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/6413D947D15B81B423D65D76DA3F2BFEF76BEEF2 [2]: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/call-arms-helping-internet-services-accept-anon ymous-users _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
