[WikiEN-l] Editing with open proxies

[George Herbert]

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?

It's one thing to say that we should block Tor, particularly not
having admins coming in that way.  I don't disagree with that
statement.

Using that to torpedo someone's RFA is a very different thing.  Prior
use of Tor does not an abuser make.

We clearly don't have a policy of blocking everyone who's found to
have arrived at Wikipedia via a Tor IP at some point.

CharoletteWebb is being guilted by association.

I don't know if (presumably she) is really a known abuser in disguise.
 Any of you who use pseudonyms could be (and any of us using real
names could be, too, though some of us are easier to find documented
real world info on if anyone cares).  I AGF.

If being able to identify admins is that important, we should consider
if the OTRS show-the-foundation-your-ID should be extended to normal
admins.

I think it's probably important enough that we should not allow active
admins to use anonymizers, but that's different than blocking someone
from becoming an admin because they have previously used one.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com