This is something that has to be discussed *on the projects themselves*, not on mailing lists that have (comparatively) very low participation by active editors. Sending to another mailing list, even a broader one than this, isn't going to get the buy-in needed from the people who will have to clean up the messes. You will need buy-in from at least the following groups:
- A significant number of editors from the project involved in the trial - Stewards - Global sysops/global rollbackers - Checkusers
You will also have to absolutely guarantee that the trial will end on the date stated *regardless of what happens during the trial*, and that there will be non-project support for the collection and analysis of data. One of the reasons projects tend to not want to participate in trials is the unwillingness to return to status quo ante because someone/developers/the WMF/etc has decided on their own basis that the results were favourable without any analysis of actual data. Frankly, we've experienced this so often on English Wikipedia that it's resulted in major showdowns with the WMF that have had a real and ongoing impact on the WMF's ability to develop and improve software. (Don't kid yourself, this will be seen as a WMF proposal even though it may be coming from volunteer developers.)
Edit filters are developed project-by-project, and cannot be relied upon to catch problem edits; even with the huge number of edit filters on enwiki, there is still significant spamming and vandalism happening. Many of the projects most severely impacted by inappropriate editing are smaller projects with comparatively few active editors and few edit filters, where recent changes are not routinely reviewed; stewards and global sysops/rollbackers are often the people who clean up the messes there.
There also needs to be a good answer to the "attribution problem" that has long been identified as a secondary concern related to Tor and other proxy systems. The absence of a good answer to this issue may be sufficient in itself to derail any proposed trial.
Not saying a trial can't happen....just making it clear that it's not something that is within the purview of developers (volunteer or staff) because the blocking of Tor has always been directly linked to behaviour and core policy, not to technical issues. I very much disagree that this is a technical issue; Tor's blocking is a technical solution to a genuine policy/behaviour problem.
Risker/Anne
On 1 October 2014 09:05, Derric Atzrott datzrott@alizeepathology.com wrote:
If, as it seems right now, the problem is technical (weed out the bots and vandals) rather than ideological (as we allow anonymous contributions after all) we can find a way to allow people to edit any wikipedia via TOR while minimizing the amount of vandalism allowed.
Of course, let's not kid ourselves - it will require some special measures probably, and editing via TOR would probably end up not being as easy as editing via a public-facing IP (we may e.g. restrict publishing via TOR to users that have logged in and have done 5 "good" edits reviewed by others, or we can use modern bot-detecting techniques in that case - those are just ideas).
I would be curious to see what percentage of problematic edits are caught by running all prospective edits through AbuseFilter and ClueBotNG. I suspect those two tools would catch a large percentage of the vandalism edits. I understand that they catch most of such edits that regular IP users make. This would be a good start and would give us a little bit of data as to what other sorts of measures might need to be taken to make this sort of thing work.
AbuseFilter has the ability to tag edits for further review so we could leverage that functionality to tag Tor edits during a trial.
I could reach out to the maintainer of ClueBotNG and see what could be done to get it to interface with AbuseFilter such that any edits it sees as unconstructive are tagged, and if that isn't possible maybe just have it log such edits somewhere special.
We've had this conversation a few times and I'd love to see creative approaches to a trial/pilot with data driving future decisions.
If I approached Wikimedia-l with the idea of a limited trial with the above approach for maybe two weeks' time with all Tor edits being tagged, do you think they might bite?
It clearly is the kind of problem where people do like to _look_ for clever technical fixes, which is why it's a recurring topic on this list.
I suspect one exists somewhere. I'll reach out to the folks at the Tor project and see if they have any suggestions for ways to prevent abuse from a technical standpoint. Especially in regards to Sockpuppet abuse. I agree with Giuseppe that the measures that will need to be put in place will make editing via Tor more difficult than editing without Tor, but that's acceptable so long as they are not as prohibitively difficult as they are currently.
Without having spoken to the Tor Project though, the Nymble approach seems like a reasonable way to go to me. The protocol could potentially be modified to accept some sort of proof of work rather than their public facing IP address as well. If we had a system where in order to be issued a certificate in Nymble you had to complete a proof-of-work that took perhaps several hours of computation and was issued for a week, that might be a sufficient barrier to stop most socks, though definitely some more data needs gathered.
Thank you, Derric Atzrott
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