On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 5:03 PM, Thomas Gries mail@tgries.de wrote:
Can you explain this briefly, or send me a pointer ? This single info can be a help for him and others. (Honestly, I do not know, what a "trusted" account/user is.) I am on #mediawiki now
There is a special permission that allows specific accounts to not be affected by IP blocks. It is granted by application on a case-by-case basis. You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_block_exemption. I am not sure whether similar processes exist on other wikis.
As for the original topic, this has been thoroughly discussed before, and every time I forget what the result of the discussion is. I know for sure that since MediaWiki is fundamentally centered around knowing users' IP addresses in order to stop sockpuppets, simply allowing Tor users to edit will not happen. We need a solution that allows us to know a Tor user's IP address without actually known their IP address. If that sounds like a difficult problem, it's because it is. One suggestion was to use a type of token authentication, where we use RSA blinding in order to give anonymous exemption tokens. Another suggestion was to simply abandon IP blocks, since users can easily enough change their IP addresses anyway.
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science