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