--- Tim Starling ts4294967296@hotmail.com wrote:
Anonymous proxies are regularly used for vandalism, and once we block one, the vandal just moves to another one. On meta recently we've had a bot operating to vandalise tens of articles, via an anonymous proxy.
Would there be any objections to systematically blocking all anonymous proxies on a site-wide basis?
I would object to it being done without a study to determine how many genuine editors use anonymizers. There are quite legitimate possible reasons. One is an editor who writes in Wikipedia from work but doesn't want his/her employer's IP to be associated with it. Another is someone who wants to be anonymous on Wikipedia but has a fixed IP address that uniquely identifies him/her. We should not ban this practice unless we have a global policy that anonymity is forbidden.
That's not to say that I don't sympathize with the problem you describe. On the other hand, how much of this problem would exist if it wasn't for the practice of allowing people to edit articles without logging in? Every time this matter is raised there are screams about the sky falling in, but I have yet to see a single convincing reason why we can't restrict editing to logged-in users.
Zero.
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