On 6/15/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/15/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/15/07, Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) newyorkbrad@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.