[WikiEN-l] Jayjg: Abusing CheckUser for political ends?

[jayjg]

On 6/15/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/15/07, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 6/15/07, Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) <newyorkbrad at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > No privacy violation is involved because mentioning that an individual
> > > edits
> > > through proxies does not reveal anything about the person's real-life
> > > identity or location nor even link the person with other Wikipedia
> > > accounts.
> >
> >
> > This is a point worth re-iterating.  I haven't revealed anything about
> > "CharlotteWebb". "CharlotteWebb" is a pseudonym, obviously based on the
> book
> > "Charlotte's Webb". I cannot reveal anything personal about the person
> who
> > is using the CharlotteWebb account because I don't know anything about
> them.
> > Nothing. I don't know their name, age, gender, location, height, weight,
> > shoe size, nationality, religion, native language, even their IP
> address. I
> > know *nothing* about them, and I cannot reveal what I do not know.
>
> The type of data involved is triggering a lot of people's "This smells
> like personal data" senses today, though.
>
> If they'd been using something other than a Tor node, and you revealed
> (for example) that the user in question logged in from Earthlink all
> the time, that would probably be clearly over the line, even though
> it's still relatively harmless in the greater scheme of things.
>
> IMHO, we shouldn't ban Tor without blocking them completely.  Making
> it against policy but not actively aggressively enforcing that allows
> grey areas like this, where a user is using and not abusing the
> service and sees nothing wrong with what they're doing, and then is
> put in a position of defending themselves.


As I understand it, technical solutions for banning TOR proxies were tried
in the past, but weren't effective. I'd certainly be much happier with a
technical solution that banned all open proxies. And, quite frankly, we
often have no idea whether or not people using TOR proxies are abusing
Wikipedia policy - it's only when they do something obvious like vandalism
that it's clear.

As Tony's said on-wiki (in Jeff's RFAR), policy is what works, not

> what's written down.  What works, right now, is using Tor
> non-abusively.


No, it doesn't. Again, the Runcorn situation is a perfect example of that.


> The written policy therefore is wrong.


No, it's not. Legitimate explanations as to the need for the use of open
proxies in this case have yet to be forthcoming - despite, I might add,
promises that they would be.

Vetoing
> CaroletteWebb's RFA on the ground that s/he violated a written but
> grossly unenforced policy is bad for the project.


The policy, like all policies, is enforced when it is brought to admin
attention. I certainly block all open proxies that I am aware of.


If the current set of abuse problems is significant enough,
> particularly admin accounts being subverted, we should just permablock
> all the Tor exit points and be done with it.



Yes,  we should.