On 17 January 2014 14:08, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 01/17/2014 01:21 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
This seems like a valid reason for a global exemption to me, so I'm not sure the current global policy is sufficient.
To be fair, Erik, I don't think it's fair to expect that one would be granted IPBE (especially globally) simply by just remembering to not add "and vandalize" in the request.
On English Wikipedia, at least, IPBE is normally only granted to someone who has some positive history and has an actual /need/ for the bit. The reason for this is simple: It's be abused over and over again historically. The number of times I personally caught someone misusing a proxy for socking that happened to have a "good hand" account with IPBE also on that proxy is much higher than the number of IPBE I've seen used legitimately.
The problem isn't straight up vandalism (IPBE is no help there -- the account'd get swiftly blocked) but socking. POV warriors know how to misuse proxies and anonymity to multiply "their" consensus, and having IPBE and editing through any sort of anonimizing proxy (including TOR) defeats what little means checkuser have to curb socking.
I agree with Marc on this, and further would say that the "reason" given by Erik in his application for IPBE is pretty much a red flag that a user is going to be editing in a controversial and non-neutral manner. It's also a red flag that the user's probably been blocked for doing it before, and thinks this will be a workaround that will prevent him/her from being blocked this time.
Risker/Anne