On 3/18/07, K P kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/18/07, Ron Ritzman ritzman@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/18/07, K P kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:
A lot of the rants from various unrelated users on this list complaining about being blocked sound exactly alike.
Of course because they all have something in common, they were all, justifiably or otherwise, blocked and they were all pissed off about it.
Yeah, Arbcom wrote something under the RfAR for an admin recently, that admins should be above the being pissed off, mostly, I assume, because of something somewhere else, a Wikipedia page where it says exactly what you say: users get ticked off when they're blocked.
A "duh" moment if ever there was one. I do think that's why so many posters sound exactly alike and then get further accused of being sock puppets, they have a DSL line, so it will be easy to find some banned user on the same ISP.
Another duh moment, when I had not thought of the obvious, is that one user is probably simply copying another user! I suspect my other ones were the same, where one user just copied another. It seems so obvious in retrospect, because copying is rampant in this day and age, why would I expect Wikipedia users to be exceptions? (Except of course for the pair involved in the GA fracus who did cut it out.)
Now that I think of it, that's also a good way to learn where to go and how to use Wikipedia quickly, look at the contributions of another editor, and just follow their paths a bit. Which could end up making you sound like the other editor, or a more experienced editor.
Yes, always nice to wake up alerted to the obvious simultaneous with your own obliviousness.
That does happen, and people who think alike in ways often find each other randomly in WP and reinforce each other to some extent (there's another guy whose first name is George who edits on some similar topics to me, but he's in Australia, and I'm in California).
But, if you find two people editing very similarly, particularly the "one is blocked and another one starts up", and checkuser says they're either at the same IP or neighbors, then one has to at least very suspiciously wonder.
If there are abuses of similar sorts going along with both accounts, the odds that it's a sock appear to approach unity.