[WikiEN-l] Tor horror stories

Tue Sep 27 16:09:03 UTC 2005

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I'm talking to some Tor people, trying to explain to them why Tor
> servers are so often blocked from editing wikipedia.  I'd like to
> collect some information (horror stories) about it...
> 
> I've blogged about my own proposed solution to the problem.
> http://blog.jimmywales.com/

I've done some quick and dirty analysis. WP access is pretty slow for me
at the moment, but if my methodology seems useful, I'll run a larger
sample later.

I grabbed the perl script here:
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Feb-2005/msg00009.html

Running this script produced a list of 364 Tor exit points.
Running grep to find those with port 80 enabled resulted in a list of
198 exit points.

I then picked 10 of those allowing port 80 at random and queried their
contributions to en.wikipedia.org.

6 of the 10 exit points had no contributions. The remaining 4 exit
points accounted for a total of 44 edits. 18 of those edits could
immediately be classed as vandalism, the remaining 26 were not obviously
vandalism, though some of them could have been revert wars.

Of the 18 obviously bad edits, 6 were part of an attack on the user page
of an admin. That attack is still ongoing, though it now seems to be
originating from open proxies and not Tor nodes.

On a personal note, as somebody who does frequent bouts of RC patrol,
the proxies of major ISPs produce orders of magnitude more disruption
than Tor nodes. Then again, Tor is probably easier to deal with.

Please let me know if this was useful. If so, I will run a larger
sampling when things recover from the crash of ariel.

GraemeL