In the recent months, we heard concerns from patrollers about the additional time they needed to spend when dealing with abusive behavior. To ensure temporary account vandalism can be sustainably managed, we have decided to make it easier for patrollers to understand and respond to temporary-account activity, both good- and bad-faith.
We are starting by surfacing clusters of related temporary accounts to patrollers. We are also exploring other interventions that could improve early identification and rapid response. At the same time, our colleagues from the Moderator Tools team are working on deploying the Automoderator tool to more wikis. They will also evaluate its impact in reducing the amount of vandalism by temporary accounts that human patrollers need to deal with.
Regarding the clusters of temporary accounts, we have just introduced a few new features:
On Special:Contributions, upon checking contributions of a temporary account, users with access to temporary account IP addresses can now see a view of contributions from the related temporary accounts. The feature looks up all the IPs associated with a given temporary account within the data retention period and shows all the contributions of all temporary accounts that have used these IPs. Users can also see this by checking "Show contributions from related temporary accounts" in the search section.
On Special:Contributions, Special:GlobalContributions, and Special:IPContributions, all users with access to these pages can see a new line: "Temporary accounts from all associated IPs", or " Temporary accounts on this IP". This provides information about the expected amount of time needed to patrol all associated contributions.
: Last deployments and continued support in the coming months
Impact of temporary accounts
We are pleased to report that about 96% of the unregistered editing across all Wikimedia wikis is now being done from temporary accounts. Half a year ago, this number was three times lower. We are grateful to many community members, particularly stewards and English Wikipedia functionaries. They help us improve the new features, and we have established very close relationships in the recent months.
We are tracking the impact of temporary accounts on user activity, blocks, and account creation.There aren't any concerning trends like relatively more reverted edits or fewer account registrations.We have noticed a new pattern for blocks, however.The proportion of blocks made for temporary accounts has increased, and the proportion of blocks made for IPs/IP ranges has decreased (see the analysis here).If this pattern sustains, we hope this will lead to fewer potential editors being blocked as collateral.
What's next
At the same time, even though temporary accounts generally work as expected, we acknowledge that there are some new costs to those who perform anti-abuse work. Our next aim is to make the anti-abuse tooling more precise and effective. If you have any suggestions for what could be changed, please reach out to us on the team talk page.
Looking back at our latest feature improvements
August survey results and subsequent discussions with English Wikipedians
Analysis of the survey sent to 18 communities
In August, we reached out to large communities from wikis where temporary accounts were deployed for their thoughts regarding the changes. We shared a survey on 18 wikis, including Chinese, French, German, and Japanese. 337 respondents took the survey, and 63% of them held extended rights (most commonly, admin). Here's the full analysis, and the highlights are:
81% responded "Yes" when asked if they understood the reasoning behind the introduction of temporary accounts.
38% were at least "very satisfied", 37% reported moderate satisfaction, and 25% reported low satisfaction with the features.
A small number of negative comments came from temporary account users who said they would like tighter restrictions on who is allowed to view IP addresses to better protect their privacy.
58% of respondents reported no disruption to their tasks from temporary accounts. The majority of negative comments focused on how temporary accounts caused disruption to tasks: it was harder to find and block sockpuppets, temporary accounts provided a new way for vandals to "hide", and it took more time to track IP vandalism (note: some users didn't have access to IPs at the time of responding to the survey).
In addition to analyzing the survey, we started having more conversations with English Wikipedia functionaries. Both the survey results and these conversations have resulted in feature improvements that benefit all wikis.
Feature updates to reduce the impact of temporary account creation and deactivation
We are seeing a large increase in the number of temporary accounts. Most of it is intended, but some cases are those of editors logging out mistakenly or always logging out after making an edit, whether in good or bad faith. We have made a few changes to address this:
Confirmation step in the exit session flow for temporary accounts (T378806): We wanted to reduce the risk of people accidentally using too many accounts by exiting their session. This should contribute to more predictable communication with the temporary account users.
Initially, the rate limit was identical with that for registered accounts, but it wasn't sufficient:
IPv6 /64 range support (T406710): The temporary account creation limits now apply to both a single IPv4 address and a /64 range for IPv6.
