Wikipedia talk:No open proxies

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Discussion, wordsmithing, etc. goes here. --EngineerScotty 21:29, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

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[edit] No preemptive blocking

Seems like a pretty well-balanced article to me. But I oppose the policy. Open proxies should only be blocked if they are already eligible under existing blocking policy due to vandalism. No preemptive blocking. Deco 22:43, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

  • Currently, many Wikipedia admins (such as on the project mentioned in the article) do pre-emptively block proxies. Which is why it is important to clarify what the policy actually is. FWIW, I'm all in favor of blocking any open proxy; though in practice I agree with you that efforts should be focused on those proxies which are actually used for vandalism. --EngineerScotty 22:54, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Oppose all you like; pre-emptive blocking of open proxies is a longstanding policy, both for reasons of vandalism and for the problems it poses to attributing edits, which is required for our license. Radiant_>|< 12:16, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
      • Oh. I had no idea. In that case I support with reservations. :-) Deco 05:45, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Why is it "required for our licence"? Since Wikipedia is collectively written, and that it accepts unlogged users, what are the differences for this matter betwen an unlogged user and a TOR user? Why are anonymous programs forbidden on Wikipedia, and where has this policy been decided? Has it been voted? If yes, can a new vote be submitted, what is the "policy on policies"? Tazmaniacs
    • It is interesting that such questions do not get answers. Nisanu 15:40, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] WP:BP

It really isn't a good policy; it provides a false sense of security without really attacking the underlying problem. This is typical of hackerish works such as Wikipedia, which will continue to lack credibility in scholarly work or in industry. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.61.5.30 (talk • contribs).

This is a very well written piece, but on the other hand the message is already part of Wikipedia:Blocking_policy#Anonymous_and_open_proxies. Might I suggest you take this text and use it to improve that subheading? Dragons flight 02:14, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

  • It's already covered there. I've done a redirect. Radiant_>|< 12:16, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing out the link to WP:BP--initially, I proposed this because I couldn't find it anywhere. That said, I still think that having this policy as separate may be a good idea.

Why?

  • WP:BP is listed on Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines, but under the "restricted features" subheading. While ordinary users (like me) can read it, many won't.
  • WP:BP contains numerous clauses of the form "if user/IP X performs behavior Y and additional constraints Z are satisfied; then X may blocked for time t"; where Y is some behavior contrary to Wikipedia's rules; and Z usually is appropriate due process or warnings afforded to the user. For most cases, Y corresponds to an official policy on Wikipedia; which is explicitly documented as such. For open proxies, there is no corresponding policy page which clearly sets forth the policy; nothing to directly reference from Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines. In short, WP:BP is a policy describing when admins may/should block users; but it's not as well suited for informing users of what they may and may not do. The equivalent in law would be giving judges sentencing guidelines allowing jail time for offenses which are not prohibited in the statutes. Maybe I'm wearing my "lawyer" hat too tight on this point.
  • At any rate, no open proxies is certainly de facto policy; transparency suggests that it be de jure policy as well. If you dig around, you can find snippets of info which document the policy (many of which are summarized in the article). Perhaps this is worrying about minutiae, I don't know.

And not to be rude, Radiant, but I think your move to a redirect was premature--very little discussion has been had on the proposal so far. I'm reverting for now, and adding a few more links--if consensus is to make this a redirect, I'll happily go along. If you revert back (to a redirect) again, I'll leave it alone--but I ask that you allow a bit more discussion to take place first.

--EngineerScotty 18:32, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Regardless of the decision here; I also recommend that certain other places on Wikipedia: open proxy, Template:blocked proxy, wikipedia:policies and guidelines explicitly state that 1) open proxies are disallowed; and 2) point to whatever location in Wikipedia (here or WP:BP formally documents that matter. --EngineerScotty 18:43, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

  • Well sure, if this page is to be more expansive there's no harm in keeping it separate. You can flag it policy, by the way, because of precedent and practice. Radiant_>|< 22:32, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
    • In other words, all the normal procedures (which certainly would apply to a new policy) can be bypassed in this case? --EngineerScotty 06:18, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
      • Well, this is not a new proposal, it is an attempt to codify something that we've done for a long time, and that is frankly already covered in existing policy pages. Radiant_>|< 11:10, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
      • In that case, I'll go ahead and change this from {{proposed}} to {{policy}}. --EngineerScotty 18:27, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Foundation Issue Violation

This page violates the foundation issue that anyone may edit. Therefore it cannot ever be policy as far as I am aware.

