User:LotsofTheories/Privacy Comes With A Price

Metainformation: For how much time this will be in draft space is currently unknown but interactive contact is going to be made soon so that this can be determined. This is to prevent perceived/real abuse of the Draft namespace.

This is in draft because the original poster is going through Wikiversity:Research ethics("Revision as of 2020-01-09T01:16:07" UTC) to check that this project qualifies based on that page. More pages will be checked before this leaves Draft. Research process will also be taken into account(work in progress). This project could be abandoned. If you believe there is no future for a project like this please don't hesitate to delete it. I'm saving this draft now more for a practical reason than for a reason I feel I was finished with the draft

Research ethics based and better organized
Verifiability


 * Methods:
 * What is gathered will be fully documented, from the IP addresses used to what proxy network provider the IP belongs to.
 * Original motivation:
 * frustration with that proxy blocking in practice is too confusing and not consistent enough across projects, causing unnecessary distractions while trying to improve Wikimedia projects
 * the hope of being able to find solutions that might be used to allow more honest users to contribute and preventing bad users from doing harm
 * Hypotheses might be developed when the research starts
 * This research project will have active and passive periods. When the period of this project is active, then templates will be used to show other users on the English Wikiversity that this is an active research project. After the active/intensive period is over then the template might be removed so that nobody misunderstands this project's current activity.

To the best of every participants ability these will be done:
 * Honesty: if some results are undesirable they will still be included.
 * Transparency: any data added must be backed up by how the data was gathered.
 * Objectivity: work in progress
 * Subjectivity: being transparent about opinions is important. Opinions will probably be expressed about proposed solutions or ideas in a way that it is clear whose opinion it is.
 * When a participant wants to express an opinion it could be marked with "Subjectivity: [opinion goes here] [by user]"
 * Disclosures: the creator of this project uses a VPN/proxy combined with a logged-in username("LotsofTheories") to edit. I don't have any strong opinions on if others should or should not use a proxy/VPN in general or specifically to edit Wikipedia, there are benefits and risks to either using or not using a specific VPN/proxy. Another disclosure is that the one starting this project is frustrated with how blocking of proxies work across Wikimedia Projects.
 * Sources: citing will happen when relevant
 * Safety: research will be conducted by the originator of this project in a way so that any findings will do no harm or introduce any new risks to Wikimedia projects. This project will have a special section where it will be described how responsible disclosure can happen in the best way for this specific topic.
 * Review process: First step is identifying peers, then participants can expect/request from specific individuals or known groups for this project

The general draft
The foundational motivation behind this research is to make it possible for as many people as possible to contribute to the "Sum Of All Human Knowledge" while at the same time preventing spam and vandalism taking up people's time. Blocking accounts or internet protocol addresses can sometimes work as a last resort to prevent both spam and continuous vandalism. This project is about to document existing policies, coming up with new solutions, possibly contributing code that can be used on test environments to test new ways to deal with spam/vandalism etc. Hopefully finding a way to make honest users being able to contribute through more means(through technological means) than currently available.

This project is created as an active learning resource and an active research project. This learning resource is intended to attempt to use the concept of Action research to better understand the following questions/problems.

Some of the questions/problems being presented as:


 * How does the situation with dealing with proxies look like on Wikimedia projects ie. English Wikiversity, Other Wikiversity language projects, Other sister projects?
 * What do the policy's of projects look like?
 * What data is there and can we gather relevant data to this project to see the "bigger picture"?

What this project is not about
This project is not a place for you to:
 * Seek IP block exempt status
 * Seeking help with registering using a proxy IP(proxy providers have many IPs) that is currently blocked

What this project is about
This project is about:
 * experimenting as long as the experiments conducted do not actively serve as a hindrance for active Wikimedia Projects to do their work.
 * avoid disrupting any other Wikimedia projects by bringing this research up, instead try to focus on creating your own environments where a participant and/or other participants can do experiments to test proxy service handling.
 * create a MediaWiki software server instance to test proxy usage that may attempt to replicate/emulate a Wikimedia project environment in an attempt to make it easier for a Wikimedia project to handle proxies, whether it is outright blocking or imposing limitations with a cost to edits in some way, whether it be time, proof of work and other factors and/or a combination of factors.
 * if possible and use caution!, depending on circumstances: learning about existing practices of how Wikimedia projects are dealing with proxies as long as the participant acquires the permission and consensus of the community of a Wikimedia project they are intending to conduct proxy experiments on(by ie. testing if edits can be done with a specific proxy IP while documenting their process).

cases
Responsible disclosure in this project is very important. If any participant discovers a problem or vulnerability we must disclose it only to the parties that can do something about it. It is not always straight forward how exactly to do that and it may differ from case to case, the most important is that all participants do their best in this.

Discoveries:
 * Something has been discovered, unsure if it is critical or trivial. One way to disclose in a responsible way is to encrypt the information in a message using ie. a tool like GPG, then giving the recipient the participants public key so that the recipient can send a confidential reply unless a reply is not necessary, in which case patience might be an important factor in the responsible disclosure ethical procedure.

sub-projects
This is still a draft in draft space but that does not mean that participants can't make edits. If you have suggestions of things that can be researched please don't hesitate to work on this section. This is a list of projects, in the beginning it might contain only 1 item but the list is a work in progress:
 * Investigating VPNs further to see if improvements can be done on the English Wikipedia page for better coverage of VPNs and use-cases ("permalink ID": 948358279, 2019-05-24T20:54:51 by Cewbot UTC time)
 * Investigating if some VPN providers have attempted to be "Wikipedia friendly" by communicating with Wikimedia or by monitoring(with a cost to privacy) some activity to determine whether their customers are using their VPNs for good or for bad on Wikimedia related projects.
 * Interview VPN providers regarding their stance on their customers using Wikimedia related projects, if they support, think its inappropriate or if they are neutral on the subject.
 * Carrying out polls to check what specific online communities think about VPN networks and proxy networks being used for Wikimedia related activities