Jeez. I'm not talking about forcibly outing anyone or demanding verification. I modestly posit that fewer sock puppet abuses would be possible if user names were not more anonymous than "anonymous" IP addresses. Admins should be able to look them up, and block open proxies as appropriate.
I'm already outed, thank you very much: http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:e6cvRAh0rzIJ:www.slweekly.com/article.cf...
As for the evidence, 27 and counting disagree with you, and the others who are dragging their feet even though they have long suspected a COI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Mantanmoreland#O...
Oh, and I already re-ran it as you suggested. Thanks for noticing. Of all 21 accounts compared, including 8 New Yorkers (as you suggested), I compared with the accounts most similar, having the same number of edits--one of them was one of the three best fits in the whole sample. They had crossed editing dozens of times on over 10 different days. Name me any account, and I'll compare them too, but nothing found so far matches as well as they do.
And to re-iterate, the editing times are not themselves unique, but considering all of the common writing traits they share (which few other editors share), their common POV, article interests, and their history of past sockpuppetry, it's easy to see why 27 and counting disagree with you.
On Feb 13, 2008 5:05 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
We're going to have to agree to disagree on the quality of the evidence. There's always been suggestive evidence that they're connected - but also suggestive evidence that they aren't. Your interpretation of the analysis you've done is suggestive, but I still object to insufficiently rigorous math and statistics and dataset sizes for comparison. Your evidence isn't qualitatively changing the situation, just quantitatively. A large mound of low-grade goo isn't better structural material than a small mound of it.
Again - Even assuming the worst case, that these two accounts are the same person, and that person is Gary Weiss - the COI issues that would raise have never been persuasive to me. They just don't seem to edit in a problematic manner in general, only on controversial topics.
Encouraging an investigation of everyone we suspect of something on Wikipedia, to avoid any COI issues, is tantamount to blowing the pseudonymity and user real ID protections we have and most people hold rather dear out of the water. We *do* block people for that. And we probably should.
If you intend to challenge the generally pseudonymous operating mode, feel free to start with yourself, by letting us all know who you are and where you work. Then, we have a few million other users to convince to similarly identify themselves, some core policies on user privacy to junk and rewrite, and eventually around 2035 we can get back to working on the encyclopedia.
I personally am perfectly fine with people using real names on Wikipedia, and I think it will improve the project. As you may note, I have used my real name online for ... oh dear lord, it's 20 years now. Other than the infrequent "edited without remembering to log in" from IP addresses that are publically registered to a company I admit freely to owning, I don't do any IP or sock edits, and am happy to have anyone who doubts that take a look at me. I have nothing to hide other than the fact that I am sadly overly heterosexual for a San Francisco Bay Area resident. Well, had nothing to hide.
However...
Forcibly outing people who fall into disfavor with our critics, however, seems like a short road to destroying the project. A large number of editors and admins I otherwise respect have happily run to do Bagley's bidding on this one, and that's highly disturbing. If we're going to enforce all the policies equally, then a number of people have met the policy definition of "acting as proxy of banned user" in this, in addition to attempts to reveal the real-life identity of a Wikipedia user in public.