QUOTE(alienus @ Wed 22nd August 2007, 2:10pm)
That's not realistic. There are plenty of articles that people would be afraid to edit honestly if their real names were associated. I'm not talking about just embarassment ("Uhm, no, I, uh, don't have any special interest in sex with ewes, despite all my edits"), either. People can lose their jobs for editing during their lunch hour, blowing the whistle on their company, or just getting involved in anything the company doesn't want associated with them, including ewe sex.
There really is a point to having anonymity on Wikipedia. The problem is that we don't have it. Instead, we have the worst of both worlds, where you're not truly anonymous nor truly public. If Jimbo really wanted his editors to be anonymous, he's allow and even encourage the use of TOR. He'd likewise change logged-in sessions to be maintained only by URL remapping, not a cookie.
I agree with that.
I was investigating the Peter Falconio disappearance as part of my work, and had inside knowledge as to what was really going on. I knew that the whole thing was a fake, that they didn't actually know who'd done it (or indeed if he was dead), but were commanded by the Federal Government (right from the Prime Minister's office) to prosecute *someone* and to avoid a repeat of the Lindy Chamberlain scandal. Indeed, on such cases, it is a federal policy. Work in government in the right departments and you learn this. We would have all lost our jobs if we'd failed to prosecute Bradley John Murdoch. Not because he was guilty, but just because we needed someone to put away. Of course, if he actually was guilty, that was a bonus, but that was rather irrelevant. All we needed to do was to put him away. We had police who were compliant, lawyers, judges, the whole lot. Everyone went along with it, because they were all trying to avoid getting fired, and having collective egg on their faces.
Now, while I was editing that article, I wasn't doing anything illegal, but I would have not only been fired, but black banned from the entire government sector, and basically been unemployable. I mean nowadays I can admit that that is how I got that inside knowledge, because I quit there, but at the time, that was terribly much against what I was employed to do. If I was forced to use my real name while editing, I wouldn't have even considered doing it. And Longhair knew that I had that inside knowledge, which is why he let me edit there, even though I was banned at the time. They wanted that inside knowledge.
Does Wikipedia want truth, or do they want to have truth that you aren't going to get unfairly fired for presenting?