Uwe Brauer wrote:
- How can I find out, whether the same user has
various accounts
and give the false impression that many users contribute. I
presume it must be via the IP (also in case of multi user
machines that might be misleading).
You cannot find this out with technical means. There is a tool
called CheckUser that tries to do this, see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CheckUser
But access to CheckUser is only available to highly trusted
people, and it never gives 100% accuracy anyway. Many people can
use the same IP address, and one person can use many IP addresses,
especially through anonymous proxies.
There are people with split personalities that are experts in
Greek archaeology when they are Mr Hyde, and experts in hip hop
music when they are Dr Jekyll. In order to maintain the illusion,
such Wikipedia sock puppets can sometimes vote against each other
in Wikipedia opinion polls.
There are also people who have nothing else to do, but are awake
18 hours a day, working 9 hours as Mr Hyde and 9 hours as Dr
Jekyll, only leaving 6 hours for sleep. Don't get surprised!
Note that this is not forbidden. As long as Mr Hyde and Dr Jekyll
both contribute to articles, this is fine. It only becomes a
problem when they enter into conflict with other people.
The only 100% working solution is to get in touch with the people
in real life. If they turn up at a meeting or a conference, they
can prove whether they are one person or two different ones. If
only Mr Hyde shows up, but never Dr Jekyll, you cannot know.
Telephone and e-mail are not good enough. Unless you meet them in
person, you always have to be in doubt.
You can get quite certain in cases where two characters are more
famous, covered by media, etc. For example, I have never met
Nelson Mandela or George Bush, but I'm quite sure they are not the
same person. If they were indeed the same person, and tried to
cover up this secret fact, the effort of this cover-up would be
far greater than the benefit. This is not a proof, but an
indication based on mathematics and probability. And that's also
what you can get from CheckUser. Sometimes that's good enough.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se