Hi Faidon,
On 16/06/2017 20:12, Faidon Liambotis wrote:
I would love to know more about what you see as the inhibitors - especially so that I can go fix them for the internet-community-at-large - however this decision is one for the Wikipedia community to take.
I'll still happily help if you decide "yes", but WMF should make and own the decision.
Note that there is a distinction between "the [e.g. English] Wikipedia community" and the WMF. We are all part of the same movement but the various wiki communities have decision-making capabilities of their own, especially when it comes to matters such as who's allowed to edit what, when and how. Allowing edits over Tor is not the kind of decision the Foundation can unilaterally make, while setting up the Onion service would be something that the Foundation would do, since it would just be part of our infrastructure and thus our mandate.
Question: would it be possible to activate it for specific projects, say Italian Wikipedia?(*).
I don't see major technical obstacles in doing just one project - i.e. one subdomain - at a time, besides the fact that the value of having just one project as an onion service would be much less (for the obvious reason that any time that the user would go to Commons, Wikidata or another language it would exit the service).
Of course this route would make the "resource balance" even worse at the beginning, but on the other hand it would be a nice test. For what is worth, it.wiki was also one of the first projects to opt-in for Wikidata interwiki transfer, if we want to follow the "test on small projects first" logic, so I hope to leverage the little (but proud :P) tradition with testing new features at scale of the it.wiki community.
Cristian
(*) I would also love to mention Turkish Wikipedia, but I don't speak Turkish and I would not be able to reach out to that community, at least not enough to start and follow a discussion on such a proposal.