Kim Bruning 19:25, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

It has been policy and will continue to be as long as Jimbo embraces it [1]. Dragons flight 19:41, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
WP:NOP doesn't violate the rule that "anyone" can edit--anyone (other than banned users) may do so; they just need to do so from a machine which isn't an open proxy. Given the security risk posed by open proxies; this is a reasonable restriction. In other words, it's a restriction on where people can edit from; not who can edit. Obviously, there will be some individuals out there who, due to their particular circumstances, can only edit through an open proxy--persons in mainland China being one large category. (Note that the Chinese government can and does block access to open proxies outside the Great Firewall of China--as use of such proxies can be used to circumvent bans on what Beijing considers seditions content).
One thing that might be a good idea (and may be done, though I'm unaware of it, and it isn't "policy" as of today), is to allow logged-in users (or a subset thereof, screened for sockpuppets, vandals, banned users, and such) to edit from open proxies. Logging in--assuming a secure password--answers the security questions around open proxies. But that would be a new policy (or a policy change), rather than documentation of what already stands. --EngineerScotty 19:51, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
I've discussed this with some developers on IRC now. I understand it's a delicate balancing act. I am somewhat saddened that this is now policy. :-( Kim Bruning 20:22, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
Again, it's been policy for quite some time. The creation of this page did not create a new policy; it just documented and set forth a policy that already existed. In other words, nothing has changed here. --EngineerScotty 20:50, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
It actually doesn't violate that foundation issue. Anyone can edit. It just means you can't edit over an open proxy. Stevage 21:14, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Some people are more "anyone" than others. Radiant_>|< 15:24, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
Yep. Any simple statement like "...anyone can edit" is obviously going to have exceptions and can't be taken literally at face value. Funny that no one has ever objected to the fact that a starving African or a person in a coma can't edit Wikipedia. Stevage 18:28, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
That's a little facetious. "Anyone can edit" plainly implies that anyone with access to the Web can edit Wikipedia - which isn't the case if open proxies are blocked, given that such proxies may be a person's only means of gaining Internet access. 217.34.39.123 15:21, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
"WP:NOP does not violate the rule that 'anyone' can edit - anyone... may do so; they just neede to do so from a machine which isn't an open proxy. Given the security risk posed by open proxies; this is a reasonable restriction." I understand that this policy has been enforced because of a "security risk". Can this "risk" be explained? Is there any vote concerning this (or other) policy? 212.112.231.83 18:18, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] amount of open proxies?

Just curious - about how many open proxies are there out in the wild? And about how much of them have been blocked? --Ixfd64 08:34, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Registered users

I can't see why even a registered user (say, registered months, or even years ago, and contributed hundreds of times already) are still being blocked, just because the IP was a shared one. I acknowledge that it is necessary to do that due to vandalism issue, but please re-re-re-consider the registered users. A serious user should be unblocked regardless of which IP s/he uses. Thank you very much. --Hello World! 02:56, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Registered users are regularly unblocked when they're affected by such a block. There's a feature request for the ability to block IPs without affecting registered users, but that's currently not possible. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 03:18, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
Has there been any progress implementing this "feature request for the ability to block IPs without affecting registered users"? I am regularly blocked (while logged in) when using Tor. Kenta2 23:31, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
I think that if Wikipedia established a policy of "trusted" logins, it would help with this problem. I would naturally assume that anonymous edits from open proxies wouldn't be allowed, but what if users who registered jumped through some extra hoops to ensure that they were legitamate? If we created a system where the normal, unauthenticated person on an open proxy can't make edits, but those who create an account with some extra hoops to jump through would be allowed. They would be trusted users on the system, and their edits would be trackable, yet their actual location can be from anywhere. Such a system could be implemented here, so that if a certain user connected through, or contributed from, an exit node or open proxy, as long as they authenticated, there would be something to track if something went wrong, while still protecting that person's right to privacy. :: Silivrenion 21:09, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Open or anonymous

The policy states that open or anonymous proxies are currently not allowed to edit. That "or" seems a bit confusing. Are there proxies that are anonymous but not open? If these [hypothetical] ‘restricted anonymous proxies’ do exist, is it allowed to use them for editing? How can someone identify such a proxy? Dart evader 10:51, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

An open proxy in one which is vulnerable to exploitation, usually by accident. An anonymising proxy is one which hides the identity of the user, but it may be a closed service; anonymising proxies aren't necessarily open. These are more difficult to find, since they aren't flagged by any scans, but they are often advertised or can be detected indirectly. // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 17:30, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] stupid question: is a school IP considered an open proxy?

