[WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee members granted checkuser tool

[Kelly Martin]

On 11/13/05, BJörn Lindqvist <bjourne at gmail.com> wrote:
> Each time an edit is comitted from an unknown IP address a new
> proxy-to-ip-pair is added to the mapping. MediaWiki could then simply
> look in the mapping for the proxy which has a certain IP. In the
> example above, the proxy would be "anon1". And the "userid" field in
> the row would contain "anon1" instead of "34.19.215.33". Preferably
> only a few key developers and the MediaWiki software should be allowed
> access to the proxy-to-IP mapping.
>
> Checkuser would still work, but instead of returning an IP as a result
> could return "user: [[foobar]], [[barfoo]] and [[anon9512]] shares an
> IP address." Etc. There are technical solutions.

This would be largely useless.  A lot of the time, we're dealing with
people on dynamic dialup ranges that change frequently.  We use
checkuser for more than just identifying that person X and person Y
have used the same IP address.  One case I looked at yesterday
involved a credible allegation of sockpuppetry where the two users had
no actual overlapping IPs but were likely (but not convincingly) the
same person because, amongst other evidence, I could tell that they
used the same ISP and lived in the same city.  (Other compelling
evidence is that the first editor's edits end before the second's
start, with about one hour from last edit of the first to first of the
second, that the first editor was banned, and editing time of day
patterns for both editors).  Your "solution" would have hidden the ISP
information from me.

Kelly