Comment by davidgerard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidgerard | Hacker News Reader

For the view from Wikipedia, I suggest what User:Coren (Marc Pelletier, who has done just about every job at Wikipedia) said in 2014:

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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... )

> (a) Previously unknown TOR endpoints get found out because they invariably are the source of vandalism and/or spam.

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).

"(b) I have never seen a good edit from a TOR endpoint. Ever."

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:

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=24588

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