10-minute cool-off period between creations (T405565): If User A creates a temporary account to vandalize and tries to quickly jump to a new temporary account, they will have to wait a minimum of 10 minutes between account creations.
Nudge temporary users who have hit the rate limit to create an account (T412105): We wanted to accommodate those who, because of these changes, are discouraged from making good-faith edits.
Anti-abuse utility changes
Extending the maximum time of IP auto-reveal: We had built the IP auto-reveal feature for users who may be patrolling very frequently, to make it easier for them to access the temporary accounts' IP addresses. This feature can now be activated for a maximum of 90 days.
Different number buckets for "temporary accounts from all associated IPs" in the User Info card (T412212): Previously, if more than 11 temporary accounts were sharing an IP address, the User Info feature displayed "11+". Because dealing with a group of 12 temporary accounts operating from shared IPs is different from dealing with 50 or 100 accounts, we wanted to give more useful information to patrollers, and introduced more buckets.
Other related changes: We have made some smaller changes to make it easier for patrollers to perform their tasks.These include adding a link to a /64 range on Special:IPContributions when revealing an IPv6 IP (T411943), adding links to /16, /24, and /32 ranges on Special:IPContributions (T409179), including a link to the abuse log when viewing IP ranges (T412341), and adding links in the Tools menu (T405568).
Other feature changes
Automatic revocation of the TAIV right from inactive users (T375115): Users who have been inactive for over a year will need to apply for this right again. Inactivity is defined as no edits or logged actions. This does not apply to users who get access as part of some other rights, like admins.
Background for temporary usernames in content and discussion pages (T392775): To make it easier to immediately identify temporary accounts, a colored background appears on content pages, consistently with log-type pages like recent changes or watchlist.
A default expiry option for blocking temporary accounts (T398626): Blocking temporary accounts indefinitely may needlessly clog up Special:BlockList since temp accounts only last 90 days. To avoid this, communities may set up a different default block expiry, for example 90 days.
Temporary accounts on blocked IPs can request unblocks (T398673): Unregistered editors on blocked IPs/IP ranges can request an unblock by editing Special:MyTalk (similar to how this worked before the introduction of temporary accounts). This activity will be tagged to let patrollers know that it happened on a blocked IP/range.
Our communication about temporary accounts
Earlier this year, we created instructional videos to better explain how to work with temporary accounts:
How to reveal IP addresses
How automatic reveal works
New special page: IPContributions
How to use IP Info
How to use User Info
We will gladly join community events and workshops to walk you through the new features. Do let us know if you are interested, particularly if you can connect us with community event organizers. In addition, we will be coordinating on this with Movement Communications.
之前的进展更新
: Deployment on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, and our plans for next months
Recent deployments – in the latter half of June, we rolled out temporary accounts on MediaWiki.org and 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias including French, German, Chinese, Japanese, and more. You will find the full list of wikis temporary accounts are deployed to in the FAQ. Heartfelt thanks to all volunteers who helped in deployment, whether by updating AbuseFilter, translating the interface, answering questions from other community members, writing and translating documentation, creating new tools, and more! Our gratitude goes to Albertoleoncio, DerHexer, Dragoniez, Ellywa, Hide on Rosé, Jules*, Johannnes89, Martin Urbanec, Matěj Suchánek, Msz2001, Neriah, NicoScribe, Titore, VZP10224, Ykhwong, *Youngjin, and many more.
Impact of the previous deployments – in a recent analysis, we found that temporary accounts did not pose any significant changes on pilot wikis.The only notable change was a shift from IP-based blocking to temporary account-based blocking on our first set of pilot wikis.You may monitor this dashboard to track changes from temporary accounts on projects where we are already deployed.
New documentation pages – you may be interested in two new documentation pages: Access to IP, explaining everything related to access to temporary account IP addresses, and Repository with a list of new gadgets and user scripts. On the latter, you will find a short new video explaining how to edit using a temporary account. We will also create at least one more for users with extended rights, moderating temporary account activity.
Meetings with communities – in the past weeks, we met with a few communities: South Asian, French Wikipedia patrollers, and Japanese Wikipedia administrators. These meetings were helpful for the community members as well as the team to plan our future work. If your community would also like to meet with us, please message Sheila.
