Wikipedia adds the temporary accounts feature in response to the Heritage Foundation’s threats to dox their editors

I'll note too that even absent Heritage Foundation threats, this can be useful to spur development of the project (i.e. for people who don't want a permanent account but don't feel comfortable having their IP permanently, publicly attached to edits). Probably the reason it hasn't been done in the past is it's almost certainly going to make it easier for bad actors to fly under the radar. Before, you either had to show your IP address (which can reveal your location and will usually uniquely identify who edited something for at least a little bit; you also can't use a VPN without special permission) or you had to register a single account (where if you created multiple, a sockpuppet investigation would often find out).
So there's an inherent trade-off, but I think right-wing threats of stochastic terrorism really tipped the scales.
- Well you say you can use a VPN, but you may often see that you’re not able to edit using a VPN IP if that IP block has been used for vandalism in the past. So then you’d have to potentially revert to a coffee shop or library which would still identify your location.
  
  Point of clarification: I said that you can't use a VPN, and that's because those IPs are blocked. As noted, you need to ask for a special exception, which for most people isn't navigable and may not even be granted without a good stated reason and/or trust built up through good edits.
  
  I was surprised I was blocked from editing even after logging in. They do hate some IP blocks.
  
  Make a list of necessary changes then go to your local cafe.
  Sounds like a nice plan.
- Doesn't Wiki still have the data? So a bad actor's behavior pattern can be seen at aggregate behind the scenes?
  
  There are only 846 administrators on the English Wikipedia. This is across 7 million articles, 118,000 active registered users, about two edits per second, about a million files just on Wikipedia (most of them are hosted on Wikipedia's sister project, Wikimedia Commons), and over 60 million total pages (articles, talk pages, user pages, redirects, help pages, templates, etc.). So although they have this data, it's not useful if somebody doesn't notice and investigate it. Administrators are stretched thin with administrative functions, and that's not even accounting for many of them participating as normal editors too (tangent: besides obvious violations of policies, administrators have no more say over Wikipedia's content than any other editor).
  Contrary to the idea that new editors sometimes get of Wikipedia as a suffocating police state run by the administrators, usually when edits get reverted it's because regular editors notice this and revert it citing policies or guidelines without any administrator involvement (every editor has this power). If an administrator intervenes, it's usually because a non-admin noticed and reported (what they perceive as) bad behavior to an admin, two editors are locked in a stalemate, or there's some routine clerical issue to be resolved.
  Sockpuppeting, copyright violations, etc. are often (even usually) found by regular editors who notice something amiss and decide to dig a bit deeper. Even with automated tools that will flag an edit that replaces the article with the n-word 500 times in a row, and even given that some non-admin editors have tools which let them detect some issues, there's just only so much that 850-ish people can find on a website that massive. For example, one time a few years back, I just randomly stumbled across an editor who was changing articles about obscure historic battles between India and Pakistan to have wildly pro-Pakistan slants – where treacherous India was the aggressor, but brilliant, strong, and courageous Pakistan stood their ground and sent pathetic India home crying with shit in their diapers. The bias was oozing from the page (with poor, if any, citations to match), and I can imagine this would fly under the radar for a while on a handful of articles that collectively get maybe 30 pageviews a day.
  TL;DR: Too few admins.
- I might have to go lookup their implementation. I feel like a good way of addressing your concern would be a secure hash of the IP address combined with a persistent random number.
  The same IP would always map to the same output and you wouldn't be able to just pre-compute it and bypass everything.
  
  What’s the persisted random number? Sounds like a salt, but usually each user has their own salt right? I assume we are not talking about logged in users here? Or are we?
- TL;DR: Wikipedia has been doxing its own editors since inception.

Anyone got a list of the heritage foundation leaders and big players?
It's only fair
- Does Heritage dox its own people too?

The Heritage Foundation is located at:
214 Massachusetts Avenue NE, Washington, D.C., U.S.

What does the heritage foundation have against Wikipedia?
- They don’t like them publishing facts:
  https://forward.com/news/686797/heritage-foundation-wikipedia-antisemitism/
  
  The best counter to bias is in an openly edited project is contributing corrected information with high quality sources. So instead of spending their time doxxing wikipedia editors, how about actually contributing quality data?
  
  That’s disingenuous. They’re far from the only ones that don’t like how Wikipedia works, with good reason.
- 'It’s not close’ - Israel committing genocide concludes Wikipedia ending editorial debate
- It prints the truth more often than not.

