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On 30/09/14 23:02, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
On 09/30/2014 09:08 AM, Derric Atzrott wrote:
"[H]ow can we quantify the loss to
Wikipedia, and to society at
large, from turning away anonymous contributors? Wikipedians say
'we have to blacklist all these IP addresses because of trolls'
and 'Wikipedia is rotting because nobody wants to edit it
anymore' in the same breath, and we believe these points are
related."
I've been doing adminwork on enwiki since 2007 and I can tell give
you two anecdotal data points:
(a) Previously unknown TOR endpoints get found out because they
invariably are the source of vandalism and/or spam.
(b) I have never seen a good edit from a TOR endpoint. Ever.
A third one I can add since I have held checkuser (2009):
(c) I have never seen accounts created via TOR or that edited
through TOR that weren't demonstrably block evasion, vandalism or
(most often) spamming.
None of this is TOR-specific, the same observations apply to open
proxies in general, and the almost totality of hosted servers.
Long blocks of open proxies or co-lo ranges that time out after
*years* being blocked invariably start spewing spam and vandalism,
often the very day the block expired.
Hi Marc :)
I know I don't need to convince you that TOR is a good thing in general.
Still, I don't see how the abusive nature of what is being done via
TOR makes it less valuable to our community, in particular in the
post-Snowden era. Without involving countries where freedom of speech
is not legally granted, it is reasonable to assume someone doing an
edit that may look 'unfriendly' to the US or UK governments will feel
uncomfortable doing that without TOR.
If, as it seems right now, the problem is technical (weed out the bots
and vandals) rather than ideological (as we allow anonymous
contributions after all) we can find a way to allow people to edit any
wikipedia via TOR while minimizing the amount of vandalism allowed.
Of course, let's not kid ourselves - it will require some special
measures probably, and editing via TOR would probably end up not being
as easy as editing via a public-facing IP (we may e.g. restrict
publishing via TOR to users that have logged in and have done 5 "good"
edits reviewed by others, or we can use modern bot-detecting
techniques in that case - those are just ideas).
Cheers,
Giuseppe
- --
Giuseppe Lavagetto
Wikimedia Foundation - TechOps Team
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