Geoff Burling wrote:
- It would be helpful to create a new position in Wikipedia, with
the powers to investigate charges of sockpuppety, & provide an answer within a short period of time -- say 12 or 24 hours. Currently, one has to attract the attention of a developer (who obviously is more interested in adding or fixing the Wikimedia code), who then must investigate before the relevant logs are purged.
What I'm envisioning is someone who does nothing more than receives an allegation that "X is a sockpuppet of Y", checks the logs, & reports whether the 2 accounts come from the same IP number, or a subnet belonging to the same ISP. (I don't know exactly how nuch info is captured in the logs, & whether it is possible for one to determine if a given IP address is a dial-up connection or a proxy address.) There has been some objections about making this kind of information even partly available because it would violate contributor's privacy.
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YES. We absolutely need this. I think this would be perfect for Bureaucrats. They could help out with other chores that require developer work, although I'm not sure on the feasibility of this (would changing usernames and helping reattribute edits be too complicated?).
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])