The value of Tor and anonymous contributions to Wikipedia
blog.torproject.org
blog.torproject.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_block_exemption
This requires a Wikipedia account and an email address (which can be used exclusively for Wikipedia). Signing up for a Wikipedia account involves providing a username and a password, but no personal information is needed.
The "Advice to users using Tor" page has more information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advice_to_users_usin...
It's borderline impossible nowadays to create an email address without a phone number or a pre-existing email address.
Also almost impossible to do using Tor.
There are services you can pay in btc, which will receive a verification code for you, using a real phone number, rather than a voip number.
AFAIK they're often used by relatively unscrupulous people to bypass bans in games, etc, but could also be used here.
Googling suggests you could try https://coinatmradar.com/
You can use Tor to circumvent firewalls or NAT (e.g. SSH tunneling, or avoiding proxies and censorship).
You can use Tor to ensure Facebook or Wikipedia does not have your IP address (you might not trust the admins).
You can use Tor to provide others the above mentioned benefits.
And in an authoritarian country such as China, trying to hide from the authorities (as you put it "national secret police") makes sense quite quickly as so much is forbidden. That being said, Tor was not designed to make you hide from the "national secret police"; at least not specifically (and which nation anyway?). IIRC it started out as a project by the US military.
But other e-mail providers like GMail and Hotmail won't like Tor and ask user to provide phone number, you are partially right. So solution is simply not to use these e-mail providers.
It must've been some time ago, then, because they now require an SMS (your phone number), a donation, or another e-mail account.
Email services that don't SMS verify on VPN or TOR endpoints usually find themselves on anti-spam blacklists sooner rather than later. Spammers are constantly on the lookout for email services that don't have trashed reputations to get around Gmail and other provider's filters.
Nope. Also fails. I git curious a few weeks ago and tried most services mentioned here.
All failed, all asked for either SMS or another email.
I got the silent treatment. They say nothing and just don't create the address.
getting a host will be more difficult though
Try sending email from your own box and not be blocked by the big ones (gmail, apple, yahoo, outlook, etc).
It's borderline impossible even if you just send a couple of emails a week (no spam) and set up everything (DKIM, SPF, DMARK)
what protection does tor give to someone logged in to wikipedia?
i don't like to get an account because that would leave a public trail of all my edits, and given the eclectic selection of topics i am interested, in this would allow anyone to deanonymize me. whereas if my edits get spread over multiple ip addresses you may tie a particular edit to an ip of mine, but you won't be able to build a profile of my person from all my edits.
hackernews has the same problem, but on hn the topic selection is more limited, and not all topics i am interested in are being discussed here. also it is a lot more difficult to categorize hn comments compared to wikipedia edits.
You have to "demonstrate the need" and "be trusted not to abuse".
> Editors who may reasonably request an exemption include users who show they can contribute to the encyclopedia, and existing users with a history of valid non-disruptive contribution.
So, "a Wikipedia account and an email address", as you write, is not enough.
EDIT to add: As acknowledged by Wikipedia in your second link:
> IP block exemptions for this purpose should be requested by following these instructions. However, it may be difficult to establish good standing and remain completely anonymous, as the former requires editing without using Tor.
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-Decemb...
Unfortunately, the incentive structure at Wikipedia has challenges. Editors suffer under every ounce of abuse but the cost of excluded contributions is nearly invisible and not felt personally by anyone.
The result is that convincing people to take even small risks (of abuse) or costs (of tech measures to mitigate abuse without compromising user privacy) is extremely hard.
Hopefully this research will help shift the balance.
So, they basically exclude anyone that's somewhat privacy conscious, or frequently travels to weird jurisdictions that make use of a VPN advisable, or lives in such jurisdictions. As you say, an invisible loss.
At the same time, as you mention, excluding contributions is cheap and that's what initial contributors feel worse about: that they can't contribute effectively
I like how the article starts with:
> An activist in the Middle East can provide a different perspective on an article about politics in their own country than a collaborator in northern Europe. And they deserve to add their voices to the conversation safely.
