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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

It seems strange that administrators hide behind anonymous accounts on Wikipedia. I know providing who you are in real life has privacy issues for many, and regardless it is not clear there is even a reliable way to make sure someone truly is who they say they are. But it seems that at the administrator level Wikipedia could make an attempt at this.

User Beeblebrox, Wifione, Lourdes... It's weird reading this — like it's some kind of secret club in grade school where everyone has code names.

I know I am not typical in that my user name is my own name. Part of me cast off anonymity on the internet though if for no other reason to keep myself honest in my postings — a deterrent to allowing some kind of alter-ego to shit post and such.

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I totally get it, when I think of it from a privacy and personal security point of views.

With wikipedia, it really is a sort of "He who controls the information, controls the world" type of scenario.

Imagine being a Wikipedia admin and editing something that can be viewed as very volatile, such as something religious or political with your own real name visible in the log - that's really scary!

It's not at all a tinfoil hat thing to say that there are people who have the will and the means to take down people such as Wikipedia admins for publishing information which doesn't align with everyone's worldviews.

It doesn't even have to be so political or religious. There are also people who go absolutely crazy over something like someone "disrespecting" their idols or favourite singer or something. If they knew where you lived, they would absolutely drive across 10 states to let you know what you did.

Or simple any page on E.g. Russia or North Korea. Especially if you as the wiki admin lives in some non-western country.

Wouldn't be so surprised if you'd get a knock on the door or need a new window sometime soon...

If you edit a page about any Middle-East conflict, or gender - well you can expect at least one, if not both sides to hate you. Even if you were a perfectly rational and objective ideal editor.

And weird messages from people who track down your social media identity. Don't ask me how I know..

I’ve been using this account on HN since 2010. I created a new HN identity because reasons [1]. Some time after I had reaped a bit of karma, I was replying to someone who was being fairly emotional (and a but irrational) in their arguments. Someone else in the thread flagged their next reply. They thought I did the flagging, looked up the domain that matched the handle, found me on LinkedIn, and complained at me in DMs on LinkedIn. I was freaked out a little.

1 - this pseudonym has followed me through many places and it was time for a change

You'd be utterly shocked if you googled what the "Anvil email" is.

I have no doubt those who worked on the US 2020 election page and pages like "Attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election" would have death threats at the very least

I've edited under a pseudonym since about 2015. I approach pages about the Middle East with trepidation; if I edited under my real name, I probably wouldn't edit at all. You'd think there were conflict-free topics, but I haven't found them.

~ Cooking: food nationalists are constantly claiming that Biryani belongs to their nation and nobody else's.

~ History: nationalists again, especially over Turkey, Cyprus, or anywhere in the Balkans.

~ Politicians: most articles about politicians are so bland as to be almost worthless, because anything interesting is quickly excised citing 'BLP' rules.

If I edited under my own name, I'd probably have to stick to articles about obscure botanical species, and places that nobody goes to.

You can do it by being an experienced non-admin user, too. Most edit-locked articles are actually semi-protected, a lower protection level.

A photo of the person who made the most edits (or something like that) on Wikipedia was posted on social media. And there were a lot of just rude and nasty comments about their appearance. It was despicable.

"Privacy issues" is kind of mild language:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5503354 ("French homeland intelligence threatens a sysop into deleting a Wikipedia Article (wikimedia.fr)")

It’s interesting to me how many online people seem to not understand the implications of this sort of stuff on an intuitive level. Maybe I am the paranoid type but once something goes public these days it’s basically available to anyone in the present and future forever. “Anyone” being state actors like you mentioned down to bored teenagers looking for fun. As the ability to capture our data evolves our autonomy is being eroded, grain by grain.

Wikipedia has always been a secret club. I've always felt the admin's are required to follow a specific social and political mindset. It's not much different than Reddit. Like HN, moderation is only as good as the person doing it, and transparency is next to non-existent.

dang here acts reasonably transparent in my experience.

How would you even know if he wasn't being transparent?

By observing a lack of transparency within his comments; which I don't observe, as I observe the opposite: transparency. It allows him to earn trust, as it makes him accountable.

how do you know he's not just deleting things without comments? plus these are posts as dang, and as the admin he could do basically anything he wants.

fwiw i think there is a good faith effort on their part, but you have no way of seeing anything shady if they don't want you to.