How is that defensible? Are there no laws to tamp down online terrorism from bad actors like Heritage? I'd imagine they're 100% in the wrong for making threats of any kind but I'm just a wee layman.
- The issue with "Wait that's illegal" is that it never work in practice.
  If the heritage foundation decide to dox an editor tomorrow. The editor in question would have to file a lawsuit and go against an army of layers the heritage foundation can afford. Even if the editor win at the end, it will be a long and drawn out legal battle where heritage risk almost nothing.
  And this is not accounting for the editor having to deal with harassment due to being dox while having to pay for a layer and fighting a legal battle.
  
  And that is why making such terroristic threats should be criminal in the first place.
- Even if there was, look who's in power. Even if judges ruled against Heritage, I'm not holding my breath of them getting any sort of accountability.
- The laws exist to protect bad actors like Heritage
- The internet is, by nature, problematic in terms of legal compliance because it is not wholly under the jurisdiction of any singular country.
  You can go after hardware physically located within your own jurisdiction, and you can go after operators under your jurisdiction. But if you start going after folks/hardware outside of that, you're rightfully going to be told to fuck off. (Which is why IP holders burn so much money on anti-piracy lobbying and get practically nowhere)
  Its the same reason encryption bans are laughably idiotic.
- No laws? Sir/ma'am, we have the 2nd amendment. I can't think of any law higher.
  
  Too bad the 2A nutjobs and right wing nutjobs are the same people.
  
  Well theres the 1st admendment. The 2nd is for when the 1st is being denied...
- It's defensible because it's public record. Wikipedia has been doxing editors by default for decades. It's one way that they intimidate people from making edits.
  
  I've never edited anything there but log in sometimes just if I'm interested in a topic and want to bookmark it. This is making me think I should just delete my account.

how is that not blackmail
- There's a lot of crimes happening nowadays by members of this administration. Add it to the pile.
  
  What administration? The Wikipedia admins? What the fuck you talking about?

Can someone please ELI5?
- The Heritage Foundation has threatened to doxx the editors of wikipedia because the greatest threat to authoritarians is information
  
  ELi5 please: how can heritage foundation track an IP address to a particular person? and what happens if the editor simply makes edit via VPN? and why does WP show the IP adresses anyway?
- Wikipedia attempts to shield editors from being Doxxed and harassed by right wing nuts and their followers over writing accurate information.
  Right wing nuts take offense at not being able to shape the narrative/history.
  
  I can’t wait for the ring wing nuts to fall back behind so behind from this massive web of lies they’re concocting for themselves. They’re now saying “vegetables are toxic and that you shouldn’t eat them”…

I’ll never contribute to Wikipedia because they block VPNs
They should really unblock them. I know it’s not always easy to combat these problems, but a dedicated individual can break articles using non-VPN IPs like mobile data IPs
- They not only enforce IP bans on account creation but on every single edit you make, even if logged in…
  
  It's not an open website at all. It severely privileges hegemonic editors promoting the status quo. Thus it's actually a right-wing website.

Um ... This doxing threat seems like a really dumb move, on par with daring Anonymous to take you down. Really, if you want to play Internet hardball, there are folks that would love to show you how it works. (Not me!)

No matter what you think of Wikipedia, if the heritage foundation have actually threatened to dox editors then that’s despicable.
- "No matter what you think of Wikipedia" sounds like Wikipedia is extremely controversial. I've never met a person who has anything against Wikipedia. How insane and out of touch with reality do you have to be to have something against Wikipedia?
  
  The only people I've seen that dislike it are people who want to hide things (like Holocaust deniers) or people that have some weird beef with people that run it or edit it.
  
  Wikipedia is quite controversial tbh because essentially anyone can make edits that people then see and take as fact, even if they are incorrect and fake. These false/fake edits can stay live for hours/days/weeks.
  This is why Wikipedia IS NOT A RELIABLE SOURCE and is not allowed to be used as a source at basically any school or university etc. What is written in Wikipedia should be taken with a grain of salt, and it should basically be used as a link aggregator. Read the wiki page, follow the sourced articles, get your information from them.
  Wikipedia has often been criticised, rightly so, for not doing enough to prevent activist-style edits, not even from repeat offenders.
  There’s nothing “out of touch with reality” to want seemingly the main source of information for many internet warriors to be better at vetting updates and the people making them. In fact I would argue the one that is out of touch with reality is you if you think that Wikipedia is above criticism.
  
