Jimmy, David, I suggest that you might want stop answering each other
directly. It is clear that at least one of you is unable to explain
himself to the other in a way that he can understand. There are more
productive matters to discuss than what anonymity means in common
usage.
On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 08:50:18PM -0700, David Benfell wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 06:57:37 -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >
> > Authentication of users is _not_ in direct contradiction to the entire
> > idea of anonymity. I'm sure that people smarter than me can explain
> > this to you better than I can.
>
> Oh really? From the American Heritage Dictionary (the pronunciation
> symbols are mangled in plain ASCII text):
[...]
> authenticate
[...]
> To establish an identification with another or others.
[...]
> anonymous
> 1. Having an unknown or unacknowledged name: an anonymous author.
So if I establish authentication with you using one identity
("user91010") while keeping my actual name ("Nick Mathewson") a
secret, I could have both an established identification and an
unacknowledged name.{1}
Similarly, you could have an anonymous credential, which would allow
you to prove that you belong to a group of people ("allowed to post on
or-talk"), while keeping your actual identity ("David Benfell") a
secret.
I assume that you're not just ignoring everybody else and replying
only to what Jimmy says, right? There have been other posts here
explaining why pseudonymity and Tor are not at odds, so long as
pseudonymity is user selected.
[...]
> > > And at the same time, you claim to endorse the idea of anonymity, by
> > > 1) not authenticating users, while 2) claiming that you *do*
> > > authenticate users.
> >
> > I don't have any idea what you think this means.
> >
> Very simple. You have claimed in response to another of my postings
> that you do authenticate users. Others here say that in effect you do
> not. Not being a Wikipedia contributor, I don't know whether you do
> or not. But your responses to others seem to concur with their claims
> that you do not authenticate users. It seems you are trying to have
> it both ways.
Wikipedia has user accounts and IP-based blocking. That's a kind of
authentication. Wikipedia does not require you to use a user account
to edit pages, and does not do much to ensure that user accounts
belong to real people. That's a lack of authentication.
It's like how Tor blocks some highly-abusable services, like SMTP on
port 25, but doesn't do content filtering to try to hunt for abusive
behavior on exiting streams. We filter out some abuse, but we can't
filter out all abuse without turning off the network. An anti-Tor
rhetorician could say, "You filter abuse, but you don't filter abuse!"
But what would that prove?
Look, if don't want to spend the time to learn how Wikipedia works,
that's fine. But there's no secret here to how it works, and if
there's any way to move this discussion forward, it will involve
people learning how it works.
These people do not need to be you, but they will be ones who are
helpful in the long run.
{1} This case is more commonly known, in the literature, as
pseudonymous communication than anonymous communication. Then
again, if you're going to invoke dictionaries in a technical
discussion, anonymity becomes a very broad term.
hope this helps,
--
Nick Mathewson
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