Trust and Safety Product/Temporary Accounts/Updates/2025-03 pilot survey
The Trust and Safety Product team invited users with extended rights to share their thoughts about Temporary Accounts. We asked stewards, global sysops, as well as CheckUsers and admins on 11 minor pilot wikis. Our goals for the survey were to:
- Uncover feedback that could be useful to plan future improvements
- Identify what we can do better for the next round of deployment
- Demonstrate impact of the project
Summary
Overall, a very nicely done feature! The disruptions were minimal compared to the benefits and there were solutions to all the raised problems.—Romanian Wikipedia administrator
It's more difficult to block effectively and it's hard to determine scale of abuse due to global contributions being broken.—Steward
Most respondents were admins on the wikis
- 54 responses from 11 wikis across 8 languages.
- 87% of respondents have extended rights, most commonly administrators.
Satisfaction was moderate to high, and disruption was low
- Communications about Temporary Accounts were well understood and considered useful.
- Most users (81%) reported moderate to high satisfaction with the current features of Temporary Accounts, however 19% felt less satisfied.
- Similarly, while 72% experienced no disruption to their on-wiki tasks, 20% reported disruption.
Anti-abuse tools need improving
- Anti-abuse tools need further work: IP Info was cited by some as being inaccessible to patrollers with no admin rights and as showing unreliable or confusing data, Global Contributions does not work properly, and enabling IP Reveal is not intuitive.
- Improvements have been suggested, some of which the Trust & Safety Product team are already working on or plan to work on, including: Auto-revealing IPs, AbuseFilter, Global Contributions, and onboarding dialog to explain how to enable IP Reveal.
- Other suggestions include: improving the effectiveness of blocks (planned for FY 25–26 as WE4.2), showing when temporary accounts are connected, and providing further communications to address concerns over the benefits of temporary accounts.
- A minority would prefer not to enable Temporary Accounts citing disruptive contributions from temporary users as a primary reason.
Communications
We need to preach to users how to use Temp Accounts and its benefits, on Swahili Wikipedia.—Swahili Wikipedia administrator
- 83% understood the reasoning behind the introduction of Temporary Accounts.
- 69% felt that communications about Temporary Accounts from the Wikimedia Foundation, shared before and after deployment, have been useful.
- More communications are needed on some wikis, in particular Swahili.
Satisfaction
Nice to not expose IP addresses for normal users on wiki projects.—Norwegian Wikipedia administrator
- 50% reported high satisfaction with the current features of Temporary Accounts: very satisfied (42%) and extremely satisfied (8%).
- 31% reported being moderately satisfied.
- 19% reported being slightly satisfied (6%) or not satisfied at all (13%).
| Reasons for high satisfaction | Reasons for low satisfaction |
|---|---|
| Temporary Accounts protect non-registered users.
Much more effective against vandalism. It keeps personal data hidden but tracks a vandal in a better way. —Administrator |
IP Info is disappointing as the data is often confusing and unreliable. Global Contributions is not working well enough.
Impossible to know scale of abuse. —Steward |
| Global Contributions is an unexpected and useful addition.
This is really very helpful. —Steward |
It's more difficult to discover that the same IP is responsible for a lot of vandalism.
More burdensome to stop vandals. —Danish Wikipedia administrator |
| In cases of vandalism, IP addresses can be quickly displayed in order to mitigate disruption. | Patrollers without extended rights cannot access IP Info tool.
IP information is not available to me. —Administrator |
| Some respondents said they would rather have logged-in editors only or to switch off temp accounts.
Temporary Accounts do not bring useful contributions. —Romanian Wikipedia administrator |
Disruption to on-wiki tasks
It's harder to know when a bad edit comes from a user/location (notably schools) who previously behaved in bad faith.
- 72% reported no disruption to their on-wiki tasks.
- 20% reported disruption to their on-wiki tasks, and 7% were unsure.
| Reasons for no disruption | Reasons for disruption |
|---|---|
| No significant difference between Temporary Accounts and IP vandals
Temporary Account vandals did not cause a statistically significant higher or lower disruption than IP vandals. —Romanian Wikipedia administrator |
Temporary Accounts make it more difficult to discover abuse.
Following and fighting anonymous vandalism is now more difficult. —Romanian Wikipedia administrator |
| Anti-abuse features (Global Contributions, AbuseFilter) are either not yet available or not feature complete.
Global contributions doesn't work. —Steward | |
| Lack of an Auto-reveal feature caused frustration, and it's not easy to find out how to enable the IP reveal feature.
Enabling viewing IPs is not intuitive. —Steward | |
| IPs are easier to remember.
Hard to differentiate temporary accounts —Serbian Wikipedia patroller | |
| It's harder to know if a vandal also vandalized wikis in the past, especially when edits are from a school.
More difficult to block effectively. —Steward | |
| IP edits and Temporary Account edits being in separate tabs caused some confusion.
It's easier to look in one place than two! —AbuseFilter helper |
Improvements and ideas
A number of improvements to Temporary Accounts have been suggested:
- Blocking - Autoblock different Temporary Accounts using the same computer/browser. Block IP address when blocking the temp account.
- Fix the tools - Finish building the anti-abuse tools.
- Name format - Change the name format so it's easier to tell the difference between accounts.
- No IP editors - Get rid of temporary accounts and make registration mandatory. Discard contributions made without logging in.
- Communications - More communications to explain to users the benefits of temp accounts and how they work (particularly on Swahili Wikipedia).
- Auto-reveal IPs per Temporary Account - Expand all IP addresses of a temporary account with one click.
- Gatekeeping and punitive measures - Prevent problematic users from receiving the "view IP addresses" right. Punishments for those that abuse the tool for personal gain.
- Account rating - A rating; benign, malevolent, dubious, neutral.
- Connecting Temporary Accounts - A feature that shows if two temporary accounts use the same IP. (The person who suggested this noted it would involve privacy issues and the feature would likely only be useful in minor cases.)
Further comments
- Does the CheckUser policy now allow matching of registered accounts with temporary ones? —Romanian Wikipedia administrator
- The messaging to temporary users does not make it clear that an IP address may still be revealed at a later point. —AbuseFilter helper
- I doubt their actual usefulness. —Administrator
- Wikipedia only works if many eyes patrol it. What if not enough editors request permission to view IPs? —Administrator
- I think this should only apply to ‘sensitive' Wikipedias. —VRT member
Recommendations
- Ensure Temporary Accounts anti-abuse tools fully meet user needs and are feature complete.
- Update Temporary Accounts wiki documentation to provide further clarification of the benefits and features.
- Explore feasibility and impact of ideas suggested by respondents to the survey.