On 09/30/2014 09:08 AM, Derric Atzrott wrote:
"[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."
I've been doing adminwork on enwiki since 2007 and I can tell give you two anecdotal data points:
(a) Previously unknown TOR endpoints get found out because they invariably are the source of vandalism and/or spam.
(b) I have never seen a good edit from a TOR endpoint. Ever.
A third one I can add since I have held checkuser (2009):
(c) I have never seen accounts created via TOR or that edited through TOR that weren't demonstrably block evasion, vandalism or (most often) spamming.
None of this is TOR-specific, the same observations apply to open proxies in general, and the almost totality of hosted servers. Long blocks of open proxies or co-lo ranges that time out after *years* being blocked invariably start spewing spam and vandalism, often the very day the block expired.
-- Marc