Talk:Trust and Safety Product/Temporary Accounts

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Any update soon?

Hello @SGrabarczuk (WMF) and NKohli (WMF): I hope you are doing well!

There has been no update since September 2023 on Trust and Safety Product/Temporary Accounts/Updates. Will there be an update soon? Is the deployment for first pilote wikis still scheduled for April/May 2024, as said on Trust and Safety Product/Temporary Accounts#Timeline? Not much info on phab:T348895 and phab:T340001 (not updated for a while).

Is there any news regarding the request for a tool that allows editors with IP Address Reveal right to see all temporary accounts who used an IP adress (in the previous 3 months)? See these comments + this discussion (ping @WhatamIdoing: with whom I discussed that when she was working for the WMF Community Relations team).

Best regards, — Jules* ^talk 21:44, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

Hey @Jules*. Thanks for your comment. Right now, I can't answer your second question (I don't know the answer) but regarding the first one, this is what could be an official project update but isn't because I didn't want to post a "placeholder update":

• After the team was merged, we focused on internal topics, also needed some time to adapt to this new setting. So we worked on temp accounts more slowly.
• In the meantime, some stewards were worried that we'd stick to months as deadlines and introduce changes without first making sure that all essential tools work. So we (1) started to talk to stewards more frequently, giving them answers from both P&T and Legal, (2) decided to define "milestones" instead of months.
• About the milestones: we prepared a long list of tasks that need to be done before any deployment, including updates to documentation (see the expanded FAQ, I'm also considering moving the pages to Temporary Accounts or mw:Temporary Accounts to make things simpler - what do you think?), engineering work, coordination with other WMF teams, updates to different extensions and their documentation, introducing new tools like Global User Contributions, etc.
• This list was done just about two weeks ago, and we haven't published it on Phabricator yet. When we publish it, you'll see how close to pilot wiki deployments we are. I think we're still quite far, because we don't know how many things will need to be fixed after deployment on testwiki. It's difficult to predict.

I hope to post a more insightful update with links to new things soon. The milestones look like an obvious candidate. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 15:45, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you very much for this, let's call it unofficial update, @SGrabarczuk (WMF).

Moving pages to Temporary Accounts seems a good idea to me. — Jules* ^talk 16:08, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I support the move, for what that is worth. Also, has the list been published yet? Gluonz (talk) 15:14, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

When is the exact date and time of the deployment of temporary account in testwiki?

In the section of timeline, I see that temporary accounts will be deployed in testwiki in this month, but as of now, IP address is still being shown in testwiki. This makes me want to know when will the temporary account be deployed in testwiki and when phab:T349507 will be completed. 132.234.228.106 08:15, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

additional question: when will tempaccounts will be deployed to test2wiki? TenWhile6 (talk | SWMT) 09:15, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

per answer above I don't think it's likely to happen soon. Johannnes89 (talk) 09:37, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, what Johannnes89 says. I'm not aware of any plan for deploying temp accounts on test2. We need to use testwiki to test temporary accounts on a production cluster wiki.

Regarding phab:T349507, we can do that any time now, for example next week, because it needs to happen some time before the test wiki deployment - a day or a month before. I'm not pointing at any particular date because this rename affects only two users, and none of them are active now. One of them has never edited (it's an account with 0 edits globally) and the other one edited only one day in 2020. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 16:00, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi @SGrabarczuk (WMF): , I had find a new account starting with ~2 was created recently which uses the similar name to a temp account (Special:CentralAuth/~2023-27459-O41). This account is needed to be renamed too. 132.234.228.134 03:22, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! Yes, I saw that account and realized that we need to run a query again to really know how many such accounts there are, and then get all of them renamed. There's also a question about the filters. These accounts shouldn't be possible to create in the first place. More info on T361021. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 13:54, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Migration from Meta-Wiki

Hello everyone, I wanted to share about the migration from Meta-Wiki to MediaWiki.org.

First, why:

1. Project documentation used to live on a few public wikis: Meta-Wiki (most pages), MediaWiki.org (example), and Foundation Governance wiki (example) + also Wikitech to some extent (example).
2. Differences between some of those wikis, what information should be where, are a bit blurry.
3. The project has evolved from IP editing as a broad concept into temporary accounts as a narrower product. Documentation needs to be much clearer in terms of what's still relevant and what's behind us.
4. It was increasingly difficult to maintain consistency, avoid unwanted contradiction etc.
5. The more advanced the project gets and the more we communicate about it, the easier to find and understand documentation needs to be.

Secondly, most Meta-Wiki pages history is still available there. At some point, we may migrate it entirely, but it seems to be a minor concern right now. One reason is because past discussions are not equally relevant since the project has evolved. In any case, we will not duplicate history pages. We would copy it into MediaWiki.org and delete it on Meta-Wiki instead.

As part of that, I'm intentionally renaming some pages (like Trust and Safety Product/IP Info or Trust and Safety Product/Temporary Accounts/For developers). This is to clarify what the pages are about, and also make it easier to navigate between them.

We'll also continue to do our best to keep the distinction between Wikimedia-specific and general MediaWiki documentation.

Thanks! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:20, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

Measurement and metrics

Are there any planned metrics that will be examined to review the effect of this change after it is deployed to non-test Wikipedia editions? A few possible areas for metrics would be measuring areas such as the impact on blocking disruptive and abusive editors, effects on vandalism in articles (both duration of visibility and ovrerall volume), volume of reports on noticeboards such as sockpuppet investigations and vandalism, and anything else that is a major area of concern with this change. Thanks. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 00:14, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Hello @Daniel Quinlan, thanks for asking! Have you taken a look at the related question and answer in the FAQ by any chance? You may find some answers there - there's a long and detailed list of metrics. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:32, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

I have, but I hadn't seen that it was updated with more specifics on metrics a few weeks ago. Thanks! Daniel Quinlan (talk) 09:26, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Abuse filters

If an LTA from Chicago posts his rants on a small European wiki as an IP (easily switching to IPs from South America, Africa, South Asia), a good counter measure is to filter out IP edits on all his favorite topics, given that they're NOT coming from the wiki's +95% known IPs: our regular IP users can freely edit articles on stalin and rocky and...

If IPs will be discoverable only by clicking on each edit, there will be no way for me to analyze our usual IP ranges. He's smart enough to use private browsing, he can do all kinds of damage, so in this new scenario he wins. I have absolutely no idea how our abuse filters will work, given that most of them cover only IP (ab)users, who (luckily) represent the majority of our vandals. Is this being discussed? With emphasis on small(er)/nonglobal wikis? pon_or (talk) 17:21, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Without theme

I'm very discouraged when I found out that we will use temporary accounts. I'm a long-term IP editor also (tens of thousands IP edits on Commons, since late 2022, mostly file categorization). It is interesting for me to edit via various and unusual IPs, much more interesting than via dull unwanted temporary accounts. Will be a choice for an anonymous editor either use temporary account or continue to use IPs? I don't want to "protect" my "privacy". Юрий Д.К. (talk) 04:06, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

@Юрий Д.К.: Hello, due the the legal reasons (the longer version explanation), it is impossible to have a choice for users continue to use IPs. Of course, they can still create an (permanent) account if they want. Thanks. SCP-2000 (talk) 04:32, 18 April 2024 (UTC)