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

[Anthony]

On 6/17/07, elisabeth bauer <eflebeth at googlemail.com> wrote:
> That it would be already a violation of policy to '''use''' proxies or
> anonymizers is a fairly new interpretation of the original descriptive
> policy "open proxies may be blocked at any time" and I am not sure
> that it is a valid one.
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:No_open_proxies&diff=48336302&oldid=47519095

On April 13, 2006, the text of [[Wikipedia:No open proxies]] was
changed from the descriptive "Users using open or anonymous proxies
are currently not allowed to edit Wikipedia." to the prescriptive
"Users are prohibited from editing Wikimedia projects through open or
anonymous proxies."  The edit was made by User:Pathoschild and the
summary of the change was "Updated policy from the Meta-Wiki".

I'm not sure what that means and whether or not the change was ever
discussed, but it seems to me that this was the point where the policy
changed from one that allowed blocking of the IP addresses used by
proxies into a policy against using those proxies.

The whole philosophical/political debate over whether or not someone
making an edit to a policy page changes the policies of the
encyclopedia (perhaps after some period of a lack of objection) is
somewhat interesting to me, but I don't foresee much in the way of
consensus over *that* issue.  Personally I'd advocate to
[[Wikipedia:Follow consensus, not policy]].