Wikipedia globally blocks Apple Private Relay IP ranges from editing

It is very seldom in my experience the case that legislation tells us anything at all about what is true about technology.

Just to be clear, your response to "disadvantaged people would likely have a hard time editing Wikipedia from an 'anon' IPs" is "take time and energy (finite resources that are in many cases more valuable than money) and travel somewhere to edit". This is...not a very good argument in your favor? Also, it makes the extremely bold assumption that the library (or whatever publicly available resource) is not IP banned itself because some vandal had the exact same thought.

>>I think it's important that there are still sites where people don't need an account to be able to participate.

Why? If this is important, why isn't it important for everyone? The point I, and other commenters have made, is that you shouldn't say "We care about a free and open internet" when what you mean is "We care about a free and open internet as long as nobody does anything we don't like and we're able to regulate it as we see fit".

These things are a binary, not a scale, despite what some people want to argue. When you start blanket bans that harm people who have done nothing wrong, you're taking a step towards authoritarian and away from pure openness. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" is pointedly saying "we are not prioritizing your needs" and that's what moderation is.

>>Given that you need to prevent abuse, how would you propose to keep things (more) open?

You're admitting defeat here, and showing how useless a word like "free" or "open" is. The site is not more or less open, it's open or closed for some. You being able to freely edit does nothing for my inability to freely edit. You can't average these things together and say "99% of people are free to do what they want" as if that was a meaningful statement for the people who can't. Moderation is antithetical to "free" or "open" speech. I'm for moderation, I just want people to stop pretending that you can have it both ways.

Unfortunately, as with everything, some people do abuse this facility. Some abuse it to place misinformation on wikipedia. Other people (like bored teenagers) might vandalize the wiki by deleting all the content on the page and replacing it with a pithy epithet. Then there are bots that skim the internet looking for mediawiki sites and filling them with adverts.

Sometimes you need to block these kinds of activity. Sometimes such abuse comes from a shared address or range, and sometimes such a block thus leads to (hopefully temporary) blocking of innocent bystanders. That is bad.

There are facilities in place to help prevent innocent bystanders from getting caught up. But it's a constant arms race. And if nothing is done at all, wikipedia would quickly cease to operate.

The community discussion is about this situation. Current internet trends have more people editing from behind proxies or shared IP addresses. If these trends continue, perhaps wikimedia will have to figure out new ways to fight abuse and while still allowing people to continue to edit anonymously. This is not something that has happened or will happen by itself. It takes and will take constant monitoring.

I don't think it's a good idea to then just go ahead abolish anonymous editing like some people suggest. Being anonymous on the internet is a great thing that should be a right. We need to continue to find ways to preserve anonymity (and pseudonymity!), and also continue to find ways to keep bad actors from ruining it for anyone else.

Having anonymous participants is orthogonal to whether your community is moderated by the way. In fact you can even have anonymous moderation (which has been a part of how wikipedia works) .

If trends continue, less people will be able to edit anonymously. This trend needs to be reversed so that as many people as possible can edit anonymously.