Trust and Safety Product/Temporary Accounts/gu
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Temporary Accounts
A new type of user account changing how personal data of logged-out users is handled
← IP Info |
Temporary accounts for unregistered editors are a new type of user account which replace the insufficient IP addresses. On all Wikimedia wikis where temporary accounts are enabled, IP addresses of unregistered editors are not visible publicly. Only those who fight spam, vandalism, harassment and disinformation have access to IP addresses there.
Currently, anyone can edit Wikimedia wikis without a Wikimedia account or without logging in. MediaWiki, the software behind Wikimedia projects, records your IP address.
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 network details. 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. In more extreme cases, cybercriminals may also have opportunities to overwhelm or render networks unusable with Denial of Service attacks owing to the publication of IP addresses on wikis.
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 impacts anti-abuse workflows. We remain committed to developing tools or maintaining access to tools that can identify and block vandals, sockpuppeteers, editors with conflicts of interest, and other bad actors.
For everyone
For patrollers and functionaries
For developers
Updates
: 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
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:
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How to reveal IP addresses
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How automatic reveal works
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New special page: IPContributions
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How to use IP Info
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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.