  I’ve never met a person who has anything against Wikipedia.
  You probably hang out with too many lames.
  As this post explains, wikipedia has been doxing its own editors since inception. Beyond that people who use VPNs are blocked. Beyond that the founder is a fash. Beyond that the editors are a closed group of insiders consistently promoting hegemonic narratives. Beyond that many pages are just corporate/state propaganda...
- Wikipedia has been doxing its own editors for decades. The Heritage Foundation is just threatening to use this public information... It's a hegemonic team working together to maintain the narrative.

I imagine this has been underway since whenever that legal kerfluffle in India happened

What is the reason?
- Wikipedia has dox'd "anonymous" editors by default for its entire existence.
  
  So temporary means anon?
- Pshhh. You'll upset the Americans. They don't want filthy foreigners in their fediverse.

Wikipedia is too liberal.
Web encyclopedia is too free in sourcing actual information.
Can we rewind to 2010? I know these weren't really that great either, but world didn't burn and I was a lot more ignorant.
Edit: As one person below me noticed, I drawn fun at the level of idiotism that these sentences bear. Sadly, it was a subtle humor.
- what's the problem with free actual information on the world?
  Also Wikipedia is a s politically unbiased as it can be. Every artivle presents just facts and no opinions or emotions.
  
  I think the intent of the comment was meant to be sarcastic? not sure
  
  Every artivle presents just facts and no opinions or emotions.
  Propaganda is the dissemination of information—facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion.
  A biased release of information (for instance, a local news channel that reports exclusively on black criminals and white victims) is presenting exclusively facts and can be fully devoid of an opinion section or an editorial appeal to emotion, and still have a powerful impact on how its audience perceives their world. More banally, if you have a sports section that exclusively covers baseball games, baseball scores, and baseball players' life events, you're going to incline your audience towards baseball as a topic of conversation and as a cultural touchstone.
  Wikipedia biases itself towards western media, particularly larger and more corporately owned and operated media conglomerates. It's editors are primarily English-speaking and source data from English-language academic sources. It's founder and the original team of editors are whiter more professional class GenXers, and are biased towards researching and recording a body of historical and cultural touchstones most relevant to this cohort. The moderation team has standards that were implemented by these founders and original team members and are biased in turn.
  Deliberately or not, if you click the "Random" button on the website, you're going to end up on a page with a decidedly white, english-speaking college-degreed GenX bias.
  I love Wikipedia, and I treasure it as a project dedicated to accruing and curating enormous amounts of information. But it is absolutely a biased source.
  
  Also Wikipedia is a s politically unbiased as it can be. Every artivle presents just facts and no opinions or emotions.
  lmao. Half of the articles are corporate propaganda and the rest are CIA.
- Wikipedia is too liberal.
  So, I agree with this on its face. Wikipedia is absolutely a source of information that's couched in liberal rhetoric, biased towards liberal media sources, and heavily pruned to conform to a liberal reading of history and modernity.
  The initial response conservatives made to address "liberal bias" was to introduce "Conservapedia" and other conservative-branded alternative publications. And that did work in the sense that it gave them a (more biased, less enthusiastically edited) alternative source of information. The problem was nobody taking it seriously.
  Just like Twitter (which was also overwhelmingly biased towards liberal users, content, and advertising) the problem wasn't that conservatives couldn't compete. It was that Twitter was broadly considered a source of truth even by other conservatives. Elon's buyout was necessary to capture and eliminate an alternative popular narrative. And that has largely been successful.
  Web encyclopedia is too free in sourcing actual information.
  That's not really the critique, though. Conservatives regularly complained that their news media and their editors were being silenced. They couldn't post long-form articles about Black Crime or fill up the Criticism section of liberal politicians with right-wing critiques and allegations. They couldn't simply throw an army of their own editors into an open sandbox. The existing editors had administrative control over what is still a privately owned and operated environment.
  Wikipedia wasn't something they could control purely by weight of financial resources. And that's unforgivable.
  Can we rewind to 2010?
  Bring. Back. Blogging!
- Wikipedia is too liberal.
  Yes, wikipedia is right-wing. It reproduces hegemonic narratives that serve the status quo. That's the point of them doxing anonymous editors by default for the past couple decades.

Oh they decided to protect anonymous editors?
If Wikipedia actually gave a shit, they would have done this decades ago.
- The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.