Paul Syverson wrote:
I want to emphasize a central aspect of my suggestion: The goal is not just to provide a filter for abusive posts, it's to change incentives.
This is exactly the right approach!
We can't know for sure without running the experiment, but my guess is that if abusive posts through Tor never succeed (OK perhaps virtually never), and if the process of posting through Tor informs posters of that fact, then Tor will become worth it for your admins. The abusers will disappear or greatly diminish because they will know from being warned, and if necessary from experience, that their attempts will fail. Posts through Tor will then mostly have value (in the sense of not being abusive in the ways that prompted this discussion.)
I would say that even some fairly slight changes to the incentive structure may help a lot. The less desirable Tor is for problem users, the more they will shift to traditional broken open proxies. We can play whack-a-mole with these as we do now, while at the same time leaving Tor more open.
Yes, I know (and I'm sure Jimmy knows) that this won't solve the longterm underlying issues. Abusive posters will just move on to another avenue than Tor. But I think it will be a quick, cheap, and big win for both Tor and Wikipedia.
Yes, but I don't really mind them moving to other avenues. That's the point. If I didn't love Tor, I wouldn't care about blocking Tor either. Let them abuse broken proxy servers, let them do whatever, that's fine, we can deal with it. We just want to open up to Tor.
Yes, as Marc Abel suggested you could implement passwords, pseudonyms, or hell ZKPs. But this is stepping onto the slippery slope of trying to solve the more longterm problem that using IP addresses in the way Wikipedia does is a temporarily useful kludge. (Kludges are great, but function creep is dangerous and can make for bigger problems in the long run.)
Let me see if I can explain a bit more of the math behind this. I'm just going to make up a hypothetical example. Suppose 100 out of every 1,000,000 edits to Wikipedia is malicious. And suppose we study them and discover, hmm, 25 of them come from Tor, which is easily blockable. 50 of them come from static ips or dynamic ips that are expensive for users to get new. 25 of them are from broken proxies. Now, our present solution is to block Tor, do various things in other situations, and this works reasonably well. Of the 25 bad edits we block from Tor, some portion of them surely shift to other means, but not all of them. So we find it to be a net win. Except. Except we don't really like to block Tor. Now, fast forward, and imagine that the "expensive ip" situation goes away in a few years, either due to widespread onion routing, or whatever you may want to dream up that makes our temporary kludge of using ips no longer functional. Then we'll still only have 100 out of every 1,000,000 edits to Wikipedia as being malicious. How we'll deal with that is how we'll deal with that, but that's fine. We'll manage. For now the key thing to do is to shift the incentives on the bad users so that Tor is less desirable for them than playing with the broken proxies or just doing whatever with a dialup account or aol addresses or whatever. --Jimbo ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]