A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians
drexel.edu
drexel.edu
Actually the whole Wikipedia-editor-who-uses-TOR demographic is probably quite low so I don't get the point of this research. The conclusion just reads as a cascade of open doors to be kicked in:
The team reviewed a number of solutions that could allow users to veil their identity, but the authors point out that before anonymous participation is allowed by sites, the administrators of these open collaborations must recognize the value of contributions by anonymous users — rather than trying to ban or out them.
“If such voices are systematically dampened by the threat of harassment, intimidation, violence, or opportunity and reputation loss, projects like Wikipedia cannot hope to attract the diversity of contributors required to produce ‘the sum of all human knowledge,’” the authors write.
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I've been doing adminwork on enwiki since 2007 and I can tell give you two anecdotal data points:
(a) Previously unknown TOR endpoints get found out because they invariably are the source of vandalism and/or spam.
(b) I have never seen a good edit from a TOR endpoint. Ever.
A third one I can add since I have held checkuser (2009):
(c) I have never seen accounts created via TOR or that edited through TOR that weren't demonstrably block evasion, vandalism or (most often) spamming.
None of this is TOR-specific, the same observations apply to open proxies in general, and the almost totality of hosted servers. Long blocks of open proxies or co-lo ranges that time out after years being blocked invariably start spewing spam and vandalism, often the very day the block expired.
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(quoted in http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedi... )
The English Wikipedia uses the MediaWiki TorBlock extension to automatically block Tor exits from editing, it has since June 2008, and before then they were mostly all automatically blocked by various bots so I don't understand how vandalism would be happening from them. Also, the Tor Project publishes a DNSBL and makes relays with the exit flag available through the ONIONOO API (which TorBlock uses). There are no "unknown endpoints", they are all publicly known.
> I have never seen a good edit from a TOR endpoint. Ever.
This is likely true since they are all automatically blocked before they can edit.
> (c) I have never seen accounts created via TOR or that edited through TOR that weren't demonstrably block evasion, vandalism or (most often) spamming.
You can't create accounts via Tor or edit while logged in via Tor -- not even Administrators can (although I think you can get a special exemption by jumping through enough hoops).
I guess I should trash a lot of my 5000+ Wikipedia edits, then...
"A third one I can add since I have held checkuser (2009): (c) I have never seen accounts created via TOR or that edited through TOR that weren't demonstrably block evasion, vandalism or (most often) spamming."
That's pretty horrifically self-serving.
I've edited through Tor. Feel pretty comfortable saying I wasn't spammy, and certainly not evading a block or vandalizing.
Fact is, checkuser is used for verification of accounts already acting abusively. So of course the subset of accounts acting abusively, suspected of being sock puppets, who is ALSO on Tor is going to be at or near 100%. You've already self-selected your sample.
Although WR (Wikipedia Review) has passed its heyday, and certainly had its share of "troublesome" users, they also were responsible for calling out a lot of problematic behavior from those revered at Wikipedia, such as Coren:
Kidding aside, I don't believe Tor is being specifically targeted by HN in any way. If there is any auto-banning mechanism in the codebase at all (is there?) I would think it might be IP ratelimit-based, and in that case it's possible for unlucky HN Tor users who share an IP with a HN Tor spammer to suffer collateral damage.
It's probably better to email them. They don't always see these threads.
Here are three threads from 2 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7894816#7895823
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8203164#8206090
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7825556
The new things dang talks about are the [vouch] link, which means users can rescue comments marked as dead, and bring mod attention to the account to turn off the dead. (I think that's how it works. I'm not a mod. Here's the comment that makes me think it works that way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10624178#10638699 )