When they will most likely get a "original research" deletion of their contribution
Should people be worried about that? Idk, i think there are probably ways to mitigate the risk of that at least somewhat. However the article didn't address that concern, and you can't change hearts and minds if you don't talk about what people are actually worried about.
So yes, letting them get away with tor some will let them in a little more, but not a huge qualitative change to not allowing them to do so.
Not allowing the access, however, blocks a significant amount of legitimate contributions too.
Plus anything else I haven't thought about regarding the severity of the vandalism during that time.
Any Wiki admins have first-hand experience?
Edit: clarifications
Before Wikipedia had any explicit policy re. Tor exit nodes, their IPs would typically be blocked anyway -- either under longstanding policy regarding open proxies, or as a result of spam/vandalism edits originating from the IP. Automatically blocking all Tor exit nodes wasn't a huge change in practice; it just meant that the process was automatic (so new exit nodes would be blocked more quickly, and old exit node IPs would be unblocked automatically), and that the block messages for users on those IPs became more informative.
If the citation is public, a non-anonymous person could make the edit as easily as an anonymous one. That's not to say it will necessarily be made, but there doesn't seem to be a case that only one person could make the edit. Allowing anonymous contributions does increase the work force to include people who feel the need to be more secure, but they don't have access to special information that makes them uniquely qualified.
The relevant expertise-- which sometimes includes privileged information-- is part of what lets you know which public information is valuable, relevant, and worth the effort to bother including.
A user's reason for protecting their privacy may also have absolutely nothing to do with their possession of any privileged knowledge. It's really impossible to predict what the long term consequence of compromised privacy are, and we know that any interaction online can be an invitation to abuse by crazy people.
So, for example, as part of some discussion online I might find myself reading an article on some venereal disease. While reading the article I might notice some omissions or errors and decide to fix them. Later, my edits could end up as part of a debate about the content of the article (even if my edits were utterly unobjectionable) ... with an end result of this potentially embarrassing subject turning up in search results about me, or being discovered by a political opponent in an entirely unrelated debate a decade later, and being pulled out of context just to smear me.
This isn't conjectural. I can speak to it personally: For example, over 13 years ago I got in an edit war on Wikipedia over some site policy thing about users including copyright law violating images on their user pages. I was a bit of a hothead about it and got myself blocked from editing for 24 hours. I was appropriately chastised for being an idiot about how it was handled. All the edits all ultimately went through. But I get regularly slandered by abusive anonymous accounts about it that are mad at me about unrelated Bitcoin debates (and can find literally nothing else negative to say about me). They love to characteristics it in various ways ("fired from wikipedia!"), divorce it from the context, yank out completely inaccurate off the cuff comments from other wikipedians made during the event (apparently some random troll was mistaken for me for a little bit during discussions about the incident).
I would have been much better off contributing anonymously as a result. And for the little personal benefit I got out of contributing, I would have been better off not contributing at all rather than end up with this nonsense.
Is Wikipedia or the world really a better place where only people who either fail to make the above calculation correctly or whom expect some big personal pay-off by contributing are left editing the site? I don't think so.
When people are allowed to speak up freely - truth will come out quickly. (Yes, you will get some noise too, but id rather adjust my signal to noise ratio then just deal with meaningless noise all the time).
it may not work as intented, if you are doing university research but ... for general purpose we must have a general encyclopedia that actually works
The idea that content is actually being deleted because it isn't considered 'notable' by some person in 2020 is sad. Who knows what will be considered 'notable' in 2050?
Anyway, Wikipedia raises TONS of money but it goes to staff of dubious purpose with regards to its goals.
A few philosophical observations:
>"Wikipedia has tried to block users coming from the Tor network since 2007, alleging vandalism, spam, and abuse."
