I cannot believe this "study" was performed by 3 people who, in all, interviewed 23 people of whom only 12 are using TOR. This sounds like a really hollow research paper.<p>Actually the whole Wikipedia-editor-who-uses-TOR demographic is probably quite low so I don't get the point of this research. The conclusion just reads as a cascade of open doors to be kicked in:<p><i>The team reviewed a number of solutions that could allow users to veil their identity, but the authors point out that before anonymous participation is allowed by sites, the administrators of these open collaborations must recognize the value of contributions by anonymous users — rather than trying to ban or out them.</i><p><i>“If such voices are systematically dampened by the threat of harassment, intimidation, violence, or opportunity and reputation loss, projects like Wikipedia cannot hope to attract the diversity of contributors required to produce ‘the sum of all human knowledge,’” the authors write.</i>
For the view from Wikipedia, I suggest what User:Coren (Marc Pelletier, who has done just about <i>every</i> job at Wikipedia) said in 2014:<p>===<p>I've been doing adminwork on enwiki since 2007 and I can tell give you
two anecdotal data points:<p>(a) Previously unknown TOR endpoints get found out because they
invariably are the source of vandalism and/or spam.<p>(b) I have never seen a good edit from a TOR endpoint. Ever.<p>A third one I can add since I have held checkuser (2009):<p>(c) I have never seen accounts created via TOR or that edited through
TOR that weren't demonstrably block evasion, vandalism or (most often)
spamming.<p>None of this is TOR-specific, the same observations apply to open
proxies in general, and the almost totality of hosted servers. Long
blocks of open proxies or co-lo ranges that time out after <i>years</i> being
blocked invariably start spewing spam and vandalism, often the very day
the block expired.<p>===<p>(quoted in <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/79743" rel="nofollow">http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedi...</a> )