Hello directly from Jimbo at Wikipedia

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 01:46:13PM -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> WE ARE ON THE SAME SIDE.

No question there. I perfectly understand why you're blocking
Tor. The current infrastructure does not allow nym reputation
tracking, and it would require changes on your end to query
reputation and classify the new edit by reputation score.
Once/if Tor catches on, and there is an easy way to query nym
reputation with the stock client, it might or might not make 
sense to change things on your end, provided it's at all 
worthwhile. Time will tell.
 
> So it always dismays me to see conversations like this, and I think that
> at least some cooler heads here will understand why I get frustrated and
> why I make no apologizes for characterizing at least some people in the
> Tor community as being irresponsible.

We're not trying to make your life more difficult. We know there's
lots of abuse going on, for a small fraction of legitimate use.
Unfortunately, there's currently no way to curb abuse at our end
without changes to the codebase (and I'm just a small Tor node operator,
not speaking for anyone by myself, in case that wasn't clear). 
It's good that you can block the Tor exit server, so that problem 
is not more severe than it is.
 
> Yes, of course!  We deal with it constantly.  We have an effective means
> of dealing with it: we block Tor servers from editing wikipedia.  But is
> that what any of us want?

Not really, but you've found a solution we both can live with, for
time being, until a better one comes along.
 
> "Misbehaviour is in the eye of the observer, however."
> 
> No, actually it isn't.  There is such a thing as objectively
> identifiable malicious behavior.  We aren't Chinese censors here.  We're
> the good guys.  We want to work with you.

I misstated. My point was that the current infrastructure is a loaded gun.
It can be used for both good, and evil. If you prevent all evil, you will
also prevent all good. Fortunately, the potential for evil is limited, and
can be shielded again (=bad neighborhood in address space).
 
> Yes, we could implement tight security to only allow people who identify
> themselves (perhaps we'll require a credit card number, someone
> suggests?)... but *cough*, aren't we supposed to care about privacy here?

Precisely. If you can filter the abusers by persistent traits (addresses),
thus limiting the damage on your end, please do so. I'm sorry if I have been
part of the conspiracy to complicate matters at your end, but unfortunately
for time being I think Tor is a worthwhile experiment, and needs continuing,
despite some potential for friendly fire.

Thanks for Wikipedia. You guys rock.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.leitl.org
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