Reader feedback mechanism

Yes, I meant IP. And I certainly don't suggest that we should be storing IP addresses to make them available publicly. But I agree, there is sensitivity about this, and I also realize it is not foolproof.

The problem of ballot stuffing is not the primary problem that I was seeking to solve with this idea. The main problem is preventing the duplication of profiling information for statistical analysis. Consider the case where a reader replies to the survey for two separate articles. In all innocence, she replies to profiling questions (age, education level, profession, use of Wikipedia, or whatever else we are interested in asking) twice, thus skewing the sample.

An alternative way of handling this would be to ask the reader if she has already filled out profile information, and, if so, to remove those questions from the instance of the survey. But that means that we cannot correlate article ratings with profile information.

A third alternative would be to capture the IP address, but to store it for only a few hours or a day. In any case, its value as a method of avoiding duplication in the sample declines after a day, because of dynamic IP assignments.