Quoting Raphael Wegmann <wegmann(a)psi.co.at>at>:
On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 05:41:21PM -0500,
joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu wrote:
Quoting Raphael Wegmann
<raphael(a)psi.co.at>at>:
Guy Chapman aka JzG schrieb:
On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 18:52:43 +0100, Raphael
Wegmann
<raphael(a)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_an…
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.