IP编辑：增强隐私和解决滥用的措施/IP编辑限制研究

IP编辑限制研究的背景

WMF leadership is currently conducting the IP Editing Restriction Study to monitor the impact of IP Editing restrictions in communities that vote to block IP Editing. So far, we have been studying the following wikis:

• Portuguese Wikipedia (Read the full report)
• Farsi Wikipedia (Read the full report)

Below are summaries:

Portuguese Wikipedia

• 2020年10月，葡萄牙语维基百科投票关闭了IP编辑。
• 反骚扰工具团队自那时起到2021年6月一直在收集相关数据，以了解关闭IP编辑有何影响。
• 所有数据的完整报告（附带图表）已经发布。
• 我们关注的部分包括：对内容的影响、对编者的影响、对管理活动的影响和对社区的影响。

Farsi Wikipedia

• Farsi Wikipedia voted and turned off IP Editing between October 20, 2021, and April 20, 2022.
• The Wikimedia Foundation's Product Analytics team tracked the impact of this change on Farsi Wikipedia on a weekly basis in order to learn more about the impact of IP editing on a Wikipedia project.
• A comprehensive report of all the metrics (with graphs) has been published.
• The key areas we focused on include: impact on content, impact on editors, impact on administrative actions and impact on the community.

研究启示

Portuguese Wikipedia

截至目前，我们没有发现任何负面影响，我们会继续观察一到两年或者更长的时间。主要发现如下：

• 用户注册量和活跃编者都增加了。我们不知道这个趋势会持续多久。
• 用户留存率（在注册第一个月作了编辑的用户中的，在第二个月也有编辑的比例）没有明显变化。我们不知道长期影响如何。
• 回退、页面保护和封禁有所下降，这表明破坏减少了。
• 编辑总数，在包括机器人编辑和回退时是下降的。不包括它们时，在Q2和Q3中是下降的，但在Q4中上升。实验对编辑数的影响还不明确。
• 我们也收集了葡语维基社区的反馈，多数编者表示赞赏关闭IP编辑，并报告纷争和仇恨更少了。

You may find the comprehensive report for Portuguese Wikipedia's restriction.

Farsi Wikipedia

On the outset we should note that the Farsi and Portuguese Wikipedia experiments were very different in their structures. Portuguese community chose to block unregistered editors from all namespaces except the Discussion and Help namespaces. On the other hand, Farsi community chose to block unregistered editors from the Main/Article namespace only. The other important factor to note before reading the metrics is that the pandemic has played out differently in different parts of the world and has made a significant impact on metrics across the board.

Highlights

We can say that the restriction on Farsi effectively reduced vandalism on the wiki. We can say this based on the fact that reverts were down 68% compared to the previous six months and down 70% compared to same time period last year. Blocks were also down by over 50% in both comparisons. This trend was consistent with the Portuguese Wikipedia experiment.

However, the restriction also prevented good-faith edits. The total number of content edits was down -24% compared to the previous six months. This was a much larger decline than what we saw in Portuguese. On Portuguese, content edits declined -15% over the unusually high number in the previous six months, but it was generally in line with the previous couple of years. Farsi's decline in edits was well below the previous years.

Unlike Portuguese Wikipedia, the partial restriction on Persian Wikipedia did not drive new account creation or active logged-in editors.

A survey of Persian Wikipedia editors found that about two-thirds of the editors surveyed had a positive opinion about the experiment, while the rest felt that it was harmful to the project.

建议

基于我们的认识，维基媒体基金会产品部门作如下建议：

• 根据葡语维基社区的意愿，继续禁止IP编辑。
• 如果本地社群感兴趣，在其他2个维基（语言项目）开展实验。毕竟单个维基的结果不具代表性。

下一步研究

尽管葡语维基的影响是正面的，这不能表明在其他维基效果一样。在IP编辑数量统计您可以看到不同维基存在不小的差异。不同维基社区对未注册编者的态度也各不相同。

还有另一个实验– Research:IP编辑的价值 –由一群学者和研究人员发布，她们表示禁止未注册编者编辑有着长期的负面影响。

为了解对其他维基的影响，我们打算在另2个维基开展类似实验。我们的计划如下：

計劃

• 我们邀请其他感兴趣的维基在讨论页留言。您需要说明您维基对禁止未注册编辑的历史兴趣。
• 各个有兴趣的维基需要指定一名负责人与我们协作启动和分析该实验。
• 实验开始前需要有社区共识。
• 在8个月内，未注册编辑会被禁止。我们在这期间会收集相关统计数据，并向社区成员发问卷调查。
• 这段时间之后，我们会重新开启IP编辑，同时准备分析统计数据。
• 数据发布后，由社区决定他们是否要继续禁止未注册编辑。