Can someone explain to me why the following IP's were indefinitely blocked as open proxies:

While similar IPs from the same range, also repositories for petty vandalism, were labelled school IPs and given mostly short-term blocks:

I'm currently trying to draft a template to put on all these IPs, and I need to know if I can use the No Open Proxies policy as justification for an indefinite block of the whole range. If these are not Open Proxies, then none of them should be blocked under this policy. If you have a better suggestion for how to stop vandalism from these IPs, please contribute to the discussion at: Wikipedia:Abuse reports#New Alerts#Internet for Learning--woggly 06:59, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

These are suspected zombie computers because they were used by a malicious zombie proxy bot. A few are blocked due to vandalism, but the others should not be since there's only circumstantial evidence that they're vulnerable. // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 17:41, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Hypocritical Policy

This policy of no open proxies seems to be one of the most contradictory policies which exists on this project, and as such this policy should be revoked. My reasoning is set out below:

  • It contradicts the foundation issue[2] of the "ability of anyone to edit articles without registering"
  • It clearly hinders some contributors particularly those from the People's Republic of China and probably prevents some from contributing at all
  • It contradicts the policy of "Assume Good Faith"
  • It adopts the policy of " Assume Bad Faith"
  • It gives the administrators the power to block a wide range of IP addresses when there is no proof of vandalism as set out in the policy. This also makes a nonsense of the principle that all users should act as administrators (wikipedia:administrators).

I look forward to your comments Fornost 21:15, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

This page is Foundation policy, not a local policy, so it override any local policy such as Wikipedia:Vandalism. It does not prevent anyone from editing Wikipedia; users in censoring countries are free to use private, closed proxies or other bypassing or tunneling methods. It makes no good-faith or bad-faith assumption, but merely prohibits a particular method. Imagine a real-world policy that prohibits the use of armoured tanks for civilian transportation. This does not in any way impact anyone's right to travel, since they're free any of a large number of other vehicles. // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 17:27, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
Imagine a fictional world policy where it's forbidden not to smile into every CCTV and where you might or might not get a job as a teacher, be allowed to travel into other countries or even spend the rest of your life in prison depending on your political opinion. This does not in any way impact anyone's right to say his opinion, since they're free to say what they want.--Rubik's Cube 01:32, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Blocking Logged in Users

Why are users who have editing histories and are not new also being blocked from using proxies? It seems to me that if someone wishes to use tor or such and they are willing to log in they should be allowed to. This helps contribute to free speech. Why must wikipedia have my real IP on file? Nisanu 15:39, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Each registered user's IP address is stored temporarily so that administrators can deal with abuse. A registered user's IP address can only be determined by a very small number of carefully selected users, and is automatically purged from the database after a set interval of under a few weeks. Allowing users to create accounts from open proxies goes against the spirit of the prohibition against open proxies, since it undermines that safeguard against abuse.
Recent changes to the software allow administrators to block an open proxy and disallow new account creation, while leaving existing accounts unblocked; whether to do so or not is a matter of individual opinion. If you wish to safeguard your IP address, you are free to use a personal, closed proxy. // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 17:03, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
What I fail to understand is if I am a user with a history, why am I not allowed to use a proxy? I have already signed up without using a proxy. So wha tis the big deal with it? A legitimate reason to use a proxy that encrypts such as TOR is to prevent eavesdropping by an ISP or intermediary. It is not necessarily to hide from Wikipedia staff. You see the connection between the local computer and the remote proxy is encrypted. Another reason might be to help prevent against broad survalience whereby an entity does something such as "poll up a list of all people who accessed page X within the last year". I hold that user who has a helpful established history with wikipedia should not be prevented from using a proxy. If you do have problems with them, then you can suspend their account and they would no longer be able to use the proxy to edit. Using an open proxy should not be seen as abuse. Nor should it be construed to undermine safeguards when in reality it does no such thing. Nisanu 21:06, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
The problem is establishing whether a user has a legitimate history. It may be fine to allow you or any number of legitimate users in, but allowing registered users means that anyone who has merely registered an account is able to edit through these. This poses a problem with aged socks, etc., and it would only take one intelligent vandal to require that the open proxies be fully blocked to prevent it. —Centrx→talk • 22:36, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Policy issue that needs to be addressed.

