[WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee members granted checkuser tool

[David Gerard]

BJörn Lindqvist wrote:

>The solution to
>the problem of exposing IP:s is to proxy them via an proxy-to-IP
>mapping which looks something like this:
>"anon1" => "34.19.215.33"
>"anon2" => "179.55.66.77"
>"anon3" => "215.108.3.2"
>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.


I can see this will have to be a FAQ too. You're the third or fourth
person to suggest this one.

Q. Why don't you write some software to tell someone if there is a
match, without revealing the IPs?

A. Because detecting sockpuppets knowing only the IPs and the edit and
its time is an art, not a process susceptible to [[Taylorisation]]. If
you think otherwise, write the code and show it works reliably in the
cases we're interested in, including dynamic IPs assigned from a /12.
So far, the only process we've found is to find people who are
trustworthy and then trust them all the way. Much as we do with
developers.


- d.