The world is increasingly technically advanced and privacy conscious. Users are more aware than ever of the collection and use of their personal information, and how its misuse may lead to harassment or abuse. Many websites, including the Wikimedia projects, are continually working to re-evaluate and enhance protections for user privacy. As part of this effort, the Wikimedia Foundation is embarking upon a technical improvement to the projects, and we’d like your input.

MediaWiki stores and publishes the IP addresses of unregistered contributors (as part of their signature; in page history and in logs), visible to anyone visiting our sites. Publication of these IP addresses risks compromising the safety and anonymity of these users and in some cases may even invite the danger of people being at risk of government persecution. It ought to be possible to provide increased privacy protection for unregistered contributors by obscuring their IP addresses when they contribute to the projects.

Inarguably, Wikimedia projects have a very good reason for storing and publishing IP addresses: they play a critical role in keeping vandalism and harassment off our wikis. It's very important that contributors, admins and functionaries have tools that can identify and block vandals, sockpuppets, editors with conflicts of interest and other bad actors.

The Wikimedia Foundation believes that, working with checkusers, stewards and vandal-fighters, it's possible to figure out a way to protect our users’ privacy while keeping our anti-vandalism tools working at-par with how they work now. Hence, it has decided to work on shielding IP addresses from our wikis — including restricting the number of people who can see other users' IP addresses, and reducing the amount of time IP addresses are stored in our databases and logs. It is important to note that a critical part of this work will be to ensure that our wikis still have access to the same (or better) level of anti-vandalism tooling and are not at risk of facing abuse.

Wikimedia Foundation does not currently have any definite plans for how to achieve this dual goal of better protecting user privacy, while also giving contributors effective tools to protect our wikis from vandalism and abuse. It is vital that developers work in partnership with checkusers, stewards and other contributors to identify the necessary changes to Wikimedia projects' tools and procedures. While there were some discussions about the technical and security implications of this project, the Wikimedia Foundation is waiting to hear from Wikimedia communities about the social implications before it decides on the next steps for this project.

This is a very challenging problem and that’s why it's been put off over the years. But in light of evolving data-privacy standards on the internet, the Wikimedia Foundation thinks it's now time to tackle this problem.