[WikiEN-l] Editing with open proxies

[Rory Stolzenberg]

On 6/16/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/16/07, K P <kpbotany at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Possibly I would be more concerned about the TOR account if I knew
> > more about it.  But I can't be too concerned about them when Charlotte
> > was allowed to edit with it for the many times it was seen by numerous
> > people with check user powers that Charlotte had one.
> >
> There's a lot of unclear thinking about this issue. The people raising
> a lot of the objections to Tor being banned are the same ones who
> regularly complain about admin abuse, but suddenly they don't care
> about electing an admin who wants to make sure that no one --
> including the Foundation -- is able to find out anything about them.
> Why would an admin want to hide their identity even from the
> Foundation?
>
> You have to ask yourself whether you care if (a) one person is running
> four admin accounts that are being used to back each other up; (b)
> that person manages to get one or more of them elected to ArbCom; (c)
> that person is copying deleted material and posting it on other
> websites; (d) that person gets access to checkuser and oversight,
> meaning they can see where other editors are posting from, and can
> read even the most sensitive deleted material.
>
> If you don't care about any of the above, by all means allow admins to
> use open proxies. All they currently have to do is fax a copy of their
> drivers license to the Foundation if elected to ArbCom and given
> access to check user, but it's a trivial matter to fax a friend's ID
> instead, so that's no security at all.
>
> The one solid thing the Foundation has is the ability to at least see
> where an admin is posting from, and their ISP, and in the event of
> serious abuse, it can act on the basis of that information.
>
> Without that, for all we know, we could have 100 admins with 1200
> accounts administering this website. The only question that matters
> here is: do you care about that?


ZOMGZ BECAUSE ANYONE USING TOR MUST BE A VANDAL WHO COOPERATES WITH
WIKITRUTH.


Please. Yes, theoretically, it's possible for someone to run multiple
accounts. However, this is possible even without open proxies, and it's
really not particularly difficult to tell that someone has sockpuppets if
all of their accounts use open proxies, they all have the same voice, and
they all do suspicious things together. Using open proxies doesn't block
checkusers from finding sockpuppets, and it doesn't mean that the user's
account will magically become compromised.

Rory