Because then we'd have comments (I have showdead on) which would call him out, and caching and screenshots would provide proof. If he'd resort to harmful behavior the risk is simply too high as it would infract his reputation.

Whenever he decides to (shadow)ban someone, he usually warns the user multiple times in replies (as evidenced by his comment history). Additionally, if you turn "showdead" on in your settings, you can see all comments even from shadowbanned users or that have been flagged or voted-dead by the general community (I think and hope for legal reasons that this excludes links to legally prohibited material such as CSAM or piracy).

Aren't all the admin actions public?...

Not every country is setup to handle criticism in a way that doesn't punish the one who is sharing the criticism. Even in "modern" countries like Spain they can (and have in the past) punish you for criticizing the police or the monarchy.

So if you want to write/edit/admin Wikipedia articles about those "touchy" things, you might want to do so under anonymous identity, as otherwise it can really make things difficult for you.

As for Spain, the only case I've heard of is a rapper that glorified terrorism and rapped that he wanted to hang the king in the village square. Is it okay to rap that you want to murder specific individuals, or does that cross the limit of freedom of speech? Is it criticism of the monarchy when you rap that you want to put a noose around the king's neck? To me it sounds like incitement of violence and nothing more, nothing less.

In some other countries it is forbidden to make music that glorifies crime, while at the same time those countries have excellent liberty of speech as well as musical lyrics that are extremely offensive by other standards.

I have a good friend who was harassed in-person in a very damaging way due to their non-pseudonymous work as a Wikipedia admin. Knowing their story, I'm surprised any admins would not be pseudonymous.

Wow. Sorry to hear that. If your good friend is a she then she should get in touch with "Jennsaurus" at Wikipediasucks.co ASAP because Jennsaurus is a journalist who has discovered and compiled two dozen cases of sexual harassment against women editors.

Thanks. In this case (which happened long ago) the perpetuator was a known cyber(?)criminal who is now currently serving time for something unrelated.

I got death threats over a package implementing an iso spec on github because fragile nation states have issues.

What was it about? The country name for Taiwan?

> like it's some kind of secret club in grade school where everyone has code names.

Thank goodness we'd never do anything like that here on HN

There are ways to verify someone's identity, without exposing their identity to the whole web. I'm a seller on an ecommerce site (not an evil one), and they required me to submit a scanned photo ID and a a piece of mail showing my billing address. My storefront doesn't have my name on it, though.

I'm shocked Wikipedia doesn't do this.

Wikimedia did this to aspiring candidates who want to be the "stewards".

Because if they acknowledged that marketing agencies, political zealots, and government operatives from various countries have infiltrated Wikipedia it would jeopardize the reputation of the project. They focus on there being few female editors or editors from Africa, rather than that every other biographical article about a living person is written by a marketing agency employee. Naivety as coping mechanism perhaps. The "honest" editors built the site for free, while many others are subverting it for their own gain.

Be aware that you are privileged to be able to expose your identity; i.e. be non-anonymous. There are quite a lot of people for whom anonymity is crucial: <https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...>

Simple: there are nutters out there that will kill because they didn't like what someone did to a Wikipedia page they care about.

> I know I am not typical in that my user name is my own name. Part of me cast off anonymity on the internet though if for no other reason to keep myself honest in my postings — a deterrent to allowing some kind of alter-ego to crap post and such.

You goal seems noble and born of good faith. I'd go past that to suggest you meant 'positively' instead of honest, because honesty could be inferred.

As a counterpoint (for a very diff use case), I ran a minecraft server and had to strongly encourage young players to anonymize themselves (starting with playernames) and to not share identifying info.

I also explained I would only chat publicly because I was an adult and my chat logs were available to any parent who asked. Not quite the same thing but I was trying to example helpful boundaries. I never got any takers on the logs but doubt that bit ever got passed on.

How else are intelligence agencies supposed to shape history to their liking these days :P

It's not unprecedented -- you can't turn to a random Encyclopedia Britannica article and see who edited it. You might be able to name the editorial board, however.

This is the culture of the internet and we like it, thank you very much.

> Part of me cast off anonymity on the internet though if for no other reason to keep myself honest in my postings — a deterrent to allowing some kind of alter-ego to shit post and such.

Anonymity provides the reverse as well. Namely the ability to speak your mind without worrying about real world ramifications.

One man’s shit posting is another’s firmly held beliefs!

it's safer tbh

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