storing and perpetually publishing IP addresses. Our editors living in countries with a high level of censorship and persecution may come to harm if we continue our practice of publishing IP addresses.
Why?
Identify the value(s) this problem/opportunity provides. Add links to relevant OKRs.
Rank values in order of importance and be explicit about who this benefits and where the value is.
User Value/Organization Value AND Objective it supports and How
- Make IP addresses accessible to as few people as possible while ensuring that admins, stewards, and checkusers remain able to effectively perform their duties, in order to protect our users from misuse of personally identifiable information and our communities and content from vandalism, spam, and harassment. -> Thriving Movement
Why are you bringing this decision to the Technical Forum?
The IP masking project has wide ranging impacts to many different teams and systems that interact with MediaWiki.
While it has been possible for very experienced engineers to understand the impact and necessary code changes for MediaWiki Core, the impact to other systems and the changes needed requires teams from across the foundation to review the proposed changes and provide feedback.
The ultimate goals of following the technical forum process are to:
- sign off on the technical plan for IP Masking, including how it interacts with existing extensions, APIs, community tools etc
- make the IP masking project changes visible to as many teams as possible
- understand which teams would need to make changes based on the chosen solution
Supporting Docs:
- Tech decision forum doc
- To be added - links/tickets to current solution