At the end of the day, the key is communicating with communities to work
things out with them - and that may well have to happen on a
project-by-project basis. Finding a mid-size project with a very active
admin corps that would be willing to try out whatever you folks come up
with is probably a place to start: if it goes well there, it will raise the
chances of acceptance elsewhere. What needs to be demonstrated is that
permitting editing through Tor under (to be specified) controlled
conditions results in improvements to the targeted project without
increased vandalism and spamming - and yes, it's entirely reasonable to
expect that there will be active participation by those who are advocating
this change to monitor and evaluate the change. Ensure that the processes
for evaluating edits through those accounts are set up before activating
the access, and have a pre-arranged set of conditions where the access
would be withdrawn.
Risker/Anne
On 16 March 2015 at 01:29, Arlo Breault <abreault(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
I share Risker’s concerns here and limiting the
anonymity
set to the intersection of Tor users and established wiki
contributors seems problematic. Also, the bootstrapping
issue needs working out and relegating Tor users to second
class citizens that need to edit through a proxy seems less
than ideal (though the specifics of that are unclear to me).
But, at a minimum, this seems like a useful exercise to
run if only for the experimental results and to show good faith.
I’m more than willing to help out. Please get in touch.
Arlo
On Wednesday, March 11, 2015 at 9:10 AM, Chris Steipp wrote:
On Mar 11, 2015 2:23 AM, "Gergo Tisza"
<gtisza(a)wikimedia.org (mailto:
gtisza(a)wikimedia.org)> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 5:40 PM, Chris Steipp <csteipp(a)wikimedia.org
(mailto:csteipp@wikimedia.org)>
wrote:
> I'm actually envisioning that the user would edit through the third
party's
> > proxy (via OAuth, linked to the new, "Special Account"), so no
special
> > permissions are needed by the
"Special Account", and a standard
block on
> > that username can prevent them from
editing. Additionally, revoking
the
> > OAuth token of the proxy itself would
stop all editing by this
process,
so
> > there's a quick way to "pull the plug" if it looks like the edits
are
> > predominantly unproductive.
> I'm probably missing the
point here but how is this better than a plain
> edit proxy, available as a Tor hidden service, which a 3rd party can
set
up
> at any time without the need to coordinate with us (apart from getting
an
> OAuth key)? Since the user connects to them
via Tor, they would not
learn
> any private information; they could be
authorized to edit via normal
OAuth
web flow
(that is not blocked from a Tor IP); the edit would seemingly
come
from the IP address of the proxy so it would not
be subject to Tor
blocking.
Setting up a proxy like this is definitely an option I've considered. As
I
did, I couldn't think of a good way to limit
the types of accounts that
used it, or come up with an acceptable collateral I could keep from the
user, that would prevent enough spammers to keep it from being blocked
while being open to people who needed it. The blinded token approach lets
the proxy rely on a trusted assertion about the identity, by the people
who
it will impact if they get it wrong. That seemed
like a good thing to me.
However, we could substitute the entire blinding process with a public
page
that the proxy posts to that says, "this
user wants to use tor to edit,
vote yes or no and we'll allow them based on your opinion". And the proxy
only allows tor editing by users with a passing vote.
That might be more palatable for enwiki's socking policy, with the risk
that if the user's IP has ever been revealed before (even if they went
through the effort of getting it deleted), there is still data to link
them
to their real identity. The blinding breaks that
correlation. But maybe a
more likely first step to actually getting tor edits?
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