维基的选择范围

反骚扰工具团队会与2个我们认为最适合开展实验的维基合作，依据以下因素

• 维基项目的规模
• 未注册编辑的数量
• 管理员的数目
• 破环的数量
• 该语言有多本地化或国际化

时间线

时间线已更新。

日期	活动
8月24日 - 10月31日	维基社区表达参与实验的意愿
待定——等待社群对此足够感兴趣。	反骚扰工具团队决定在哪些维基开展实验
待定——等待社群觉得本地意见征集应持续多久	维基社区进行本地RfC，同意开展实验。
待定，等待意见征求结束	开始研究

我们期待与维基社区的协作。欢迎您将此邀请分享给他人。

Some Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can you give me a background of this "IP Editing Restriction Study"?

A: Portuguese Wikipedia (ptwiki) decided to turn off IP editing by community decision.

Following the vote, Portuguese Wikipedia initially decided to block IP edits using an abuse filter which was later changed in the favor of using site JavaScript to avoid privacy concerns.

We analyzed the outcome of the change on the health of Portuguese Wikipedia over a period of eight months. The outcome was fairly positive and encouraged us to continue this study on other projects which have expressed a strong desire to block IP editing.

Q: What was the Wikimedia Foundation's role in the study?

A: WMF leadership and the board wanted to monitor the impact of the change, so the Wikimedia Product Analytics team built a dashboard to monitor the metrics and summarize the data quarterly.

The report from the study was published on meta.

Q: Why did we share the metrics summary?

A: We believed the community would be interested in seeing the data, and that it may inform continued discussions across the movement about the role of IP editing. Therefore, our team shared the metrics summary on Meta-Wiki for your information without any intention to advocate one way or the other.

Q: How did Wikimedia Product select and define the metrics?

A: We started with core metrics which this change might impact. Most of them adopted the definitions from this glossary.

For reverts - we used a 48-hour revert window to make the year over year comparisons more valid. If we did not limit reverts to a revert window, edits made last year would have more time & opportunity to be reverted than edits made this year.

Similarly, when we calculated net edits, we only removed edits that were reverted in that 48-hour revert window,

We also further adjusted net edit metrics by excluding edits which reverted other edits in a 48-hour window based on community members' suggestions on Phabricator.

Q: What percentage of users gave up editing instead of creating an account is essential to know. Why is that not captured in the report?

A: There is no good way to calculate the percentage of users who gave up editing after banning IP editing. Anonymous users can edit from multiple IP addresses and devices. Multiple anonymous users can share one IP address or device.

We cannot identify the number of non-bot editors who edited in anonymous mode before the banning. If we have the data on the unique device of editors, maybe we can alternatively estimate the change of the unique editor devices. However, the foundation does not track unique devices of editors. We have only aggregated unique devices estimation on readers. Please find more info about the unique device tables here.

Q: How do the edits metrics of the ptwiki compare with the other wikis?

A: We initially compared Portuguese Wikipedia with some other European and South American language Wikipedias, like German Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Russian Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia.

You can find the non-reverted non-bot edits graphs of the other wikis at the appendix section (page 47-51, page 62-69) in these report slides.

The growth on the other Wikipedias is not present on Portuguese Wikipedia.

These graphs show non-reverted non-bot edits on these European and South American language Wikipedias grew solidly in 2020 while Portuguese Wikipedia did not.

However, after looking at the historical data (net non-reverted non-bot edits), we found Portuguese Wikipedia’s trend does not correlate very well with these Wikipedias. Portuguese Wikipedia is not similar to any other medium-sized wikis. Zooming out to a longer time period by looking at the historical trend (please see page 23 in the slides), non-bot edits (including reverts) on Portuguese Wikipedia have been slightly declining since as early as 2018 while the other European and South American language Wikipedias did not decline.

By comparing Portuguese Wikipedia to the other wikis, we assume that Portuguese Wikipedia would grow as the other wikis do. Historical trends do not support this assumption, that is why we did not discuss it in the report and only put the comparison graphs in the appendix.

We also explored edits (including reverts) by countries to find comparison benchmarks. 95% of edits on Portuguese Wikipedia are from Brazil and Portugal. It has a good correlation with the edits on English Wikipedia from Brazil and Portugal. However, the data is only available for a short period (90 days). We don't have historical data to compare this to.

We also compared bot edits trend on ptwiki to the other Wikipedias, because we see bot edits decreased in 2013 in the historical trend of ptwiki (please see page 23 in the slides). We found it was a common phenomenon across wikis, not the one only ptwiki has.