On 17 January 2014 14:08, Marc A. Pelletier <marc(a)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