volunteer to do php patch for wikipedia?

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

Hi folks,

I've been talking to Jimmy Wales, the guy who runs Wikipedia, and we've
agreed on a proposed patch to Mediawiki (the software that runs Wikipedia)
that I think we'll all be happy with. (The Frank guy who visited or-talk
long ago is just some guy who claimed to run Wikipedia -- nothing more.)

Wikipedia blocks some Tor exit nodes from writing to their website. This
issue is not new for them: they have exactly the same problems when AOL
users abuse their website, since AOL also has only a few IP addresses
for its many users. Their current answer is to have a message on the
block page begging their admins not to block certain IP spaces. They
recover from accidental blocks by hearing from angry AOL users on their
IRC channel and manually fixing things.

Here's how I envision it working: there should be a db of IP sets (some
contiguous blocks, some not) that Wikipedia keeps track of. Periodically
(like every 15 minutes), all of these IPs should be unblocked. To make
things saner for the admins, certain IP sets should have a flag that says
if you block any IP in the set then you should block every IP in the set.

In this way, the Tor network (or each individual AOL IP) would be blocked
while there is abuse, but when it subsides they would become unblocked.

The reason I mention this here is that the Tor core developers have
their hands full making Tor work better, and it's time to delegate. Can I
get one (or more) of you to step up and make this happen? We don't need
to produce a beautiful pristine patch on the first go, but we need to
move this forward or its status will never change. :) Don't worry about
producing the list of actual IPs, we've got that covered.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki

(Please, do not debate here whether these measures are adequate to
prevent abuse -- we will find this out by trying it, not by speculating.)

Thanks. Let me know if you need more details.
--Roger