Grants talk:IdeaLab/Verify identity of the user

Hmm... Perceiving myself as a victim of some harassment on Wikipedia, my idea of a solution would be to make the process more transparent, which led me to this identity-verification proposal. In general, I think anonymity is too easy to abuse, and there is almost never a justification for anonymity and secrecy except in terms of prior anonymity and secrecy.

However, I also think that strong verification of identity is hard to enforce, so I'm going to suggest a weaker alternative: A maturity filter.

The simplest form would simply allow readers to ignore identities that are two young, but there are various other ways to define maturity, and the implementation could be expanded later on. The basic idea is that you could easily elect to ignore contributions that are extra likely to be worth ignoring.

On the reading end of an article, that would mean your view could be filtered to exclude changes from young identities. In conversational venues, you would never be bothered by the kiddies.

On the writing end, a new identity would receive an extra warning about being likely to be ignored by many possible readers. In dialogs, I think the deterrent would be extra powerful, because the system could add a comment that the poster was not sincere without bothering the target at all: "The following reply was NOT intended as part of an actual dialog, since the author was notified in advance of the maturity-filter setting of the OP." Shanen (talk) 04:33, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

• Identity verification is something that is very unlikely to happen on Wikipedia because not only is it fairly expensive, it also raises other issues. Someone else posted a similar idea where the concept was to require real names and here were the main concerns:

1. Wikipedia would have to put some security system into place that would protect users' private information, something that would be very costly.
2. This personal information would be a large and tempting topic for hacking groups and/or other people who would use the information for the wrong purposes. (Identity theft, off-Wikipedia harassment, etc)
3. Some users do not want to give up their personal information out of fear of retribution or it harming their personal and work lives. For example, someone editing in a country with a totalitarian government would be at risk if Wikipedia required them to give up their personal information. By comparison, someone could risk losing their job if their employers discovered that they were editing certain topics that went against their employers specific values.
4. Some users just don't want to be forced to give up their personal information at all, even if doing so poses no risk to themselves.
5. Doing this would likely lead to a mass exodus of editors and a sharp decline in people signing up for Wikipedia, something that would bring about great harm to Wikipedia considering that active editor numbers have been steadily decreasing over the years.
6. Some of the biggest trolls or harassers have no problem with giving up their identity. Some of them don't even identify as trolls or see what they're doing as harassment.
7. This could lead to huge backlash in the online communities, especially in the cases where a user does not use their real name, such as with transgendered persons. (See this news article about Google+ and their real name policy.)

I'm not saying this to discourage you per se, just letting you know that this has been pitched several times in the past (both on here and on Wikipedia itself) and these are some of the most common concerns. Tokyogirl79 (talk) 06:08, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Grants to improve your project

Greetings! The Project Grants program is currently accepting proposals for funding. The deadline for draft submissions is tommorrow. If you have ideas for software, offline outreach, research, online community organizing, or other projects that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers, start your proposal today! Please encourage others who have great ideas to apply as well. Support is available if you want help turning your idea into a grant request.

• Submit a grant request
• Learn from examples of completed Individual Engagement Grants or Project and Event Grants

The next open call for Project Grants will be in October 2016. You can also consider applying for a Rapid Grant, if your project does not require a large amount of funding, as applications can be submitted anytime. Feel free to ping me if you need help getting your proposal started. Thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) 22:49, 1 August 2016 (UTC)