Ragib Hasan wrote:

Since many users are not familiar with editing, the workshop involves showing them how to create an account, [...]

However, it came to our notice that from a single IP address, no more than 6 new accounts could be created.

As a technical solution (and this is why I'm moving this discussion to wikitech-l) to aid this social process, I think it could be useful if one user could "sponsor" or "adopt" (i.e. become the "parent" of) a newcomer. Then the teacher in such a scenario could be the "sponsor" of 20 new accounts, and the limit of 6 new accounts per IP address would only need to apply to non-sponsored (or "orphan") new accounts. As the newcomer gets older and more mature, the sponsorship link could be dropped.

People trying to contact the newcomer, would be directed to the parent/sponsor. Or messages to the newcomer would be copied to the parent/sponsor.

The ability to sponsor new accounts should perhaps be limited to admins or some other trusted class of users. There could also be a limit in numbers, so that one teacher could sponsor 50 newcomers but not 500.

I think this feature could be useful both in WMF projects and when MediaWiki is used for other (educational) type situations.

Has this been tried?