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.
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.
Deployment on testwiki. We have rolled out temporary accounts to testwiki. Anyone who edits testwiki without an account will see their edits being attributed to a temporary account. We would like to emphasize that this is an early release, and things may break. This deployment makes it possible for some teams (like Data Platform Engineering or Apps) to start adjusting their code to temporary accounts. We aren't planning on introducing temporary accounts on any other wiki just yet. Instead, we will invite patrollers from different communities to testwiki and ask them to familiarize themselves with the new experience and share opinions with us. Currently, only testwiki admins can see the implemented patroller workflows (such as revealing IPs and view IP contributions) for temporary accounts. Over the next few weeks we will broaden the access to allow more users to test temporary accounts related workflows on testwiki.
Global blocking. We are really glad to announce that we launched global account blocks on all wikis (T17294). A request for this feature was first documented in 2008. It was also the top6 feature in the stewards' wishlist from 2015. Now, stewards can globally block regular and temporary account users. Read our previous update to learn more about the expected impact of global blocks.
Wikimania. We will be hosting sessions "Temporary Accounts are coming" (add to your favorite sessions) and "Getting better at blocking bad activity on the wikis" (add to your favorite sessions). Register to Wikimania to add sessions to favorites. Please join us in-person or virtually, and don't hesitate to get in touch with our team members during the event!
AbuseFilter. Some existing edit/abuse filters set up by community members on different wikis will need to be updated to work with temporary accounts. (See our instructions for developers on how to do this.) After the deployment of temporary accounts on a given wiki, abuse filters using data about IP together with related logs will be hidden from general view. It will be possible for admins to view and edit these filters. Later, we may change the group of users with access to the impacted filters, to potentially include technical editors who don't have any other advanced permissions.