Please see [3]. Should such servers be blocked? JoshuaZ 02:49, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

The discussion mentioned is now here. No, such servers should not be blocked, and yes, the issue needs to be addressed. Urgently. TheMadBaron 16:34, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tor

Same banned users and others that have "left" the project, are now using Tor (http://tor.eff.org/) . What can be done? ≈ jossi ≈ t • @ 04:09, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Legitimate uses for open proxies

There are many legitimate uses for open proxies. One notable example is China and its Great Firewall. With over a fifth of the world's population unable to edit Wikipedia via normal methods, this policy discriminates against a large percentage of the world's population. Secure.wikimedia.org does not offer as good privacy protection as, say, TOR for example. This is a problem, for users in China and elsewhere, who are worried about being persecuted for their edits. According to Wikipedia:Block#Personal_attacks_that_place_users_in_danger, "Blocks may be imposed where threats have been made or actions performed (including actions outside the Wikipedia site) that expose Wikipedia editors to political, religious, or other persecution by government, their employer, or anyone else." This policy is exposing Wikipedia editors to such prosecution. (And no, I'm not suggesting blocking anyone for following this policy, I'm suggesting changing the policy.) Not only users in China, but users in all governments that have restrictive laws (inclusive) or enforcement, as well as non-governments that monitor internet usage, for whatever reason. Yes, vandals and blocked users may use proxies too, but is the perfect state of Wikpedia's articles more important that people's lives and well-being?

If you think that editors who have such concerns simply shouldn't edit, isn't that against the spirit of the Foundation policy that anyone may edit? And doesn't it encourage systemic bias by discouraging editors from China and other places with restrictive goverments from editing, and discouraging the editing of controversial topics?

To make it absolutely clear, I strongly oppose this policy. I would support soft-blocking proxies such that anon IPs could not edit, but registered users could.

— Armedblowfish (talk|mail) 01:07, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why indefinite blocking?

I have asked the same question at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject on open proxies. What is the reason for indefinitely blocking? These IPs are going to change at some point, and someone is going to have to take the time to unblock them all. Why not block for 1 year or 3 years? —Centrx→talk • 02:23, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Are you trying to ban Thailand?

I strongly oppose the use of this policy to block positive contributions from established, registered users. Two of the biggest ISPs in Thailand, True internet and CS Loxinfo, have been blocked under this policy. I have to wonder what "open proxy" is supposed to suggest in this context.... these are paid services; I very much doubt that trying to use IPs such as 203.144.144.164 (True) and 203.146.247.78 (CS Loxinfo) through a proxy client would get anyone very far....

CS Loxinfo is Thailand's Biggest Internet Service Provider. It is operated by Shin Satellite, which holds a monopoly on satellite operation in the Kingdom of Thailand. I can't imagine that blocking such services is what this policy was intended to achieve.

The indiscriminate application of this policy has now made it extremely difficult for me to edit Wikipedia, and I presume that other Thailand based users must be having similar problems. I will persevere, for now, with other ISPs, in the full expectation that these, too, will eventually be blocked as "open proxies". Of course, if every ISP I can possibly use is going to be systematically blocked, I will eventually be obliged to take an extended wikibreak.... along with thousands of other users in the Kingdom... until the application of this policy is reconsidered. TheMadBaron 06:19, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Solution of the problem: more action - more reaction

There is no need to block any open proxies. Instead of this You can maintain automagically (not, as now, manually) generated list of ip addresses that are most frequently used to vandalize Wikipedia. Let Wikipedians that are somehow more trusted (for example having at least x edits) report vandalisms from ips in a format that can be easily understood by Wikipedia computers. Those computers would count cases of vandalism and in situations when number of edits from some address that are vandalisms would in some period of time be greater than some value (let it be 1/month) they would put this address on a list of restricted (not blocked) addresses.

