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On 30/09/14 23:02, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
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.
Hi Marc :)
I know I don't need to convince you that TOR is a good thing in general.
Still, I don't see how the abusive nature of what is being done via TOR makes it less valuable to our community, in particular in the post-Snowden era. Without involving countries where freedom of speech is not legally granted, it is reasonable to assume someone doing an edit that may look 'unfriendly' to the US or UK governments will feel uncomfortable doing that without TOR.
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).
Cheers, Giuseppe - -- Giuseppe Lavagetto Wikimedia Foundation - TechOps Team