I hope we can make this work and help Tor users at least contribute some
content to some Wikimedia projects, even if English Wikipedia needs to keep
up its current policy.
Places to convene to work on this include: the MediaWiki developers' summit
in January in San Francisco
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Developer_Summit_2015 , FOSDEM Jan
31-Feb 1 in Brussels
https://fosdem.org/2015/ , the Circumvention Tech
Festival in Spain in March
https://openitp.org/news-events/save-the-date-march-1-6-2015.html .
Some previous discussions
on wikitech-l
:
"Can we help Tor users make legitimate edits?" 2012.
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/323006
"Jake requests enabling access and edit access to Wikipedia via TOR" 2013.
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/420039
"Tor exemption process" January 2014.
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/425124
"Anonymous editors & IP addresses" July 2014.
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/482562
Sumana Harihareswara
Senior Technical Writer
Wikimedia Foundation
On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 9:08 AM, Derric Atzrott <
datzrott(a)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/6413D947D15B81B423D65D76DA3F2BFEF76BE…
[2]:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/call-arms-helping-internet-services-accept…
ymous-users
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l