Planning to tighten TorBlock restrictions

by
Translate This Post

en.wikipedia.org and others have seen a rash of abuse coming via Tor in the form of account creations with abusive names and such; this is taking up a large chunk of CheckUser and oversighter time and effort, which is apparently not too fun.
It looks like the current TorBlock settings don’t generally restrict various actions to a logged-in user when accessing through Tor; is there any objection to tightening this up to restrict edits, account creations, etc via Tor except when the account is explicitly excepted?

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

Can you help us translate this article?

In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?

12 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

#350

No, go ahead.

0
#351

Tor use on Wikipedia in general is a cyberpunk wannabe pissing all over your loungeroom floor while shouting “WHY DO YOU HATE FREEDOM?!” c.f. John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. It’s a pity.

0
#352

This could be hurting wikis depending of restricted-freedom-nation users, like the chinese one.

0
#353

Tor is also the solution to allow filtered countries like China to browse Wikipédia.
We should devise a solution to allow them to register, log in through Tor.
An easy solution, accessible to not too many techy people.
The balance between vandalism fight and universal access have to be be found.

0
#354

a solution could be to have a set of wiki (like the thing used for global groups) where that restriction would be enabled/disabled

0
#355

Imho edits made with tor are always an issue with GFDL

0
#356

We *have* devised a way for users with a need to edit through Tor. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_block_exemption.

0
#357

Will this mean that “IP (range) block exemptions” are available on all wikis then? Yet only for enwiki and few others, unfortunately.
See also MediaZilla bug 18337 (requesting this).

0
#358

Would be fine if this just applied to en. On our project, I think it’s well overdue and will actually improve access.
Legitimate users can still apply to edit through the IP block exception, and we won’t need to issue long Tor IP hard blocks. The block will automatically be lifted once the IP is no longer a Tor node. Currently, we cause some collateral damages through these overlong hard blocks.

0
#359

Let me see, is the main thrill of creating abusive usernames being
that people will see them in recentchanges? Well if so consider
implementing https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18364
“array of boring event types to exclude from recentchanges”.

0
#360

Darkoneko :
a solution could be to have a set of wiki (like the thing used for global groups) where that restriction would be enabled/disabled

That defeats the whole point. Somebody could go to one of the WMF wiki’s where it’s disabled, create there and then SUL to a wiki where it’s blocked. It has to be all or none otherwise it serves no point.

0
#361

Darkoneko :
This could be hurting wikis depending of restricted-freedom-nation users, like the chinese one.

True but not many people are using Tor to bypass the block set by the government. Nowadays only sensitive articles are blocked hence mainland Chinese Wikipedians do not need Tor a lot.

0

Meta

Posted in MediaWiki, TechnologyTagged ,