Ray Saintonge wrote:
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.
This may be the practise on the en:wikipedia. It is not necessarily the
same on all projects. The sockpuppets were not responsible and they were
noticed, it led to a lot of bad blood and it is one thing to say what
the practice is on one project this may mean little on an other.
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
We are looking for a negative colleration. The person has a bad
reputation. Before he adopted a user profile he was known for doing his
thing with any number of IP numbers. When he was blocked he was almost
instantly back on another IP-number. Given this past behaviour and his
subsequent behaviour as a user there are many that would not mind to see
the back of this person. However as he claims that he is not the same, I
would not mind to give him the opportunity to give some credence to his
claim by having a negative colleration. In this case it will give
credence it will not exonerate. It will be the difference of allowing
him prematurely to end the blocking period or the insistence by many
that he waits out his entire blocking period.
Thanks,
GerardM