Not logged users making edit to some Wikipedia article from those restricted addresses would everytime have to first pass defenses set by Wikipedia (for example they would have to write in a form a long sequence of random letters that they would see on an image). If, despite of those measures, number of vandalisms in edits from some address would increase, defenses would be automagically toughen (the number of random letters to write in would be increased), and, inversely, when number of vandalisms in edits from some adress would decrease, defenses would be relaxed and the number of letters to write would be decreased (to 0, when number of vandalisms would drop below 1/month).

Simply speaking: it would give to users of all open proxies ability to edit Wikipedia, and Wikipedia ability to keep number of vandalisms made using open proxies on low level, with much less manual work.

Lukasz 2 February 2007

[edit] Users from China are banned by this policy

This policy effectively bans users from China. I've previously used Tor to circumvent the block, but it stopped to work after I updated Firefox to version 2.0. I think it's because the Switchproxy plug-in for Firefox doesn't work. Even Tor was not a good solution, because for most users it's too difficult to install. Anyway, I've not been able to access articles since then without using an open proxy. The alternative access to Wikipedia explained somewhere else ( https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki) also doesn't work any more. I strongly oppose the ban, and I'm forced to breach it to even make this statement. —Babelfisch 03:33, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

There is no way to not have this ban. If open proxies were allowed, they would be repeatedly and endlessly used by vandals—and therefore blocked just as they are now. The only difference is that with this policy they are blocked before the vandalism. —Centrx→talk • 03:32, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
Correction: They are blocked whether there is vandalism or not. I also strongly oppose this policy. The number of good faith editors that are hit hard by it is too large to call it accidental any more. - Andre Engels 12:26, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
"There is no way not to have this ban"? There is no way not to exclude one fifth of the world population from Wikipedia? There is no way not to exclude a community of Internet users larger than in the United States? (On the number of Internet users in China, see Natalie Pace, China Surpasses U.S. In Internet Use, Forbes 2006; 100 million go online in China, BBC 2005)
There must be a way! Pre-emptively blocking such a large number of users is totally out of proportion. This policy exacerbates the systemic bias of Wikipedia. —Babelfisch 03:44, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Babelfisch and Andre Engels that this is a huge problem. You are probably blocking more good faith editors than vandals with this policy. Note that these good faith editors even might have helped you vandal-hunting.--Grace E. Dougle 12:08, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Because it only takes one vandal to make use of thousands of proxies to cause havoc, it makes no difference how many persons are affected by the block. Welcome to the technology age: one person has through technology more power than 100 million Chinese people manually reverting vandalism. —Centrx→talk • 19:02, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
Centrx, your racist slur is not appreciated. —Babelfisch 05:41, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
Huh? —Centrx→talk • 03:27, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
I've modified the word, since he indicates he didn't know it was offensive. Dmcdevit·t 06:30, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
How can you "modify" another user's contribution in the middle of a discussion? If he "doesn't know" that "Chinamen" is an offensive term, why "help" him by replacing "Chinamen" by "Chinese people"? This is ridiculous. —Babelfisch 07:47, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

As there seems to be no willingness to solve this problem on this discussion page, I've also started a discussion here: Wikipedia talk:Blocking policy#Softblock for Tor proxies —Babelfisch 07:29, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestion of proxy open parts of wikipedia

Could we create a second proxy open talk page or open the talk pages for proxies? This would allow many more user's to contribute (sourced information can be presented on the talk page and than inserted by users who can edit the article). Talk page's didn't seem to be sexy enough for most vandals, so I presume the chances of an increased misuse are comparably low. Wandalstouring 18:58, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

That becomes useless once it is used by vandalbots. —Centrx→talk • 18:59, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
And you can't use vandalbots on wikipedia without proxies? Besides if we use a seperate page it is quite simple to require a registration for edits. Wandalstouring 11:38, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
If you use vandalbots without proxies, the IP address or even range which it uses is blocked. If you use them with open proxies, there are thousands upon thousands of IP addresses of all designation which can be used endlessly, unless open proxies are blocked. —Centrx→talk • 17:22, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
I can see some potential value, although I'm not sure how much demand there would be. There are already many, many articles with no talk page activity so I'm not sure that adding a second talk page would gain much, particulalry since it would need the good graces of another user to transfer material across.
I'm not sure how it could be achieved, but I'm sure it could be worked into the mediawiki software.
ALR 20:37, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
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