Question #1. If let's say a country like China blocks users and/or content, citing "vandalism, spam, and abuse" as their reasons for doing so, then is this Censorship, or is this blocking content/users for "vandalism, spam, and abuse"?
?
That is, how exactly does one distinguish blocking content/users for "vandalism, spam, and abuse" differ from Censorship -- if the net effect is the same in both cases?
See, whatever reasons we give as criteria for this distinguishing process -- we must then be able to apply them equally to the other party.
If we say that it's OK for a company to block users based on "vandalism, spam, and abuse" -- then how do we know that the Chinese government (or any other government that engages in censorship) does not apply the exact same criteria when it apparently censors, and if so, is it justified in those content takedowns?
In other words, if we're saying that it's OK for Wikipedia to engage in its actions, then why is China not justified in doing the same thing?
And if it's not OK for China to do, then why is it justified for Wikipedia to do?
Disclaimer: I am neither for nor against China, and I am neither for nor against Wikipedia.
I merely think it that it would make for an interesting philsophical debate as to why one's actions are justfied, and the other's actions are not, IF BOTH SETS OF ACTIONS RESULT IN THE SAME EFFECT.
Help me to understand. Pretend I am Socrates, that is, I claim to know nothing, and it's your goal to educate me...
Code is open source and viewable at https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-TorBlock
Wikipedia's viability depends critically on hundreds of millions of dollars of year of uncompensated volunteer labor by self-selecting contributors-- and a major component of that includes anti-vandalism.
As my sibling comment laments, Wikipedians directly feel the pain of any reduction in their anti-abuse toolchest-- while the countributor's privacy is almost a pure externality.
It's trivial to create an account, so any contributor that cares can self-serve a solution-- at least if they're sophisticated enough. If they're not even that sophisticated they're not exactly likely to make a case for this kind of change.
It also provide a bit of a false sense of privacy since the information is still retained by the site and available to many-- though the same situation exists for logged in users.
I think advocating access via tor would be more important: It's unfortunate to create a situation where a user's life or freedom might be endangered due to their contributions unethical-but-lawful order (or an accidental data breach) forces Wikimedia to expose them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CheckUser
As for privacy, allowing everyone to associate your IP address with your edit history is quite different than only allowing the website to see it.
The reason I bring this up is because there have been quite a few times where I’ve wanted to make a quick copy edit, but I don’t, because I don’t want the edit and the name of the article I read to be permanently associated with my IP address. Preferring anonymity and the ability to change identities, I hate having a permanent account for online interactions. I‘ve made a lot of temporary account on various websites, but most of the time it’s not worth creating a temporary account for a tiny edit on Wikipedia. So I don’t bother.
Maybe I’m a unique case, but I’m still willing to bet that there would be more interaction from non-logged-in users on Wikipedia if their IP address were hidden.
(As a side note, the reason why I’ve stuck with this HN account for so long is because there is a limit to how many accounts an IP address can make before getting banned.)
But I completely understand if you're making more "risky" edits and/or have a IP address attached to you like that. Then it makes sense. And if it's too much to create an account for the tiny edit, I guess it'll be left like it is. Some things I see on Wikipedia are wrong too, but the work to verify, archive, link and do the edit, is more than the edit is worth in terms of shared knowledge, so I skip it too.
On the other hand, I quite like that you can connect the ASN with edits on Wikipedia. Makes it very obvious what organizations are trying to influence what in which direction. But maybe the information doesn't have to be fully public, require a different access rule than just user.
It scales better.
Pretty much just that.
> Maybe I’m a unique case, but I’m still willing to bet that there would be more interaction from non-logged-in users on Wikipedia if their IP address were hidden.
You're not. Though WP would generally prefer you not use throwaway accounts (as would HN, for that matter!).
It's unclear how many people it discourages-- a lot of people manage to make edits without realizing their IP will be displayed because they miss the warnings. Users asking the site to delete edits that were accidentally IP-exposing is a not-infrequent support request.
