Talk:IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/Archives/2021-03

Anti-abuse tools

Once the WMF implements IP masking, our efforts to block VPNs and open proxies (en:WP:WPOP) will be effectively dead. I think it does not matter how many users get the new user rights, we will not be able to cope. Does the WMF plan to implement any new anti-abuse tools?

I would like to make a concrete proposal: the WMF could license the spur.us feed, which includes most IPs associated with VPNs and open proxies and actively block all of them globally. It is not a solution to every problem, but proxy blocking would be handled even more efficiently than today. Also, the cost of licensing such a database is peanuts for the WMF, and I think it makes sense to do it in-house.

I mention spur.us because it is currently giving us very good results on enwiki, but there may be other options. Best, --MarioGom (talk) 23:15, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback! We'll investigate. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 12:01, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Pending queries

Hi Johan,

Sort of a mixed bag here, since it includes questions from at least three sections that are now somewhat buried by other comments.

1) Do you have any thoughts on the issue that to get close to current standards is going to require a very broad "most-IP info" and broad "all IP-info" sharing, which is presumably not desired by Legal, and couldn't happen if NDAs were required for full IP-info? (That's two distinct issues I realise)

2) I'm going to assume Legal haven't got back to you with regard to Blablubbs' questions. Could it be added to something like the next set of Wikimedia Clinic hours as a topic (where I believe there's a Legal rep)?

3) On the userright discussion, which has somewhat petered out, I'm going to copy one comment I made in regard to your correct statement that tying it to admin may be tricky due to the different standards. "this is at least a good discussion benchmark. I thank you for your bottom half - I was absolutely going to step in and make a point that it should be lower, but of course you are right as regards variable levels for adminship. Hmm. I will have to have a think, please excuse the whirring hamster noises. I realise it continues the userright proliferation, but would it make sense to actually have two userrights (akin to edit filter helper and edit filter manager), the lower (partial vision) of which would be the "given to all admins", but would also be given to others under one criteria set - while the other (full vision) would be under a higher set [which might be all admins plus others on some projects, but only a subset of admins on others]". It was just a discussion starter, but would be good to consider it, and several other proposals made in the thread, in more detail. Nosebagbear (talk) 11:08, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Nosebagbear: Good questions, which I think we should address as a team rather than me alone, so I'm going to bring this up internally rather than replying to it right now. Responding here just to acknowledge that it has been seen and is not ignored. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 17:48, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Nosebagbear: I just had a conversation with NKohli (WMF), and issues 1) and 3) sort of need to be solved together, in a way. We'll put something together so there's something tangible to talk about, and then we can spread the word more broadly. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 17:49, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

An update on this: We're in meetings, but it's work across several teams in different parts of the organisation, and we have to make sure that everything is technically and legally realistic. Sorry this is taking so long: we really don't want to show you what we have in mind, have everyone think about it, leave feedback, come up with plans and so on, and then come back and tell you that, no, sorry, apparently this didn't work, let's start over. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 15:52, 14 April 2021 (UTC)