I hope we can make this work and help Tor users at least contribute some content to some Wikimedia projects, even if English Wikipedia needs to keep up its current policy. Places to convene to work on this include: the MediaWiki developers' summit in January in San Francisco https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Developer_Summit_2015 , FOSDEM Jan 31-Feb 1 in Brussels https://fosdem.org/2015/ , the Circumvention Tech Festival in Spain in March https://openitp.org/news-events/save-the-date-march-1-6-2015.html .
Some previous discussions on wikitech-l :
"Can we help Tor users make legitimate edits?" 2012. http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/323006
"Jake requests enabling access and edit access to Wikipedia via TOR" 2013. http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/420039
"Tor exemption process" January 2014. http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/425124
"Anonymous editors & IP addresses" July 2014. http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/482562
Sumana Harihareswara Senior Technical Writer Wikimedia Foundation
On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 9:08 AM, Derric Atzrott < datzrott@alizeepathology.com> wrote:
Hello everyone,
I've been a Tor user for many years and I frequently make use of
anonymising
proxies services. Recently (yesterday), I set up my first Tor relay.[1]
This
has once again gotten the use of Tor and other anonymising services with Wikipedia on my mind again.
In a recent article on the Tor blog,[2] Wikipedia is actually called out a number of times for being unfriendly to Tor, and I think they make a good
point.
"[H]ow can we quantify the loss to Wikipedia, and to society at large,
from
turning away anonymous contributors? Wikipedians say 'we have to
blacklist all
these IP addresses because of trolls' and 'Wikipedia is rotting because
nobody
wants to edit it anymore' in the same breath, and we believe these points are related."
There must be a way that we can allow users to work from Tor. My
understanding
of why we block Tor categorically is that it is very hard to block
individual
Tor users. Perhaps we could allow Tor users to only edit pages if they
make
an account? That would allow us to at least block those accounts, which increases the cost of being problematic on Wikipedia a bit.
Or to take from the blog post, perhaps Tor users could be issued a
certificate
that they could use to prove their identity from one session to another.
New
Tor users would need to prove they are the same person as someone we
already
trust or their edits would be put in some sort of review queue.
Or combine the two and new accounts made from Tor connections would need
to have
their edits reviewed, or perhaps just wouldn't get autopatrolled status as quickly (if ever).
There has got to be a better solution to the problem than just blocking
all Tor
users completely.
Thank you, Derric Atzrott
[1]:
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/6413D947D15B81B423D65D76DA3F2BFEF76BEE...
[2]:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/call-arms-helping-internet-services-accept-...
ymous-users
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