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For information about CheckUser on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:CheckUser.

CheckUser is a function of MediaWiki that investigates the IP addresses of an account to enforce blocks.[1][2] Together with manual inspection, it assists in uncovering illegitimate behavior such as spam.[3] This protects the wiki from disruption by any particular group or individual.[4] It can also show all edits from an IP including those by registered users.[5][6]

Purpose

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CheckUsers target abusive users, which are blocked or banned to protect the wiki from harm. Although they are held to a higher professional standard, CheckUsers do not have greater control of articles.[7] However, the role has been categorized, alongside the "Oversight" role,[4] as the second-highest level in Wikipedia's power hierarchy, below founder.[8]

User interface

When attempts are made to continue spamming unblocked, an army of accounts is needed. CheckUsers detects if the accounts all have the same IP range. As open proxies are blocked, this forces threat actors to resort to botnets.[3]

Edits attributed to an IP address are not fully anonymous but can be traced back as they were in the United States congressional staff edits to Wikipedia scandal. Keeping access to registered accounts' IP addresses limited to CheckUsers helps protect the privacy of users.[9]

Audit log

Transparency is promoted by keeping logs of CheckUser usage.[10] Ombudsmen exist to supplement self-regulation with audits and maintain the privacy policy.[11]

Incidents

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A cabal of Croatian Wikipedia administrators conspired to coordinate the abuse they were normally elected to defend against. One co-conspirator CheckUser was installed to "eventually fabricate checkuser data to try and secure [Admin 2's] innocence." By controlling this position, the cabal had free rein to successfully violate Wikipedia policies while editing articles.[12]

CheckUsers helped uncover at least 381 editors writing promotional material and running the Orangemoody extortion scam. The cleanup of articles was deferred to other editors.[13]

British conservative politicians denied allegations that an account belonged to their chairman.[14] In the end, the disclosure of personal information was found to be unjustified and tenuous for the case.[15] The accuser's CheckUser permissions were removed to prevent biased exertion of "political or social control".[15]

A user named Essjay falsely claimed to have multiple university degrees. He attained a position of community trust and became a CheckUser. This was a Wikipedia problem because according to Kozminski University, IP addresses are considered sensitive information.[16] The general concern with this position is that it can be inappropriately used to unmask what should remain anonymous accounts.[17]

References

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  1. ^ de Laat, Paul B. (2014-06-01). "From open-source software to Wikipedia: 'Backgrounding' trust by collective monitoring and reputation tracking". Ethics and Information Technology. 16 (2): 157–169. doi:10.1007/s10676-014-9342-9. ISSN 1572-8439.
  2. ^ Walsh, Kathleen M.; Lam, Sarah (February 23, 2010). "Self-Regulation: How Wikipedia Leverages User-Generated Quality Control Under Section 230". SSRN.
  3. ^ a b West, Andrew G.; Chang, Jian; Venkatasubramanian, Krishna; Sokolsky, Oleg; Lee, Insup (2011-09-01). "Link spamming Wikipedia for profit". Proceedings of the 8th Annual Collaboration, Electronic messaging, Anti-Abuse and Spam Conference. CEAS '11. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 152–161. doi:10.1145/2030376.2030394. ISBN 978-1-4503-0788-8.
  4. ^ a b Arazy, Ofer; Nov, Oded; Ortega, Felipe (2014). "The [Wikipedia] world is not flat: 22nd European Conference on Information Systems, ECIS 2014". ECIS 2014 Proceedings - 22nd European Conference on Information Systems.
  5. ^ Ru Hong, Seah (2006). "KNOWLEDGE CONTRIBUTION IN WIKIPEDIA". Department of Information Systems School of Computing National University of Singapore – via CiteSeerX.
  6. ^ Solorio, T.; Hasan, Ragib; Mizan, M. (2013). "A Case Study of Sockpuppet Detection in Wikipedia" (PDF). The University of Alabama at Birmingham. Retrieved 26 August 2024. Check users are higher privileged editors, who have access to private information regarding editors and edits, such as the IP address from which an editor has logged in.
  7. ^ Monaci, Sara (2009). "Quality assessment process in Wikipedia's Vetrina: the role of the community's policies and rules". Observatorio (OBS*) Journal. 8. Università degli Studi di Torino: 148–161 – via CiteSeerX.
  8. ^ Arazy, Ofer; Ortega, Felipe; Nov, Oded; Yeo, Lisa; Balila, Adam (2015-02-28). "Functional Roles and Career Paths in Wikipedia". Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. CSCW '15. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 1092–1105. doi:10.1145/2675133.2675257. ISBN 978-1-4503-2922-4.
  9. ^ Reagle, Joseph M. (2012). Good faith collaboration: the culture of Wikipedia. History and Foundations of Information Science. Cambridge, Mass. London: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01447-2.
  10. ^ Ortega, Felipe; Gonzalez Barahona, Jesus M. (2007-10-21). "Quantitative analysis of thewikipedia community of users". Proceedings of the 2007 international symposium on Wikis. WikiSym '07. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 75–86. doi:10.1145/1296951.1296960. ISBN 978-1-59593-861-9.
  11. ^ Ovesen, Håvard (2014). The Political Economy of Wikiality: A South African Inquiry into Knowledge and Power on Wikipedia (Master of Arts in Media Studies thesis). University of Cape Town.
  12. ^ Kharazian, Zarine; Starbird, Kate; Hill, Benjamin Mako (2024-04-17). "Governance Capture in a Self-Governing Community: A Qualitative Comparison of the Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias". Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. 8 (CSCW1): 1–26. arXiv:2311.03616. doi:10.1145/3637338. ISSN 2573-0142.
  13. ^ Culpan, Daniel (2015-09-01). "Wikipedia bans 381 accounts for secretly promoting brands". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2024-08-20.
  14. ^ Ramesh, Randeep; Perraudin, Frances; Mason, Rowena (2015-04-22). "Nick Clegg mocks Grant Shapps over Wikipedia affair". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2024-08-20.
  15. ^ a b "Censure for Grant Shapps' Wikipedia accuser". BBC News. 2015-06-08. Retrieved 2024-08-20.
  16. ^ Jemielniak, Dariusz (5 August 2012). "Trust, Control, and Formalization in Open-Collaboration Communities: A Qualitative Study of Wikipedia". Kozminski University – via CiteSeerX.
  17. ^ Ross, Sara (2014). "Your Day in 'Wiki-Court': ADR, Fairness, and Justice in Wikipedia's Global Community". SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2495196. ISSN 1556-5068.
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