Gerard Meijssen wrote:
There has been a lot of discussion about the use of
this tool. When a
community does NOT have this tool available, you will get yourself
into funny situations as well. At this moment we have a person who has
been banned because everyone believes this person to have used a sock
puppet. He has been banned for a month. There is no willingness to
have this person unblocked prior to the end of this period. The person
banned insists that he is not the same person as the sock puppet.
Simply using a sockpuppet to circumvent the time limit on a ban should
not give rise to the use of this tool. If the sockpuppet edits
responsibly he may not even be noticed. In practice they tend to repeat
their crimes, and it is this repetition that will give rise to just
cause. Simply suspecting that a person is reappearing before expiry of
the ban is not enough.
The insistence of the primarily English oriented
community to give it
to the arb comm or not all means that there is no solution for this
situation. The consequence is that either this person is correctly
banned or is not correctly banned. With the CheckUser permissions
given to Stewards or Bureaucrats, there are some selected people who
can discreetly check out these situations and say that yes/no two
persons are likely the same person.
A positive correlation will not always be definitive; a negative one
will almost certainly exonerate the suspect. In the latter case it
should be enough to report back to the claimant that the inquiry found
no match, and to do so without providing any further details.
Ec