IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/Blocked Editor Experience

Goal

We want to improve the end-user experience for editors who want to edit a wiki but cannot do so without an account on the platform. This may be due to the wiki turning off IP editing or because there is a block on the IP address (range) that prevents the user from editing without logging in.

Problem statement

Some wikis are toying with the idea of turning off IP editing -- either temporarily or permanently. Portuguese Wikipedia has shut down IP editing from most namespaces and Farsi Wikipedia has experimented with it in the past. In order to edit on these projects a user must have an account and be logged in. When users without an account arrive on the project, they are met with confusing workflows that make it hard for them to understand what’s required of them and why.

MediaWiki software doesn't inherently have a particular UI workflow for when IP addresses are disabled for editing. This project aims to introduce a systematized, consistent workflow for editors when IP addresses are disabled from editing that eases them into creating an account and being able to complete the edit the user arrived for. This project is being undertaken by the Anti-Harassment Tools team in coordination with the Growth and Editing teams in the Wikimedia Foundation.

Metrics

TBD