Wikipedia talk:Disabling edits by unregistered users and stricter registration requirement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hi, I deleted the section saying that Hotmail, Yahoo and gmail e-mails reveal the sender's e-mail address, because I don't think they do. I stand to be corrected, of course, but I'm fairly certain that was wrong. Slim 20:18, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

No, they sure do ... here are full headers from yahoo email

To: blocked@yahoo.com via 68.142.225.148; Thu, 09 Dec 2004 12:20:18 -0800 X-Originating-IP: [68.142.225.149] Return-Path: <blocked@yahoo.com> Received: from 68.142.225.149 (HELO web54307.mail.yahoo.com) (68.142.225.149) by mta313.mail.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; Thu, 09 Dec 2004 12:20:18 -0800 Received: (qmail 33262 invoked by uid 60001); 9 Dec 2004 20:20:17 -0000 Comment: DomainKeys? See http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=yahoo.com; b=5CFglAf7PijyE6/1RL+OG+GTd1vTcYn6PG41WVI5qCRDi9K9uvrwWPmSVVN2978N3d0+hQXwnCZ7kyKdLsEQFOTHSVJxCDDwU9fuOujUtYV559DzauDm6gOQvAZEKSLKXjtnYip9vArpwvnzESTTO6VVyHsUgSUh39IYtknjDHQ= ; Message-ID: <20041209202017.33260.qmail@web54307.mail.yahoo.com> Received: from [67.64.41.155] by web54307.mail.yahoo.com via HTTP;

You can see, 67.64.41.155 is my IP OneGuy 20:25, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Interesting. I wonder why all the terrorists etc use Hotmail and Yahoo if that's the case? I added on the other page about how I'd tried gmail out and it didn't show my IP address. (I sent one to myself at my ISP-based e-mail). Do you know a lot about IP addresses and how to figure out who people are? There are a couple of editors/trolls (actually, LaRouche supporters) that I'm having trouble with. I have their IP addresses; and I see IP addresses in the same ranges turning up on Usenet, with some pretty horrible pro-LaRouche material, real fanatical stuff. I'm currently trying to compare which editor appears to be posting this material, and I'm checking the IP addresses at places like Network.Tools.com. But I find these websites hard to trust. I checked out my own IP address on two sites. One gave the wrong country. The other gave the right country but wrong city and by quite a distance. And Network.Tools says that no information at all is available about my IP address. So they seem to be pretty hopeless.

FWIW, I tested this and GMail does not include the originating IP address with the e-mail. I'm not sure how this is relevant to the proposal, but I figured I'd mention it. Rhobite 21:12, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)

GMail is still beta. They are not widely offering it everyone yet. They might change this later because of the potential abuse OneGuy 03:56, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It's very easy to get multiple GMail accounts right now. For all practical purposes, it's out of beta. Regardless, I don't know how this discussion is relevant, since signing up for a Wikipedia account doesn't require sending any e-mail. It also doesn't provide any more information than is already in the server logs, which should have your IP anyway. Rhobite 04:49, Dec 11, 2004 (UTC)

Do you know what the best websites are, with the most reliable information? What I'm trying to find out is which IP range belongs to which ISP, because it could be that the Usenet/Wikipedia posts I'm seeing are coming from entirely different ranges but just look as though they're in the same range.

Also, one of them is posting from an AOL proxy. Do you know how they would get one of those? Slim 21:28, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

All Net Tools is a very nice Web-based one. Put an IP address into the 'smartwhois' search. - David Gerard 00:05, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks David, that site is much better than the others I tried, though it still didn't have information about my IP address: not even the range. About the others, though, I did get the ranges, and now have to interpret what this means. Regarding the AOL proxy, it gave three companies: AOL, ANS Communications, and UUNET Technologies. I'm not sure what that means, but I'll look them up. My low-level sleuthing is finally teaching me something about the Internet. :-) Thanks for the information. Slim 00:25, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)

This comment was never addressed: Isn't the current functionality part of the software? Would making this change affect all of the other wiki projects? --Sean Kelly 00:54, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, but I don't know the answer. OneGuy

Why is this page not on current surveys? Johnleemk | Talk 19:59, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] RFC

Does this page still need to be listed on RFC? Maurreen 06:33, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Probably not. As much as I love democracy, I am confident that no policy will ever come out of this discussion. I would like to see it archived for future reference, since this issue will come up again soon. --Sean Kelly 05:24, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Minimize barriers to entry

I'm surprised the argument wasn't raised that many newbies casually stumbling upon Wikipedia will not want to go through the extra step of creating an account before editing. There are a lot of websites with similar requirements (e.g. Board Game Geek) where I just don't contribute because I don't feel like creating an account. Even though it only takes a few seconds here, the casual contributor may not want to deal with keeping track of yet another account and password (which are easily forgotten, requiring creation of a new account).

I know that even on other wikis, I don't really feel like creating an account just to make a single edit. Rad Racer | Talk 02:06, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)