[roy at rant-central.com: Re: [jwales at wikia.com: Re:

[Geoffrey Goodell]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 09:27:12AM -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> But now we're back to the question: how can Tor be improved to deal with
> this very serious and important problem?  What are the steps that might
> be taken, however imperfect, to reduce the amount of abuse coming from
> Tor nodes?

I think that we can agree that there are short-term and long-term
solutions to this problem.  In the short-term, we can block Tor nodes by
routing address and develop special mechanisms to allow Tor users to
edit Wikipedia content anyway.  We can do this either via some sort of
indirection or via some sort of special change to Wikipedia itself,
working around the limitations in Mediawiki.  We can focus on the
short-term for now.

However, I think that most proponents of Tor believe that in the
long-term, Wikipedia should support location-independent users.  So we
need a plan going forward, and this plan should be sufficiently general
to apply to any location-independent users, not just users of Tor.  I
think that many of us hope that some day the Internet will be flat and
routing information will be useless in tracking identity or reputation.
This will be difficult to achieve, but it is certainly my hope.  As
such, I am loath to encourage the design of systems that require any
form of access control at the network layer, and I believe that the
right thing to do is avoid such temptation, even if software tools like
Mediawiki appear to be designed with network-layer access control in
mind.

Geoff



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