Temporary accounts for unregistered editors will be a new type of user account.
IP addresses of unregistered editors will no longer be publicly visible.
Only those who fight spam, vandalism, harassment and disinformation will have access to IP addresses.
Temporary Accounts
A new type of user account changing how personal data of logged-out users is handled
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.
Hello! We have published a new policy page: Access to temporary account IP addresses.
It explains how users can gain access to IP addresses.
Later, we will update the section on using IP addresses.
In it, we will add information on how and where to access the IP addresses, and what is logged when IP addresses are accessed.
There is also a new page with frequently asked questions.
Both pages use the term "temporary user accounts".
This name comes from the first version of the software (MVP).
Soon, we will share more information about it.
We welcome your comments on the talk page.
As planned, at the end of October and in the first days of November, we launched Temporary Accounts to 12 projects. We are happy to report that we did not encounter any issues that required us to roll back the deployment. There is a lot of activity from temporary accounts on these projects. We are currently collecting detailed data, and will publish a report with our findings about it in the coming weeks. We will also be running a survey to better understand the impact of this rollout on users with advanced rights. Many thanks to the communities of the pilot wikis, stewards, CheckUsers, and global sysops for their openness, good questions, and ideas for changes.
We are implementing an onboarding dialog box to help registered users understand temporary accounts and associated features. The dialog box will introduce the concept of temporary accounts, the IP Info tool with the IP reveal feature, and more. (T373818)
A mockup of AutorevealWe have decided to implement an "auto-reveal" feature. It will allow selected functionaries to view all IP addresses, for all temporary accounts in a defined period of time. This feature will help functionaries respond quickly to abuse, for example vandalism events that require checking a lot of IP addresses. We are currently defining the typical tasks and designs for this feature. We will be grateful if you share your thoughts about Autoreveal in this Phabricator task. The decision to build it was based on our discussions with stewards and other users with extended rights, and we would like to thank them again for their continued involvement and invaluable advice.
Special:GlobalContributions will be able to display information about cross-wiki contributions from registered users, IP addresses, IP ranges, and temporary accounts in the near future. (T375632)
