David Gerard said:
I believe that's the longer form of what I meant when I said "you
greatly underestimate the propensity of our more antisocial editors for
gaming the system" ;-)
Indeed. Having said that, I think arbcom must take great care to afford
all involved in a case an opportunity to give evidence in their defense.
Towards the end of the recent Robert the Bruce case, it emerged that one
innocent third party named by Robert the Bruce as a sock puppet only heard
of this accusation by accident. He had not been involved in the
arbitration case at all except by being named, unknown to him, by one of
the parties. A sock puppet check was ordered on him without his
knowledge.
In cases of sock puppet accusations sometimes the accused may be able to,
and certainly should always be given the opportunity to, convince the
arbitrators that he is not a sock puppet. Many people use AOL which I
understand uses a round-robin web proxy system, so it would be quite easy
for two people with ostensible similarities in their patterns of Wiki
usage to be mistaken for sock puppets.