Trust and Safety Product/Temporary Accounts/Updates/Related changes
The software needs to be updated to adapt to changes caused by Temporary Accounts. This page is for updates about these changes.
Moderator Tools: Progress update and new functionality for Nuke
editThis is a quick status update from the Moderator Tools team. Our team has verified and made necessary changes to The Wikipedia Library (and a few related tools), PageTriage, and Nuke to ensure that these tools will continue to work following the introduction of Temporary accounts.
Our work on Nuke identified a potential new attack vector which would make the tool less effective - namely that if a user on the same IP address rotated temporary accounts rapidly, the tool would no longer be useful in cleaning up newly created pages. To address this we're planning to introduce a new feature which will accept an IP address as an input and return all pages recently created by temporary accounts using that IP address. Progress on this work can be tracked at T342785.
Growth: Temporary Accounts usability tests for Unregistered editors
editThe Growth team completed usability tests to gauge the understanding and experience from the perspective of unregistered editors, and are assigned a “temporary account”.
The aim of the tests were to learn their:
- Understanding of temporary accounts . Particularly that temporary accounts are Anonymous (no longer associated with an IP address) and Temporal (that the account will expire).
- Preferences for different temporary account name formats, especially across languages.
- Inclination to create an account compared to using temporary accounts if they were to edit.
We have completed Temporary Accounts user research in four languages, and the complete report is available here: IP Masking: Usability tests in English, Spanish, Japanese, and Arabic.
Below is a summary of the usability research and design changes made in response to the user feedback.
First round of usability tests:
edit- Testers understand that temp accounts are different than traditional accounts, but remain unclear about “getting credit,” whether edits carry over, etc.
- A large proportion of testers (more than half) interpreted “*23-15.498” as representing their IP address—a perceived security risk.
- Testers are not receiving the basic message that “Wikipedia is trying to make you safer by hiding your previously-visible IP address.”
- English-speaking testers prefer temp account names that include lexical meaning; e.g., “Unregistered_,” or “Temp-”.
Second design iteration:
editBased on the first found of usability tests, several design changes were made before testing again in more languages.
- Adding gray banner/status bar at top of page (this work was completed by the Web team).
- Simplifying copy to remove confusing jargon — for example ”IP address” no longer appears next to temp account name
- Changing the name format to test inclusion of a `YYYY` prefix
- Simplifying information about account expiration
Second round of usability tests:
editThe updated designs performed better, and the following details were noted by the researcher:
- Significant UI overhaul leads to greatly improved understanding.
- Testers no longer perceive the randomly generated temporary user name as relating to their IP address.
- There is still some confusion in some languages about what exactly happens when a temporary account expires.
- YYYY in name format immediately grasped as source of meaning.
- Different languages have different preferences for how to format temporary account names. For example, Japanese testers prefer a temporary account name that includes lexical meaning (e.g., 未登録 “Unregistered”)
- Findings related to the name format were incorporated into wider discussion about this topic on the Phabricator task T332805.
Growth next steps:
editGrowth team engineers are now updating Growth Team-owned products that are affected by the Temporary Accounts project (T328368). The Growth team will focus mainly on the logged out user to temporary account holder user experience, as well as ensuring that Growth owned extensions and features work as expected with this new temporary account type.
Growth: Notifications for Temporary accounts
editTo help facilitate editor communication, Temporary accounts will be able to receive Echo notifications.
Temporary accounts will be configured with the system's default notification preferences and will not be able to modify these settings (T333531).
Furthermore, Temporary accounts don't have access to certain features, so the notifications they are eligible to receive is more limited than the typical new account default. For instance, temporary accounts will never be associated with email addresses, thereby precluding them from receiving notifications such as "Email from other user."
| Notification | Are temporary accounts eligible for this notification type? |
|---|---|
| Edit to my user talk page | ✅ |
| Thanks | ✅ |
| Translations | ✅ |
| Talk page archiving | ✅ |
| Talk page subscription | ❌[1] |
| Mention | ✅ |
| Failed mention | ❌ |
| Successful mention | ❌ |
| Connection with Wikidata | ✅ |
| Page link | ✅ |
| Failed login attempts | ❌ |
| Login from an unfamiliar device | ❌ |
| Page review | ✅ Note: Temporary accounts will receive this notification on wikis that allow temporary accounts to create new pages. |
| Edit milestone | ✅ |
| Email from other user | ❌ |
| Edit revert | ✅ |
| User rights change | ❌ |
| Mentorship | ❌ |
| Growth features | ❌ |