Trust and Safety Product/Temporary Accounts

Temporary accounts for unregistered editors will be a new type of user account. IP addresses of unregistered editors will no longer be publicly visible. Only those who fight spam, vandalism, harassment and disinformation will have access to IP addresses.

Currently, anyone can edit Wikimedia wikis without a Wikimedia account or without logging in. MediaWiki, the software behind Wikimedia projects, records and exposes your IP address in its public log if you edit without logging in. Anyone seeking your IP address will find it.

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 device. 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.

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 will impact current anti-abuse workflows. We are committed to developing tools or maintaining access to tools that can identify and block vandals, sock puppets, editors with conflicts of interest and other bad actors after IPs are masked.

March 2023[edit]

Hello! We have published a new policy page: Access to temporary account IP addresses. It explains how users can gain access to IP addresses. Later, we will update the section on using IP addresses. In it, we will add information on how and where to access the IP addresses, and what is logged when IP addresses are accessed. There is also a new page with frequently asked questions. Both pages use the term "temporary user accounts". This name comes from the first version of the software (MVP). Soon, we will share more information about it. We welcome your comments on the talk page.

June 2024: Priority for functionary and patroller tools[edit]

• 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 ban, which is a permanent block and which is technically performed by a 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.