Temporary accounts for unregistered editors are a new type of user account.
On wikis where temporary accounts are enabled, IP addresses of unregistered editors are not visible publicly.
Only those who fight spam, vandalism, harassment and disinformation have access to IP addresses there.
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.
Recent deployments – in the latter half of June, we rolled out temporary accounts on MediaWiki.org and 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias including French, German, Chinese, Japanese, and more. You will find the full list of wikis temporary accounts are deployed to in the FAQ. Heartfelt thanks to all volunteers who helped in deployment, whether by updating AbuseFilter, translating the interface, answering questions from other community members, writing and translating documentation, creating new tools, and more! Our gratitude goes to Albertoleoncio, DerHexer, Dragoniez, Ellywa, Hide on Rosé, Jules*, Johannnes89, Martin Urbanec, Matěj Suchánek, Msz2001, Neriah, NicoScribe, Titore, VZP10224, Ykhwong, *Youngjin, and many more.
Impact of the previous deployments – in a recent analysis, we found that temporary accounts did not pose any significant changes on pilot wikis. The only notable change was a shift from IP-based blocking to temporary account-based blocking on our first set of pilot wikis. You may monitor this dashboard to track changes from temporary accounts on projects where we are already deployed.
New documentation pages – you may be interested in two new documentation pages: Access to IP, explaining everything related to access to temporary account IP addresses, and Repository with a list of new gadgets and user scripts. On the latter, you will find a short new video explaining how to edit using a temporary account. We will also create at least one more for users with extended rights, moderating temporary account activity.
Meetings with communities – in the past weeks, we met with a few communities: South Asian, French Wikipedia patrollers, and Japanese Wikipedia administrators. These meetings were helpful for the community members as well as the team to plan our future work. If your community would also like to meet with us, please message Sheila.
Work in the coming weeks
Our goal for this phase is to identify issues which may only surface with large-scale use of temporary accounts. We are delighted to share that this work is progressing as planned. You may subscribe to the task T395134, "Analyzing the roll-out of temp accounts on major pilots as it impacts anti-abuse work".
Do let Claudia know if temporary accounts significantly interfered with your ability to deter bad behavior, or helped you stop unwanted behavior from happening, or eased your communication with a logged-out user.
We have also received a lot of feedback and ideas for improvements on the project talk page. We are documenting and prioritizing the next set of work based on this feedback. There are a number of Phabricator tickets we have created since the deployment. You can see them on this board.
Plans for the coming months – the final deployment on all remaining wikis is planned for September. We are considering options to limit the scope of that phase by rolling out on some wikis sooner. Please write to Szymon if your community is interested in having temporary accounts earlier (July or August) – we will gladly include your wiki in these plans.
Statements from the Wikimedia Foundation Legal department
