[WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee members granted checkuser tool

[Andrew Gray]

On 13/11/05, BJörn Lindqvist <bjourne at gmail.com> wrote:

> Each time an edit is comitted from an unknown IP address a new
> proxy-to-ip-pair is added to the mapping. MediaWiki could then simply
> look in the mapping for the proxy which has a certain IP. In the
> example above, the proxy would be "anon1". And the "userid" field in
> the row would contain "anon1" instead of "34.19.215.33". Preferably
> only a few key developers and the MediaWiki software should be allowed
> access to the proxy-to-IP mapping.

Hmm. Let's cut this down to a more day-to-day level.

Some anonymous user has vandalised a page I watch. I rollback, but do
I warn them or not? If they're on an AOL proxy, or coming through an
obvious webcache - my research suggests this is 10-20% of our users - 
I won't; they probably won't see it, but *someone* will, and it'll
just cause more confusion and get people annoyed with the project. Nor
is there much point in blocking them except if they're systematically
attacking a single page (since they seem to retain the same IP here,
for some reason).

We regularly have people contacting this list to ask for a block to be
lifted because an administrator accidentally blocked a college of
fifteen thousand people, or an ISP serving half of Chicago, or the
proxy server for all of Dubai, or something. Imagine how much more
common this would be where admins weren't ever able to do a quick
"whois 34.19.215.33" to check on who they were actually blocking.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk