this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
1 points (100.0% liked)
Today I Learned (TIL)
9067 readers
1 users here now
You learn something new every day; what did you learn today?
/c/til is a community for any true knowledge that you would like to share, regardless of topic or of source.
Share your knowledge and experience!
Rules
- Information must be true
- Follow site rules
- No, you don't have to have literally learned the fact today
- Posts must be about something you learned
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How were they caught? Did Wikipedia reveal user data to the authorities when prompted?
Your IP address is shown publicly when you make edits on Wikipedia
What benefit is there for that to be publicly viewable?
Banning bad actors ip's. Or more horrifically, this.
I'm not sure that's a "benefit"…
Wouldn't that only be relevant for an admin/moderator? Why does it need to be publicly viewable?
Took a two month nap?
It's important for it to be public, otherwise bad actors can far too easily destroy the entire platform. Wikipedia is too big, and smart to privatize editors. While it sucks really bad that this happened to this poor guy, the alternative could doom Wikipedia.
The real evil here is Saudi Arabia (they are the ones that pursued him correct? It's been a few months I forgot.)
Edit: it was, he was an admin of Saudi Arabia Wikipedia, and they blamed him for some bs. There was no hiding his editing regardless, he was the administrator sadly. Blame the country.
Okay, but, again, why does it need to be public? What use is there for the IP to be publicly visible to anyone except the moderators/admins? What can an average user do with that information in the context of editing/improving the content on Wikipedia?
Probably helps to stop vandalism of pages.