[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

[Ronald Beelaard]

Returning from holidays and browsing through the various threads, I
got triggered by a few buzzwords in the threads on the board
elections: sock puppets and (language) origin of the votes. As I'm
currently working on technical means to automatically detect open
proxies, that raised with me the following question.

Does the auditing process on the vote validation takes care of sock
puppets? I guess the answer is yes, but what about the case where the
sock puppet is smart enough to use open proxy IP's. I presume the
standard check user tools are inappropriate for that.

The reason I post this (rather critical) question, is the
aforementioned work on open proxy detection. With just a list of IP's,
I could easily scan those IP's on being an open proxy or not. If
detected that is positively yes, if not detected the likelihood of
being OK is pretty high as the program also takes into account the
daylight periods in the respective time zones of the IP's.

An even more easily obtainable by-product of such an exercise could be
a frequency distribution of votes per country and that might be more
useful for understanding the origin of votes than just the language.

Rgds Ronald Beelaard