On 7/4/07, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher(a)student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
zetawoof
wrote:
It's for the exact same reason, just in
reverse: If an apparently
good-faith contributor is using an anonymizing service like TOR, it's
impossible to detect that they're also trolling (or whatever) from
their actual IP.
But we don't use checkuser to detect that apparently good-faith
contributors are trolling or sockpuppeting or whatever. We use
it in an attempt to confirm that apparently bad-faith editors are.
Hear, hear. "I hold in my hand the names of 205 administrators who are
also trolling as IP addresses!"
If I'm a troll/puppetmaster with different accounts from this IP, you
have no way of knowing ... because you have no reason to check.
Zetawoof seems to be proposing that we check all users to ensure they
aren't running multiple accounts[0]. Zetawoof's Wikipedia is not a
Wikipedia to which I would wish to contribute.
I'm not proposing any such thing. There is, in fact, already an "implicit
checkuser" in place for such situations, in the form of the autoblock:
blocking an account will also place a temporary block on the IP address
they last edited from, which serves as adequate protection from good hand /
bad hand sockpuppetry. What I was pointing out was that allowing TOR makes
this existing mechanism entirely ineffective.