[WikiEN-l] Anonymous proxies (was Re: Desysop Morwen)

[Rich Holton]

How about requiring users from known anonymizers to
login? This still allows for legitimate uses of the
anonymizers, but helps to restrict vandals.

-Rholton (aka Anthropos)


--- zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Anonymous proxies are
> > regularly used for vandalism, and once we block
> one, the vandal just
> > moves to another one. On meta recently we've had a
> bot operating to
> > vandalise tens of articles, via an anonymous
> proxy.
> > 
> > Would there be any objections to systematically
> blocking all
> > anonymous proxies on a site-wide basis?
> 
> I would object to it being done without a study to
> determine how many
> genuine editors use anonymizers.  There are quite
> legitimate possible
> reasons.  One is an editor who writes in Wikipedia
> from work but 
> doesn't want his/her employer's IP to be associated
> with it.  Another
> is someone who wants to be anonymous on Wikipedia
> but has a fixed IP
> address that uniquely identifies him/her.  We should
> not ban this
> practice unless we have a global policy that
> anonymity is forbidden.
> 
> That's not to say that I don't sympathize with the
> problem you
> describe.  On the other hand, how much of this
> problem would
> exist if it wasn't for the practice of allowing
> people to edit
> articles without logging in?  Every time this matter
> is raised there
> are screams about the sky falling in, but I have yet
> to see a single
> convincing reason why we can't restrict editing to
> logged-in users.
> 
> Zero.
> 
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