Good points carol and i would add that i dont trust the checkuser tool more than 50%. Its easy to fool, hard to read the data and interpret the results. 90% of it is gut instinct and spotting vocal trends and writing style by the user. I have seen first hand that not only is it prone to error, but many in the community give it far more trust than it deserves.

 

 

 

------ Original message------

From: Carol Moore dc

Date: Wed, Dec 10, 2014 1:15 PM

To: Addressing gender equity and exploring ways to increase the participation of women within Wikimedia projects.;

Subject:Re: [Gendergap] a gender gap meet-up?

 

That depends on how you interpret it. No monetary gain was there but they a r e userping someones identity for personal gain.

How do you know?

For example, maybe there are secretly for profit, paid editors
on Wikipedia who feel threatened by more Admin and/or
Foundation scrutiny of the kind that some editors have
been promoting, sometimes for years.

GGTF has too many snoopy, boat rocking editors.
Getting rid of such editors allows them to continue to make
money without pesky snoops. If faking IPs helps discredit those
editors and get them blocked, so they can continue their
secret paid editing, that's fraud.

Or maybe someone who doesn't like GGTF or Lightbreather
paid someone $50 to fake the IP and Lightbreather-like
comments in order to cover their tracks.

Maybe there's someone making a good living faking
3 or 4 IPs a week in some topic area where some
organization wants to discredit some BLPs or
companies or even a whole nation.  So they flood
the topic area with socks from phony IPs
and then it's easy to claim new editors are socks
and get rid of them before they can learn
the ropes and deal with POV edits.

I'm sure there are all sorts of more examples
of what might be happening we could come up with.

 So don't claim there is no fraud when there could
be fraud going on...

CM