Work in the coming weeks
Our goal for this phase is to identify issues which may only surface with large-scale use of temporary accounts. We are delighted to share that this work is progressing as planned. You may subscribe to the task T395134, "Analyzing the roll-out of temp accounts on major pilots as it impacts anti-abuse work".
Do let Claudia know if temporary accounts significantly interfered with your ability to deter bad behavior, or helped you stop unwanted behavior from happening, or eased your communication with a logged-out user.
We have also received a lot of feedback and ideas for improvements on the project talk page.We are documenting and prioritizing the next set of work based on this feedback.There are a number of Phabricator tickets we have created since the deployment.You can see them on this board.
Plans for the coming months – the final deployment on all remaining wikis is planned for September. We are considering options to limit the scope of that phase by rolling out on some wikis sooner. Please write to Szymon if your community is interested in having temporary accounts earlier (July or August) – we will gladly include your wiki in these plans.
Manual granting – initially, we chose numerical thresholds to access IP addresses for users who don't have extended rights. We decided this before deploying temporary accounts on any wiki. However, after gathering feedback from our pilot projects we realized that these thresholds were quite low and it was still too easy for bad-faith actors to gain access to temporary account IP addresses. In addition, outside actors who may want to access IP addresses could contact users who have this right in an attempt to obtain this information. Temporary accounts should meaningfully improve editor privacy, so we decided to be more restrictive before we roll this feature out on wikis with large communities. This is why we updated the policy and changed the granting of this group from automatic to manual, done by administrators or stewards upon request. Read the full message we posted on Meta-Wiki and 20 large Wikipedias.
Technical enforcement – we have decided to technically prevent the assignment of the Temporary account IP viewer group to accounts which do not meet criteria.Stewards will be able to override this limitation.Here's the decision record page.We will also include this on the Limits to configuration changes page.
Next deployments will happen in June – in autumn 2024, we successfully deployed temporary accounts on small wikis. Since then, users with global rights have started to see how temporary accounts work in practice, and how to handle cross-wiki workflows. Now, we are ready for more deployments, and in the coming weeks, we will be talking with large communities about it. Communities which receive temporary accounts in June will have more opportunities and time to suggest improvements than communities which will receive the change in the last deployment later this year.
Changes coordinated with the time of new deployments – because the following changes depend on the policy change described above and on one another, we are introducing them shortly before and after the next deployments:
Access to IP Info on wikis with temporary accounts enabled and Meta-Wiki – users with access to temporary account IP addresses will have full access to IP Info. Those without access to temporary account IP addresses will not be able to use IP Info. In addition, IP Info will no longer be a beta feature and available as a full feature.
Access to IP info on the remaining wikis – this is not changing – autoconfirmed users will have limited access, users with extended rights like admins will have the full access, and IP Info will remain as a beta feature there until the deployment of temporary accounts.
Onboarding dialog (T373818) and Autoreveal (T374869) – the features we mentioned in the previous update will also be deployed around the time of the new deployments. The onboarding dialog will be shown to all users with access to temporary account IP addresses, on both wikis where temporary accounts were deployed in 2024 and wikis where the deployments will happen in June.
Statistics of blocks on pilot wikis – we have collected data on the number of IP and account blocks before and after the pilot deployment. Our results show that while the number of blocks of registered accounts didn't change, most of the remaining blocks (approximately 90%) affected temporary accounts, and only about 10% were IP blocks. This seems to support our hypothesis that most of the logged-out abusive activity may be prevented with account blocks, which reduces collateral damage significantly. After the June deployments, we will be sharing more data.
Special:MassGlobalBlock – we have built a new special page to allow stewards block multiple accounts and IPs globally. It was requested by stewards in 2016. We took inspiration from an existing gadget. This feature now helps stewards combat abuse from temporary and registered accounts more effectively. (T124607)
FAQ and documentation refresh – considering all these changes, we have updated the FAQ to include the manual granting of the Temporary account IP address group elaborate on retroactive patrolling. We will be also rewording the part about the motivation for the project. In the coming weeks, we will make more documentation changes.
