Quoting Raphael Wegmann wegmann@psi.co.at:
On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 05:41:21PM -0500, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Quoting Raphael Wegmann raphael@psi.co.at:
Guy Chapman aka JzG schrieb:
On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 18:52:43 +0100, Raphael Wegmann raphael@psi.co.at wrote:
No, the only people who need to fear that are the *already banned* abusers of the project whose socks we are blocking on an almost daily basis.
And what kind of magic is involved in finding those socks? In what way is it different from a witch hunt?
The average sockpuppet is traceable via IP using CheckUser and other methods, whereas witch hunts require ducking stools and the like.
None of those methods is verifiable by a normal editor. Therefore CheckUser and "other methods" are a kind of "witchcraft" for non-admins, where only the adepts make decisions.
Are you saying that you don't trust the people we have doing checkuser? Or that you don't trust Durova and others who are good at picking up subtle signals of socks? The first case, my response is going to be close to "well, too bad. The rest of the community trusts them. If you disagree you need a good reason"- the second case simply doesn't hold water because Durova, Guy and others are always willing to email trusted users their evidence.
What are those "other methods"? According to WP:SOCK "similarities in interests and editing style" might help to detect sockpuppets. If this is the case, how can we make sure, that we do not block different editors, who happen to share the same POV? Does it matter at all since we might call them as well meatpuppets? How do we prevent admins from blocking not a vandal but a certain POV?
For an example of what this sort of evidence can look like see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Agapetos_ang... This isn't an ideal example since it is linking an IP address to someone outside Wikipedia and I didn't know as much about this sort of thing way back in March of 2006 as I know now. And I'm certainly not as good as picking up subtle cues as Durova is. As is I hope apparent in this particular case, the editing patterns extended not just from POV but from a unique intersection of interests as well as some linguistic quirks.
Furthermore, even if admins were blocking a specific POV- so what? In order for a POV to look similar to a blocked editor it generally needs to be extreme and with no caring for NPOV. So even if such blocks were occasionally occurring we aren't losing much. Consider for example, some socks of Jason Gastrich we've blocked. At least one of those I think wasn't a Gastrich sock, but it was interested in pretty close to the same thing; spamming and promoting Louisiana Baptist University and whitewashing the article. We didn't lose much for blocking it. Note incidentally, that this isn't the sort of evidence we are talking about above- that sort is almost never wrong.
And I've love to discuss this in more detail but I'm not going to do it over an open list. There's no need to give these people any more help.