Users suffering unwelcome exposure is largely an external cost (except for those support requests, and the invisible long term discouragement-to-contribution).
Probably on the balance, considering everyone's costs and risks it would be better to make IP edits private. But the decision to do this is made by Wikipedians, and considering just their costs, favours not doing it more strongly.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IP_Editing:_Privacy_Enhancem...
[0]https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:IP_Editing:_Privacy_E...
> the research team found that Tor users made similar quality edits to those of IP editors [...] and first-time editors. The paper notes that Tor users, on average, contributed higher-quality changes to articles than non-logged-in IP editors.
Is it similar quality or higher-quality now? The text also appears (word for word) on the linked website at nyu.edu. Reading the original paper, guess what I found?
> Using hand-coded data and a machine-learning classifier, we estimated that edits from Tor users are of similar quality to those by IP editors and First-time editors. We estimated that Tor users make more higher quality contributions than other IP editors, on average, as measured by PTRs.
Almost the same wording and contradiction again. There is a subtle change, namely that the "of similar quality" judgement is a result of hand- and machine-classifying, and "more higher quality contributions" is the judgement of a metric called PTR* . There might also be a difference between "similar quality edits" and "more high quality edits" (e.g. Tor users might do more crap edits and more great edits by one metric but simply be about average by another metric), but I'm not sure if that's just random variation in phrasing or intentional.
* PTRs are "persistent token revisions". I don't find it very succinctly/adequately explained at first use, but probably if you read the whole paper it makes more sense. To my understanding, it's basically just how much of the contribution was later changed (within a fixed number of subsequent edits), presuming that if it was largely left unchanged, it was probably a welcome and correct edit.
While the article and paper are all positive, I'm not sure whether this might just be because of course we'd all love to hear how great Tor users are (many of us are also Tor users: we like to think of ourselves as freedom fighters, privacy advocates, etc.), but I'm not sure that's what this unambiguously shows. Perhaps it's worth the moderation effort to unban them, perhaps not. The paper does acknowledge this to an extent: "We simply cannot know if our sample of Tor edits is representative of the edits that would occur if Wikipedia did not block anonymity-seeking users."
Perhaps, instead of ban vs unban, we just need another system to anonymously contribute changes, like a moderation queue, which would make it less attractive for vandalism.
(On StackOverflow/StackExchange, anyone can edit without logging in and not even your IP address is shown. While moderating it, I very very rarely see trolls or spambots there. I'm not sure if that's because of some magic system I don't know about or if it's simply because a manual review filters all the garbage and there is no point in trying.)
https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/06/25/how-does-spam-protecti...
I also read the paper. Depending on what metric you choose, it is either similar quality (based on revert numbers) or higher-quality (based on PTR - basically the characters that survive subsequent edits).
> While the article and paper are all positive... I'm not sure that's what this unambiguously shows.
You are absolutely correct!
The paper actually shows that Tor edits were much worse than any other group ("Overall, 41.12% of Tor edits on article pages are reverted, while only30.3% of IP edits, 35.2% of First-time edits, and 5.5% of Registered edits are reverted.") before the ban was implemented.
After the 2013 ban they "consider the small number of edits made in this later period. Using the methods described above, we computed the reversion rate and the PTRs for the population of 536 edits made after 2013 along with the same number of time-matched edits from other groups as described above." - and THIS dataset is what the headline comes from!
So this positive conclusion is based on these 536 edits, not the much bigger dataset! Additionally, they filter out edits to non-article pages where "this analysis provides evidence that Tor was used to engage in edit warring in violation of Wikipedia policy."
It's a pity, but this paper doesn't really support the idea that Tor users are good Wikipedia editors.
You're not lazy just because you decide something isn't worth it.
I've worked on some services where I'm not exaggerating to say that almost all Tor traffic was abuse.
And the distinct users would be trying to do another thing
Community-based fully open spam moderation is a beast hard to contend with for even large entities.