
A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians - laamalif
http://drexel.edu/now/archive/2016/October/Tor-Wikipedia-privacy/
======
itcrowd
I cannot believe this "study" was performed by 3 people who, in all,
interviewed 23 people of whom only 12 are using TOR. This sounds like a really
hollow research paper.

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

===

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.

===

(quoted in
[http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedi...](http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/79743)
)

~~~
OrpheanBeholder
_> (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).

------
gh1
I think Hacker News also blocks Tor users by hellbanning them. Anyone here can
confirm?

~~~
hiq
It's been a few months (9+) now that I only visit HN using Tor, and I have not
encountered any problem (apart from the annoying Cloudflare pages, which I
avoid using another Tor circuit). I created and used my account using non-Tor
ip addresses before that though.

~~~
lucb1e
Can confirm. Created this account, say, 5 years ago (just estimating) without
Tor, used Tor for regular browsing a lot between 24 and 12 months ago
(corporate firewall during internship), and since then stopped using Tor again
for regular browsing. Did not experience any kind of block at any point.

~~~
gh1
It seems like only new accounts using Tor are hellbanned. If an account has
sufficient karma or age or some combination of both, then it is not.