Our plans for the next fiscal year – we invite you to read the final draft of the 2025/2026 Annual plan, and specifically the part describing our work: key results WE4.1 (Incident Reporting System), WE4.2 (improvements to anti-abuse tooling), WE4.4 (Temporary Accounts) and WE4.5 (AI risk and opportunity assessment). Share your comments on the talk page until May 31st.
: Successful deployment on minor pilots and progress on the features
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)
: Deployments on the first pilots
Deployment schedule
We have a finalized list of small-to-medium sized projects where we will be deploying temporary accounts over the next couple of weeks. The goal is to ensure all critical functionality (patroller workflows, tools etc.) for temporary accounts works as expected. We decided to split this phase into two batches. This way, we will have more control over the key functionality and more confidence before temporary accounts are introduced on the largest of the first pilots.
We are developing a public dashboard for monitoring metrics for our pilot projects. We will have a documentation page in place shortly to explain which metrics we are focusing on and why.
Special:GlobalContributions is now ready for looking up cross-wiki contributions from an IP address.This page will only be accessible to users who qualify to see IP addresses associated with a temporary account.We are still ironing out permissions for this page access.We will have a documentation page up about it over the next week.
We have updated IP Info to support information for multiple IP addresses that may be associated with a temporary account.Special:IPInfo should be available on all projects where temporary accounts will be deployed.
We are updating IP Info access policy to be at par with the IP Reveal policy. You can follow along with this task for further information.
Temporary accounts can now be globally blocked. Global autoblocks work is in progress and should be implemented over the next couple of weeks.
Temporary accounts are now available on all beta cluster projects except for en-rtl for testing.
We are looking forward to your comments on the talk page.
: Deployment plan is ready!
We are happy to announce our timeline and strategy for the temporary accounts deployments across all wikis.The plan was co-created by the Product and Technology, Legal, and Communications departments at the Foundation.We also consulted stewards and informed CheckUsers.All the date below are subject to change based on the extent of pending work.We will be informing you if anything changes.
In late October 2024, we will roll out on approximately 10 small and medium-sized wikis.This phase is called the minor pilot deployment.We have pre-selected potential good pilots based on different factors.These include: the numbers of active admins and IP edits per month, lack of blockers related to the configuration of a given wiki, availability of potential ambassadors and technical members of the respective communities, and more.After we deploy there, we will be monitoring the impact of this project on collaboration on wikis.We will also be contacting community members of these wikis.Some time later, we will monitor what will happen when the initial IP addresses of temporary accounts are not available to patrollers.
If the first deployments are successful and we don't have a ton of unexpected work, then in February 2025, we will roll out on larger wikis.We call this major pilot deployment.It may include some top10 wikis, but not English Wikipedia.
Next, in May 2025, we will deploy on all remaining wikis in one carefully coordinated step.After that, we will be providing support, monitoring metrics, and solving issues as they arise.
We will do our best to inform everyone impacted ahead of time.Information about temporary accounts will be available on Tech News, Diff, other blogs, different wikipages, banners, and other forms.At conferences, for example regional and national ones, we or our colleagues on our behalf will be inviting talk about this project with attendees.We will also try to have presentations there.In addition, we will be contacting affiliates running programs of support for editors with advanced permissions.Subscribe to our new newsletter to stay close in touch.
: Progress on our technical work
Before we deploy temporary accounts to any non-test wiki, we need to complete our work on a few remaining tasks.These include:
Live-updated metrics on temporary accounts.Before the October deployments, we will build a dashboard presenting the impact of temporary accounts on communities.There will be different graphs showing, for example, numbers of reverts, blocks, temp accounts' IP address previews ("IP Reveal"), successful and abandoned edits, and more.All these will be updated very frequently, for instance, every day, to give everyone a good visibility of the actual work of temporary accounts on wikis. (T357763)
Allowing global autoblocks for temporary accounts (T368949), building a mechanism automatically giving the eligible users the right to reveal IP addresses of temporary accounts (T327913), and some other tasks.
Relatedly, we wanted to share a kind request to the maintainers of community-owned code like tools, bots, gadgets etc.We want to avoid any unnecessary disruptions to your software.If it uses data about IP addresses or is available for not logged-in users, please read our documentation, and in particular, the section on how your code might need to be updated.We will gladly help you out, and we're waiting for your questions.
