Under your argument, why should Wikpedia even exist at all? If it's sufficient that the information is "out there" -- well then it's all already out there. Th

Under your argument, why should Wikpedia even exist at all? If it's sufficient that the information is "out there" -- well then it's all already out there. The relevant expertise-- which sometimes includes privileged information-- is part of what lets you know which public information is valuable, relevant, and worth the effort to bother including. A user's reason for protecting their privacy may also have absolutely nothing to do with their possession of any privileged knowledge. It's really impossible to predict what the long term consequence of compromised privacy are, and we know that any interaction online can be an invitation to abuse by crazy people. So, for example, as part of some discussion online I might find myself reading an article on some venereal disease. While reading the article I might notice some omissions or errors and decide to fix them. Later, my edits could end up as part of a debate about the content of the article (even if my edits were utterly unobjectionable) ... with an end result of this potentially embarrassing subject turning up in search results about me, or being discovered by a political opponent in an entirely unrelated debate a decade later, and being pulled out of context just to smear me. This isn't conjectural. I can speak to it personally: For example, over 13 years ago I got in an edit war on Wikipedia over some site policy thing about users including copyright law violating images on their user pages. I was a bit of a hothead about it and got myself blocked from editing for 24 hours. I was appropriately chastised for being an idiot about how it was handled. All the edits all ultimately went through. But I get regularly slandered by abusive anonymous accounts about it that are mad at me about unrelated Bitcoin debates (and can find literally nothing else negative to say about me). They love to characteristics it in various ways ("fired from wikipedia!"), divorce it from the context, yank out completely inaccurate off the cuff comments from other wikipedians made during the event (apparently some random troll was mistaken for me for a little bit during discussions about the incident). I would have been much better off contributing anonymously as a result. And for the little personal benefit I got out of contributing, I would have been better off not contributing at all rather than end up with this nonsense. Is Wikipedia or the world really a better place where only people who either fail to make the above calculation correctly or whom expect some big personal pay-off by contributing are left editing the site? I don't think so.