This bug tracks obstacles to enabling anonymous editing via [[mw:Extension:MobileFrontend]].
In T54442#542750, @Maryana wrote:It's not quite so simple as a permissions change. Longer explanation below, but the tl;dr is that there's a lot of design and development work that needs to be done before we can just flip the switch.
First and most importantly: editing a wiki "anonymously" means leaving a permanent, searchable trace of your IP address in connection with your edits; this is actually a non-trivial and in many cases highly sensitive piece of metadata. As a bare minimum requirement to ensure the safety and privacy of our users, we would need to build an educational system into the mobile editor that alerted users of their logged out status, made them understand the implications of this (e.g. if they're in a country where their edits could put them in danger, make sure they're aware that they're basically geo-targeting themselves by editing without an account), and let them login/signup before saving their edit. On desktop, we do this with a series of templates and mediawiki messages, but mobile has a very different, radically constrained UI, and solving this problem in a way that doesn't hinder the ability to actually make an edit and gets people to read and understand the disclaimer isn't easy or straightforward. In addition to this bare minimum requirement, there are a host of other social, UX-related, and technical challenges to opening up an anonymous editing funnel on mobile:
- Mobile devices are quite different from desktop in that it's much easier to fat-finger and accidentally do something you didn't intend to do. A highly motivated IP editor on desktop who accidentally (or as a test) blanks a page might discover the page history and the undo button – that's much harder to do on mobile, where the history view is currently so tiny and cluttered that undo is barely enough of a target to tap on, let alone see. Until we have a nice, clean, mobile-friendly history view and revert actions (something the team is going to be working on sometime this year), you'll get a lot of first-time users messing up or messing around with no way to clean up the mess.
- On desktop, it's not as huge a break from your workflow to leave what you're editing, log in, and keep editing; on mobile, where everything is so focused and zoomed-in, that feels like a huge break. Unless we made it obvious *why* an account is beneficial, it's doubtful most anon editors would go through the trouble of creating an account to fix a typo -- but that means they're missing out on important features like a watchlist and a notification system (see point 4).
- The abuse filter is already a huge problem for mobile, since on many wikis it's configured to show a CAPTCHA for certain conditions (non-autoconfirmed users adding links, adding/removing large chunks of text, or, on projects like Portuguese Wikipedia, making edits of any kind), which in turn causes the mobile editor to throw an error. Right now the error rate is hovering at an alarming 48% across all projects; making editing available to anons would guarantee that the error rate would skyrocket. Until we build a replacement for the abusefilter CAPTCHA (again, a tricky engineering problem on mobile), we'd knowingly be showing anons a broken and unusable edit button most of the time.
- A lot of the features we're building on desktop to keep people in the loop about what's happening to their edits (like email and Echo notifications) are for logged in users only, and those become extra critical communication mechanisms on mobile, where it's harder (and, again, a bigger break from your workflow) to find and check your talk page. I'm not sure how we'd build a notification system for mobile IP editors without unnecessarily spamming a huge swath of mobile readers with notifications about user warnings that don't involve them. This is already a problem on desktop, but it becomes exponentially more problematic with the wildly fluctuating IPs of most mobile devices.
For all these reasons and more, letting IPs edit on mobile is (for now) not a great idea, so I'm closing this as WONTFIX -- however, the mobile dev team will be working on many of the associated issues here, and it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility for anon mobile editing to happen sometime in the future. For now, we can fulfill our ideological obligations to a free and open wiki by showing the edit button and a login/signup CTA everywhere and making it as quick and easy as possible to login or sign up. To reiterate my first point: "anonymous" editing is actually less anonymous than signing up for a free user account that requires no personal information, not even an email; to claim otherwise is simply demagoguery.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement