The clue is when a new user who looks like a returner making use of previously acquired operating knowledge starts making dubiously productive edits, and doesnt respond to a question about whether and under what ID he has previously edited. Nobody does that with honest intentions.
On 11/27/07, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Do you have any idea how many people will look like returners over the course of the years? As WP becomes an institution and people dip into it every now and then and then choose to settle down to an account once they already know their way around? This sort of paranoia is so detached from the reality of how most of us, especially the casual editors who keep this place growing, operate, that its laughable. You're designing the responses of a top 5 websites around your fears of a dozen people so inept they were kicked off Wikipedia. And most of us uninvolved in the debates earlier this year neither understand nor share this level of concern.
This is a valid point. The vast majority of banned users would self-destruct well before they ever got anywhere near adminship. We don't need to worry too much about this. Especially given the likelyhood of false positives. I myself started editing as an IP about a month before registering an account, and I know someone else who registered an account after already having edited as an IP for about 2 months. Someone who looked at her edits might very well decide it was some sort of returning user. The damage that this sort of attitude can do if not approached carefully is much higher than the benefit.
Now, there are a variety of other techniques that can be used to find banned users and taken together with those they are often effective. However, we shouldn't simply use evidence prior experience with Wikipedia as a good reason to assume someone is a banned returning user.
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