Geoff Burling wrote:
1. It would be helpful to create a new position in
Wikipedia, with
the powers to investigate charges of sockpuppety, & provide an answer
within a short period of time -- say 12 or 24 hours. Currently, one
has to attract the attention of a developer (who obviously is more
interested in adding or fixing the Wikimedia code), who then must
investigate before the relevant logs are purged.
What I'm envisioning is someone who does nothing more than receives
an allegation that "X is a sockpuppet of Y", checks the logs, & reports
whether the 2 accounts come from the same IP number, or a subnet
belonging to the same ISP. (I don't know exactly how nuch info is
captured in the logs, & whether it is possible for one to determine
if a given IP address is a dial-up connection or a proxy address.)
There has been some objections about making this kind of information
even partly available because it would violate contributor's privacy.
<snip>
YES. We absolutely need this. I think this would be perfect for
Bureaucrats. They could help out with other chores that require
developer work, although I'm not sure on the feasibility of this (would
changing usernames and helping reattribute edits be too complicated?).
John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])