Last modified: 2007-04-02 06:58:01 UTC
This is a proposed solution for allowing anonymous/pseudonymous Wiki(pedia) editing through anonymousing networks such as Tor <http://tor.eff.org/> that are frequently used for vandalism and are currently permanently blocked. Following an idea of Roger Dingledine (one of the main Tor developers) and Jimmy Wales, the proposal is to have certain address classes where blocks are temporary, automatically expiring after 15 minutes or so. There is a patch ( http://www.imperialviolet.org/binary/mediawiki-1.4.4-tor-block.patch ), prepared by Adam Langley, which is (probably) almost ready, except for a few things we are unsure of ("FIXME" in the code): * Using ip2long, will the resulting numbers be negative in string expansion for the SQL code? (for IP address > 128.0.0.0). If so, how do you tell PHP that it's an unsigned number? * What's the standard MediaWiki boilerplate code for logging events like the creation of new block sets etc? This issue is related to Bug 550, which discusses some other possibilities of handling the problem.
Created attachment 925 [details] The proposed patch
I highly disagree with any solution that makes it easier for vandals to edit Wikipedia. Allowing tor users to edit Wikipedia makes it tough on everyone- think about a bunch of Willy on Wheels-like vandals, using tor to circumvent blocks. If you're worrying about using an anonymizer to edit Wikipedia, perhaps it's best you don't edit it at all.
Anonymizers, especially encrypting anonymizers such as Tor that make it impossible to snoop your Internet traffic, are important for everyone who wants to contribute to topics which are illegal or very controversial in their country, e.g. democracy in China or homosexuality in Saudi Arabia. The hope is that this patch, or a related solution, would make Tor inattractive enough for most vandals to go away (they'll be blocked, after all), while still allowing such legitimate cases of anonymity. Whether it would work for this purpose remains to be seen, but for this it would be necessary to try it out. If it fails to work (the vandals stay), Tor exit nodes will end up being almost permanently blocked, and finally Tor would be removed from the range of auto-unblocking IPs, so we wouldn't be worse of than now. It would also be useful for dynamic IP spaces, e.g. AOL, where permanent blocks cause collateral damage instead of blocking the targeted abuser.
It is now possible to block IP address ranges while allowing logged-in users to edit through them; it is furthermore possible to whitelist such ranges. The autoblocker has been tweaked to behave itself. I'm closing this as fixed indirectly.
