Hoi, There has been a lot of discussion about the use of this tool. When a community does NOT have this tool available, you will get yourself into funny situations as well. At this moment we have a person who has been banned because everyone believes this person to have used a sock puppet. He has been banned for a month. There is no willingness to have this person unblocked prior to the end of this period. The person banned insists that he is not the same person as the sock puppet.
The insistence of the primarily English oriented community to give it to the arb comm or not all means that there is no solution for this situation. The consequence is that either this person is correctly banned or is not correctly banned. With the CheckUser permissions given to Stewards or Bureaucrats, there are some selected people who can discreetly check out these situations and say that yes/no two persons are likely the same person.
As stewards are people who are explictly trusted to do right. Explicitly as they are chosen for this role I do believe there is little reason to make this more difficult by insisting on all kinds of auditing and registration with its own inherent insecurity.
Conclusion: Without the potential to explore the likelyhood of two users being the same, a user may suffer unjustly when a community is convinced that two users are the same person. The person for whom this discussion was started has been penalised with a ban of a month on the conviction that two users are actually the same person. This person insists that this is a false accusation and as much as I dislike this person, I do believe we should be able to investigate the likelyhood that his claim is true.
Thanks, GerardM