[WikiEN-l] The real Occam's razor and AGF: stop it before it begins

[zetawoof]

On 7/4/07, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> > zetawoof wrote:
> >> It's for the exact same reason, just in reverse: If an apparently
> >> good-faith contributor is using an anonymizing service like TOR, it's
> >> impossible to detect that they're also trolling (or whatever) from
> >> their actual IP.
> >
> > But we don't use checkuser to detect that apparently good-faith
> > contributors are trolling or sockpuppeting or whatever.  We use
> > it in an attempt to confirm that apparently bad-faith editors are.
>
> Hear, hear.  "I hold in my hand the names of 205 administrators who are
> also trolling as IP addresses!"
>
> If I'm a troll/puppetmaster with different accounts from this IP, you
> have no way of knowing ... because you have no reason to check.
> Zetawoof seems to be proposing that we check all users to ensure they
> aren't running multiple accounts[0].  Zetawoof's Wikipedia is not a
> Wikipedia to which I would wish to contribute.

I'm not proposing any such thing. There is, in fact, already an "implicit
checkuser" in place for such situations, in the form of the autoblock:
blocking an account will also place a temporary block on the IP address
they last edited from, which serves as adequate protection from good hand /
bad hand sockpuppetry. What I was pointing out was that allowing TOR makes
this existing mechanism entirely ineffective.