User talk:A Magical Me

Sockpuppets
First, let me say welcome to Wikipedia. We always appreciate new people who join the project. You specifically asked how you could prove that your account is not a sockpuppet. The fact that you politely responded and that you took the time to ask the question starts to establish your credibility.

Unfortunately, the simple fact is that it is not possible to prove or disprove sockpuppetry in any but the most extreme cases. One of our core principles is that anyone can edit. Anyone can create an account. When you couple that imperitive for flexibility with the technical workings of internet IP addresses, that inherently means that anyone can create multiple accounts. (The technical workings that are relevant are dynamic addressing - multiple people sharing one IP address used by their ISP - and the ease with which a hacker can route the connection through someone else's computer so that it appears to Wikipedia that you're connecting from anywhere in the world.) We've come to accept those limitations.

We address it by basically saying that we will ignore each other's claims about our outside lives. We will ignore the claims that anyone is or is not a sockpuppet. These claims are unverifiable. Instead, we base our judgment on the online identity created and used here at Wikipedia. We begin to trust that someone is not a sockpuppet when they've built up an edit history as a serious and reliable contributor. Anyone can review your contributions by clicking on the User contributions link and make their own judgment. Users with suspiciously short histories or with histories full of vandalism are given little weight. Users with established reputations are given greater weight.

We make this evaluation because we've had such serious problems with vandals attempting to use these tricks to bias the community decision-making process. We have learned to be suspicious when users with short contribution histories suddenly show up at and start participating in detailed discussions of policy. It's possible that the user has been contributing for a long time as an anonymous user and finally got an account. Unfortunately, it's equally possible that the user is a sockpuppet.

You seem to be on your way to building a reputation for yourself. I would encourage you to continue making good edits and don't worry about my (or anyone else's opinion) for now. Come back to the debate in a month or three when you've got a substantial contribution history and no one will be able to mistake you for a sockpuppet.

Hope that helps. Rossami (talk) 15:16, 18 January 2006 (UTC)


 * It does help. And I must say that I truly appreciate that you took the time to create such a lengthy and polite response.


 * --a_magical_me 20:20, 19 January 2006 (UTC)