2007/6/17, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
On 6/16/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Anthony wrote:
On 6/15/07, Blu Aardvark jeffrey.latham@gmail.com wrote:
I'm relatively sure that even Jimbo himself has stated that he doesn't have a problem with users editing through proxies as long as they are doing so in good faith.
I seem to remember this too. Couldn't find the exact email, though.
See [[Wikipedia talk:No open proxies#A general statement]].
"I would like this policy to be (thoughtfully, slowly, and with due consideration for all valid viewpoints) revised a bit to include a stronger acknowledgment that editing via open proxies can be a valid thing to do."
This is a pretty strange comment if editing via open proxies is already a violation of policy. He didn't say he thinks the policy should be revised to allow editing via open proxies, but rather he said he thinks it should have "a stronger acknowledgment" that this is already allowed.
Until 7 May 2007 the page Wikipedia:Advice to users using TOR to bypass the great firewall recommended users affected by a block: "Tor proxies can now be softblocked so logged in account users can edit via a tor connection. If you find an IP that has this problem please request an unblock to a softblock for tor."
It signalled in no way that it would be a violation of policy to '''use''' an anonymizer - only that there could be problems to edit because these proxies would be routinely blocked.
That it would be already a violation of policy to '''use''' proxies or anonymizers is a fairly new interpretation of the original descriptive policy "open proxies may be blocked at any time" and I am not sure that it is a valid one.
1) for those, who follow the words of the benevolent dictator: even Jimbo seems to assume that editing via anonymizer may be a valid thing to do, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:No_open_proxies#A_general_statem...
2) It would be a policy which could not be enforced. Or should the checkusers in the future check randomly normal users if they use an open proxy or anonymizer? This would be a serious violation of the checkuser policy - enforcing one policy by breaking an other, infinetely more important one doesn't look like a good thing to do. Or should the checkusers just block good users they accidentally discovered using proxies while hunting vandals?
3) Sometimes it isn't even possible to prove that a user knowingly used an open proxy. Open proxies are often a result of misconfiguration by the server admin. So you are punished by Wikipedia because your provider's sysadmin made a mistake? wonderful.
Summary: please let's stick to policies which can be enforced and which make sense. Punishing good editors only for their way of accessing wikipedia doesn't make sense.
greetings, Elian