Say hi to temporary accounts: easier collaboration with logged-out editors with better privacy protection

The Wikimedia Foundation is rolling out temporary accounts for unregistered (logged-out) editors on multiple wikis. Their communities have the chance to test and share comments to improve the feature before it is deployed on all wikis in mid-2025.

On most wikis, edits made by logged-out users are attributed to the IP addresses used at the time of publishing the edit. An IP address is a unique number identifying a device connected to the Internet. Temporary accounts are a new type of user account present on 12 wikis, and next year, everywhere. They will be used to attribute new edits made by logged-out users instead of the IP addresses. It will not be an exact replacement, though. First, temporary users will have access to functionalities currently inaccessible for logged-out editors. Secondly, Wikimedia projects will continue to use IP addresses of logged-out editors, and experienced community members will keep access to them. This change is especially relevant to the logged-out editors and anyone who uses IP addresses when blocking users and keeping the wikis safe.

This is the first of a series of posts dedicated to temporary accounts. It gives an overview of the basics of the project, impact on different groups of users, and the plan for introducing the change on all wikis. Our next posts will offer more details on how we have been working with community members with advanced technical permissions. Following their advice, we have tied the deployments with work on specific functionalities.

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Legal mandate for this change

Changing laws and regulation around internet privacy are creating urgency for the Wikimedia projects to protect personal data more strongly. To meet this need, the Wikimedia Foundation must change the way in which logged-out editors interact with the wikis, and how their personal data is handled. The solution is the introduction of temporary accounts – it will improve the logged-out editors’ privacy. To learn more about the need for temporary accounts, see the legal section in our FAQ and the 2021 update from the Legal team.

How temporary accounts work

Wikimedia projects allow anyone to edit, with or without creating an account. This is one of our founding principles. When an edit is made through a registered account, the edit is attributed to the respective account in various logs and pages like Recent Changes or page history. When an edit is made without an account, the edit will be attributed to an auto-generated temporary account. The temporary account will be created on behalf of the logged-out editor and will last for 90 days. All subsequent edits by the same device will be attributed to the same temporary account.

This account’s name follows the pattern: ~2024-1234567 (a tilde, current year, a number). The number automatically increments, such that the next user will be ~2024-1234568, and so on. Users won’t be able to choose this name.

It will be the same account even if the IP address changes, unless the user clears their browser cookies or uses a different device or web browser. A record of the IP address used at the time of each edit will be stored for 90 days after the edit. Only some logged-in users will be able to see it.

90 days after the account creation date, the cookie will expire. All published edits will continue to be attributed to its account, but the user, if they continue to edit as logged-out, will be assigned a new temporary account. Temporary accounts cannot be converted into registered accounts. To learn more on how temporary accounts work, see our help page.

Where are temporary accounts enabled

Temporary accounts are currently enabled on Wikipedias in: Cantonese, Danish, Igbo, Norwegian bokmål, Romanian, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, and Swahili, as well as on Czech Wikiversity, Italian Wikiquote, Japanese Wikibooks, and Persian Wiktionary.

What does this mean for different groups of users?

For readers who don’t have a Wikipedia account

Nothing is changing! If you don’t edit, are not logged-in, and you are just reading Wikipedia (or using Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, etc.), there will be no difference from your perspective.

For logged-out editors

• This increases privacy: currently, if you do not use a registered account to edit, then everybody can see the IP address for the edits you made, even after 90 days. That will no longer be possible on wikis with temporary accounts enabled.
• If you use a temporary account to edit from different locations in the last 90 days (for example at home and at a coffee shop), the edit history and the IP addresses for all those locations will now be recorded together, for the same temporary account. Users who meet the requirements will be able to view this data. If this creates any personal security concerns for you, please contact talktohumanrights at wikimedia dot org for advice.

For community members interacting with logged-out editors

• A temporary account is uniquely linked to a device. In comparison, an IP address can be shared with different devices and people (for example, different people at school or at work might have the same IP address).
• Temporary user’s identity will be more stable than that of an IP user. If you see their edit, and you leave a message about it on their talk page, it will be quite likely that the person who made the edit will read the message, even if some time passes.
• Temporary accounts work similar to registered accounts in some aspects. We may enable more features for them in the future. As you can see in the screenshot above, temporary account users will be able to receive notifications. It will also be possible to thank them for their edits, ping them in discussions, and invite them to get more involved in the community.

For users who use IP address data to moderate and maintain the wiki

• For patrollers who track persistent abusers, investigate violations of policies, etc.: Users who meet the requirements will be able to reveal temporary users’ IP addresses and all contributions made by temporary accounts from a specific IP address or range. They will also have access to useful information about the IP addresses thanks to the IP Info feature. Many other pieces of software have been built or adjusted to work with temporary accounts, including AbuseFilter, global blocks, Global User Contributions, and more.
• For admins blocking logged-out editors:
  • It will be possible to block many abusers by just blocking their temporary accounts. A blocked person won’t be able to create new temporary accounts quickly if the admin selects the autoblock option.
  • It will still be possible to block an IP address or IP range.
• We are and will be working with other users with advanced permissions, like stewards. With invaluable comments and questions from these users, we have updated tools and scheduled deployments around these updates.
• Temporary accounts will not be retroactively applied to contributions made before the deployment. On Special:Contributions, you will be able to see existing IP user contributions, but not new contributions made by temporary accounts on that IP address. Instead, users meeting the requirements should use Special:IPContributions for this.

When will temporary accounts be deployed on more wikis?

• As we mentioned, we have rolled out temporary accounts on the first batch of wikis. This phase is called the minor pilot deployment. It will help us identify any issues that need to be fixed before temporary accounts are enabled on more wikis. We need to see how community members interact with temporary accounts, if all the existing and new tools are working, if experienced users comfortably perform their usual tasks, etc. We will be constantly monitoring the impact of this project and periodically sharing the reports. You can see a public dashboard with real-time metrics data.
• If we don’t have a ton of unexpected work, then in February 2025, we will roll out on larger wikis. We call this major pilot deployment. It may include some top 10 wikis which would express their interest (write to us here). We would prefer not to deploy on English Wikipedia at that time, though.
• Next, mid 2025, we will deploy on all remaining wikis in one carefully coordinated step. After that, we will be providing support, monitoring metrics, and solving issues as they arise.

We will do our best to inform everyone impacted ahead of time. Information about temporary accounts will be available on Tech News, Diff, other blogs, different wikipages, banners, and other forms. At conferences, we or our colleagues on our behalf are inviting attendees to talk about this project. In addition, we are contacting affiliates running community support programs.

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