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Re: Voting for nym

I would see a proxy as being, from Wikipedia's point of view, like an
ISP. It would be like aol.com or, more analogously, momandpopisp.com,
some ISP with a number of users. If one misbehaves at Wikipedia they
probably don't block the whole ISP. That would be an unfriendly action
that would give them a bad reputation. Instead they probably make an
effort to contact someone at the ISP responsible for abuse and tell
them about the user who caused trouble, letting the ISP block him.
Only if an ISP were persistently unresponsive to abuse complaints
would they be justified in blocking the entire ISP, and I imagine that
this is exactly what they do.

To the best of my knowledge, we've never blocked an entire ISP, largely because it is difficult to determine all the relevant IP ranges. However, when large range blocks are done, that may block an entire ISP or organization. I would also note that ISPs have been very unresponsive to our abuse compliants.

BTW Jimmy Wales himself suffered some embarrassment a few weeks ago
when it came out that he had edited his own Wikipedia entry (an action
that is frowned upon) to change it and make himself look better and
more important.

You're right that he has made edits to the page. Some have made himself look better while others have been neutral factual edits (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jimmy_Wales&action=history for a record of all edits to the page). However, he now expressed regret for making any edits. More importantly, he made those edits from his established account, with no attempt to hide his identity. It is wrong to imply he was trying to be secretive.