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.

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------ 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?

On 12/10/2014 12:47 PM, Nathan wrote:

No, nothing described below constitutes fraud of any kind.

On 12/10/2014 1:01 PM, reguyla@gmail.com wrote: 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