Incidentally, Gmail has a new group chat feature so we can have our cabal meets in real time! /sarcasm On Nov 29, 2007 1:06 PM, jayjg <jayjg99(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Nov 29, 2007 2:06 PM, jayjg <jayjg99(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm looking at the "sooper seekret" message (as it appears on Wikitruth), and I see a list of signs that one is dealing with a troll/sockpuppet, generally in the form of "new people don't act this way." !! was held to fulfill every one of them, and yet the identification turned out to be faulty. The conclusion which one may well make is that these are not necessarily good assumptions to make about how new users act. Looking back at my early edits, my first really substantial edit was to split one article in two. I got into an RFD within my first fifty edits. The expectation that new editors don't know what they're doing is evidently not entirely warranted. Which is not to say that Jon Awbrey shouldn't be banned at every opportunity.

On Nov 30, 2007 4:18 AM, <joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu> wrote: Yes, but once again, Durova's evidence was interpolated with editorial remarks indicating she thought it implied more than just that !! was a 'new editor'', that !! was a returning troll. It is in that leap that the faulty logic comes in. RR

On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 07:11 -0500, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote: But Durova wasn't simply giving a cookbook in the identification of a returning user (even there, it might not be a false positive here, we already have argument in the rest of unquoted part of the post as to how it could easily provide false positive). The sooper seekret evidence starts off in the first paragraph indicating the following example was one of a returning WR-related troll/abuser. Please remember this thread started with the message by The Mangoe about the circumstantial arguments that were used to justify sockpuppetry blocks, not whether it correctly or not identify someone as a returning user (in good standing or otherwise). KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

In reconsidering, my original statement was too strong. Nonetheless, it still seems to me that there is an awful lot more confidence expressed in the ability to deduce what users are up to than seems to me to be merited, and Durova's argument seems to me to exemplify how this can happen. Just my opinion, it seems.