--- Jonathan Hochman jeh@jehochman.com wrote:

Hi, I'm an English Wikipedia administrator. I'd like to make a change to our user interface, but first I need to know whether it has support.

A problem I frequently encounter is that disruptive users create multiple accounts to avoid scrutiny. These users often are not banned after being caught. It isn't very nice to make an active user keep a sock puppeteer template on their user page. Nonetheless, we need to know when a user has had sock puppets, because this affects how we deal with future disruption. When assessing a user conduct issue, we need to know the block history of the user, and also the block history of any sock puppets. Currently, I must rummage around to find all the necessary information. This process could be made more efficient with one simple change.

The idea would be to add two links below the boilerplace text at the top of special:log&type=block&user=USERNAME. The links would point to the two sockpuppet categories associated with USERNAME. When looking at an editor's "rap sheet" it will be very helpful to see whether those links are red or blue, and if blue, to drill down and see the evidence.

For [[User:ECW500]] the links would be:

<small>[[:Category:Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of ECW500]] | [[:Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of ECW500]]</small>

For me:

<small>[[:Category:Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of Jehochman]] | [[:Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Jehochman]]</small>

As you see, this won't take up much screen real estate. The change would improve website usability and help the community by making all the relevant information available via links from a single page. What do you think?

While it's certainly nice to get community consensus for such changes, they are a per-project matter; the correct place to get such consensus is on the appropriate wiki rather than on the Wikimedia-wide development mailing list.

I personally don't see anything wrong with it.

-Gurch