"Even if admins were blocking a specific POV- so what?" Well, here's why that thinking might be dangerous: most banned editors are banned for disruptively arguing their POV, nor their POV. If we ban accounts on the basis of POVs like already banned editors, that would be a severe error, and compromise our neutrality, our effectiveness, and our ability to criticize ourselves.
I'd let this go - I don't normally write in - but it seems that too many people have begun believing that 'sounding like' people who are dangerous for *other reasons *is in itself reason for banning. That's just happened at AN/I, for example which is why I've broken the rules I've set myself and written in. We've got to be careful to avoid false positives in our identification.
I agree with Joshua on the effectiveness of textual analysis to catch sockpuppets, so don't make this remark about that. It isn't. It's about how this method must not appear to be used to scotch criticism of our own on-WP behavior.
RR
Quoting joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu <wikien-l%40lists.wikimedia.org?Subject=%5BWikiEN-l%5D%20Featured%20editors%3F&In-Reply-To=20071112103004.GB16056%40psi.co.at> *Mon Nov 12 14:16:40 UTC 2007*
Quoting Raphael Wegmann <wegmann at psi.co.at>:
On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 05:41:21PM -0500, joshua.zelinsky at yale.eduwrote:
Quoting Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at >:
Guy Chapman aka JzG schrieb:
On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 18:52:43 +0100, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
> No, the only people who need to fear that are the *already banned* > abusers of the project whose socks we are blocking on an almost > daily basis.
And what kind of magic is involved in finding those socks? In what way is it different from a witch hunt?
The average sockpuppet is traceable via IP using CheckUser and other
methods, whereas witch hunts require ducking stools and the like.
What are those "other methods"? According to WP:SOCK "similarities in interests and editing style" might help to detect sockpuppets. If this is the case, how can we make sure, that we do not block different editors, who happen to share the same POV? Does it matter at all since we might call them as well meatpuppets? How do we prevent admins from blocking not a vandal but a certain POV?
Furthermore, even if admins were blocking a specific POV- so what? In order for a POV to look similar to a blocked editor it generally needs to be extreme and with no caring for NPOV. So even if such blocks were occasionally occurring we aren't losing much. Consider for example, some socks of Jason Gastrich we've blocked. At least one of those I think wasn't a Gastrich sock, but it was interested in pretty close to the same thing; spamming and promoting Louisiana Baptist University and whitewashing the article. We didn't lose much for blocking it. Note incidentally, that this isn't the sort of evidence we are talking about above- that sort is almost never wrong.