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