Re: Wikipedia & Tor

[Paul Syverson <syverson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Maybe some of the more high-tech solutions, something involving
blind signatures, etc. will ultimately be shown useful, designed
and coded.

In the meantime, I suggest something to try that I believe is both low
tech and easy to implement.  It turns into advantages some of the
putative limitations we've been talking about

(1) Tor is set up and managed so Wikipedia can easily recognize
    stuff coming through Tor.

(2) Wikipedia doesn't have a lot of human or other resources available
    to check these posts for what it considers abuse. (Relates to Nick's
    points.)

Anyone attempting to post via Tor gets a response that explains that
posts through Tor are not automatically posted. Because of previous
experience, posts through Tor will be screened by a human being. There
are not alot of human beings available.  This is both a reality and
intentional so this could take a while. (Once experience is
accumulated an expected wait time in hours/days/etc can be given.)  If
the client would still like to submit a post, he can continue and do
so. The post is then stored till a person gets to it, or till its time
waiting in storage for a person to check it expires, or maybe there's
some scheme to limit the potential abuse of disk space or
whatever. There are some perameters to tweak, but I still think it's
pretty simple.  Even if there's only fifteen man-minutes a day for
this in the Wikipedia organization, it could still be effective.

People who want to abuse a particular entry or even arbitrary entries
will simply not succeed through Tor at all. They will have to come in
by some other means. People can still abuse Wikipedia in general by
wasting this resource, but Wikipedia can intentionally limit the
resource to the amount it wants to give to this. If there's lots of
such abusers out there who don't care about defacing entries, they
just want to mess up the Wikipedia organization in a way that is not
even publicly visible, then this resource all goes to waste.  But it's
conceivable to me that most (all?) who know they cannot succeed in
creating an abusive post will not bother, leaving the resource for
those who truly want to remain anonymous. If way more people
nonabusively post through Tor so that the Wikipedia human or other
resource is overwhelmed by legitimate anonymous posts, well that's
something Wikipedia would probably like to find out about too. By then
maybe we'll have a better technical solution or maybe Wikipedia will
be able to find more man hours if it's seen to be that important.

I think this is simple, both conceptually and to implement;
it might work;  and it's an improvement over the status quo.

aloha,
Paul