Hey, Overall you are suggesting that WMF changes the policy about anonymity and accept anonymous users. In my view it's not a technical thing and it should be brought up in wikimedia-l.
BTW: I need to add something about anonymous users and how the system treats them. When you block all open proxies you close the gate for sock-puppeteers, zombies and specially trolls which I'm grateful but If you change the prospective and see the issues as an Iranian, Chinese or other similar countries the whole thing changes. In these countries using proxies and "anti-filter" is as common as the using internet. People are using it literally all the time. as an obvious result, Persian Wikipedia and Chinese Wikipedia are losing users in great numbers. A troll-minimized environment came with a great cost for us. Even though Wikipedia is not blocked (at least in Iran) but switching off the proxy (and dropping all the connection) just to make an edit simply doesn't worth it for millions of users. And it gets worse: Even trusted users in these Wikis that are editing in sensitive materials [1] can't get the global ip-block exempt right easily and we see the right as a sensitive right (which it shouldn't be at least for Iranian and Chinese users).
[1]: By saying sensitive material I don't mean some random political articles. I mean things that can cause death penalty and execution. We already saw that for bloggers and facebook users that wrote things against: leaders, Islam, homosexuality, or even history(!) and they faced death. (If you want I can show you the news in reliable sources)
Best
On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Derric Atzrott < datzrott@alizeepathology.com> wrote:
Hello everyone,
I've been a Tor user for many years and I frequently make use of anonymising proxies services. Recently (yesterday), I set up my first Tor relay.[1] This has once again gotten the use of Tor and other anonymising services with Wikipedia on my mind again.
In a recent article on the Tor blog,[2] Wikipedia is actually called out a number of times for being unfriendly to Tor, and I think they make a good point.
"[H]ow can we quantify the loss to Wikipedia, and to society at large, from turning away anonymous contributors? Wikipedians say 'we have to blacklist all these IP addresses because of trolls' and 'Wikipedia is rotting because nobody wants to edit it anymore' in the same breath, and we believe these points are related."
There must be a way that we can allow users to work from Tor. My understanding of why we block Tor categorically is that it is very hard to block individual Tor users. Perhaps we could allow Tor users to only edit pages if they make an account? That would allow us to at least block those accounts, which increases the cost of being problematic on Wikipedia a bit.
Or to take from the blog post, perhaps Tor users could be issued a certificate that they could use to prove their identity from one session to another. New Tor users would need to prove they are the same person as someone we already trust or their edits would be put in some sort of review queue.
Or combine the two and new accounts made from Tor connections would need to have their edits reviewed, or perhaps just wouldn't get autopatrolled status as quickly (if ever).
There has got to be a better solution to the problem than just blocking all Tor users completely.
Thank you, Derric Atzrott
[1]:
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/6413D947D15B81B423D65D76DA3F2BFEF76BEE... [2]:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/call-arms-helping-internet-services-accept-... ymous-users
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