On 6/16/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: methods jayjg <jayjg99(a)gmail.com> to English show details 8:52 am (3 hours ago) and you're neither a prosecutor nor a judge. There's no particular reason I should answer questions from an obviously hostile questioner who has been applying outrageous double standards in this incident from the very start. If the TOR was forbidden for good reasons, Charlotte should have simply been asked, long before the RfA, to stop using it. I have no doubt she would have complied with a request. There was no need for a revelation of information gained through use of check user tools to sink her RfA. That is the real Occam's razor coupled with AGF in this incident: ask her to stop, when you first find out, explaining it is verboten, for good reason. KP _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Asking someone first is indeed a good first step, but I fail to see what the "good reason" for forbidding it would be. As long as the user isn't hiding behind the proxy to get away with edit warring and such there's no reason we should disallow it. (Is there evidence of any editing abuse?)

But that's the whole point - there won't be any evidence of abuse even if she's the worst edit warrer ever

since all the evidence would be hidden by the fact that she's using TOR.

We have no way to know if she's hiding behind it or using it legitimately, and that's why it is banned.

Not quite. It's banned (as I understand it) because if editor A is editing from 12.345.678.910, and editor B is editing via TOR, and B is suspected of being A's sockpuppet, we can't say, "Aha! You're using the same IP address as A!" But it seems to me we could note that they're using TOR and block them as a sockpuppet on that basis -- *after* they're suspected/accused of being a sockpuppet. The claim that productive contributors can't/shouldn't/mustn't use proxies is tenuous at best.

If the TOR was forbidden for good reasons, Charlotte should have simply been asked, long before the RfA, to stop using it.

On 6/17/07, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote: It's for the exact same reason, just in reverse: If an apparently good-faith contributor is using an anonymizing service like TOR, it's impossible to detect that they're also trolling (or whatever) from their actual IP. It also becomes entirely impossible to identify more subtle forms of disruption such as sockpuppetry.

If someone became suspicious that something odd was going on with a particular article and ran a checkuser on all the contributors

the best they could find is that lots of people are using TOR, but if we allow people to use TOR then it is quite a leap to assume that it is just one person using TOR.

zetawoof wrote: But we don't use checkuser to detect that apparently good-faith contributors are trolling or sockpuppeting or whatever. We use it in an attempt to confirm that apparently bad-faith editors are.

Hear, hear. "I hold in my hand the names of 205 administrators who are also trolling as IP addresses!" If I'm a troll/puppetmaster with different accounts from this IP, you have no way of knowing ... because you have no reason to check. Zetawoof seems to be proposing that we check all users to ensure they aren't running multiple accounts[0]. Zetawoof's Wikipedia is not a Wikipedia to which I would wish to contribute.

I know it isn't entirely inline with guidelines but what about editors who do edit controversial articles with a second log-in? They are good editors who just don't want controversial articles showing on their contrib log.