Hi. I hope it is ok to raise this issue on this mailing list.
From my recent observations, the current situation on Wikipedia often seems
to be that as soon a user expresses any concern over an indef block, they are immediately accused of being a meatpuppet (on AN/I or similar) and in many cases, blocked themselves. After a recent incident, I have been told about a number of similar cases. Had it not been for the fact that I've been a wikipedia editor for over four years, I suspect I too would have been blocked on the assumption of being a meatpuppet. I saw some recent posts on this mailing list where the question was asked "do meatpuppets exist"? I'm pretty much of the opinion that the term itself ought to be avoided, as it seems all too easily be used to refer to a group of editors who share a view.
There are various policies on Wikipedia that deal with sockpuppets, but these seem to have changed over time to include meatpuppets, and it seems to have become largely ignored as to what the policy said at the point that it became policy.
The same seems to apply to WP:DUCK. This was originally brought in as WP:SPADE to allow people to call a spade a spade, i.e. to say that something is what it is. It was at this point it became policy. Then it somehow got linked (hijacked?) to become WP:DUCK, which seems to now be used to state that something must be a duck if it shares a few attributes with a duck. WP:DUCK and WP:SPADE seem to me to be hugely different arguments. WP:SPADE is about stating facts, whereas WP:DUCK seems to be about making often wild accusations based on correlations.
In case an example is needed to back up my above observations, below is a link of where I was concerned that WP:DUCK and accusations of meatpuppetry were getting out of hand, and that supervision instead of blocking may have been more appropriate:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_notice...
Regards, R E Broadley