Graduating IP Info out of beta features.IP Info provides reliable information about IP addresses to some logged-in users.According to a dedicated policy, this tool may only be used for the investigation or prevention of violations of policies.Users can access it if they select a checkbox in their preferences, agreeing to use this tool in accordance with these terms.Then, they can see a button ⓘ displayed next to the IP address on pages like Recent Changes, Watchlist, and page history.The feature is also available for them at the top of the Special:Contributions page when contributions of a specific IP address are listed.Soon, we will make this a regular feature and remove it from the list of beta features.We will also make some changes to its functionality.For more information about IP Info, watch its project page or subscribe to our new newsletter. (T375084)
: Global blocks are here. Temporary accounts on testwiki
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.
: Priority for functionary and patroller tools
Team changes.In our update from September 2023, we wrote that changes to the team may have an effect on the timeline of this project.Indeed, they had, as we wrote on the talk page earlier this year.Briefly, the Anti-Harassment Tools and Trust and Safety Tools teams were merged into one to work according to a unified plan.Now, we encourage you to look at our refreshed team page and our part of the 2024–2025 annual plan: key results WE4.1, WE4.2, and WE4.4.Temporary accounts are documented as WE4.4.
Documentation. We invite you to read the new FAQ, visit the main project page, and click around. We have migrated pages from Meta-Wiki, and restructured and updated them. Hopefully, the new structure makes it easier to learn about the future changes, how temporary accounts will work, and why this change will happen.
Wikimania. Our team members will hold two sessions at Wikimania 2024: about temporary accounts and about getting better at blocking bad activity on wikis. Whether you're going to be in Katowice or connecting online, join us!
Projected timeline for deployments:
We have reviewed our previous plans and prioritized support for patroller tools and anti-abuse workflows. The most important part of our work is ensuring that wiki functionaries and patrollers are comfortable with the rollout of temporary accounts. We can't estimate how much time this part of work will take. As a result, we can't announce the dates of deployments yet.
In April, we asked volunteer developers to update the code they maintain. This was an early call to give them time to prepare. Some tools may need to be updated before the test wiki deployment.
We are discussing our strategy for content wiki deployments. We're weighing different factors, including consistency of functionaries' workflows across wikis, and availability of functionaries and frequency of abuse on different wikis.
Changes to features and tools. As we mentioned, we are prioritizing support for patrollers and functionaries. Below are examples of our recent work:
Global blocking.Currently, there is no tool that allows stewards to globally block an account – there is only global lock, which logs the person out of their account.Without our changes, a temporary account holder blocked this way would lose their account and create a new one with their next edit attempt.After our changes, they will not be logged out, and they will see a block notice on their next edit attempt (T17294).Doing this also means that stewards will be able to globally block registered users, which implements a long-requested feature and provides better tools to combat cross-wiki abuse.
Autoblocks. To make the above effective, we will also support autoblocks, limiting temporary account creations (T355286). This will limit the avenues for abuse if a person using a temporary account that is globally blocked exits their session and tries to make an edit again.
Global User Contributions.The Global User Contributions tool allows patrollers to track a logged-out user's edits on all wikis and track cross-wiki abuse.It depends on IP addresses being public, though.As a result of our deployments, it will stop working.We are building a new tool with the same name which will provide the same functionality (T337089).
Special page for IP contributions. Currently, functionaries check contributions made by logged-out users from IPs, using the page Special:Contributions.After our deployments, only regular and temporary account holders' contributions will be listed on this special page.We are building a new page, Special:IPContributions, to keep the functionality (T358852).
We are also updating other tools like AbuseFilter, CheckUser tools, action API, and more.
我很快会发布另一篇文章来跟进此事，分享我们已经实现的最简可行产品的大纲。这个最简可行产品基于我们过去在本页面和其他平台上与社群的对话。请详阅过往对话以及本页上过去的进展更新。如果你有任何问题和担忧，可以在讨论页上联络我们。This MVP is based on the conversations we have had with the community in the past, through this page and other mediums.Please feel free to peruse those previous conversations and read through the past updates on this page.If you have questions or concerns, you can reach out to us on the talk page.
基于IP方案的截图
基于会话方案的截图
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