Misplaced Pages

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Undisclosed alternate accounts

For purposes of this discussion, "undiclosed" can be taken to mean "not publicly declared" regardless of whether the account has been disclosed to arbcom or to a CU, or was discovered without voluntary disclosure. This discussion is aimed at "privacy alts," secondary accounts created for editing certain topic areas the user would prefer not to edit from their primary account.

Background

Since the early days of the English Misplaced Pages, there has been a tradition or custom of some users having either known or undisclosed alternate accounts. This has held over to some extent into the modern era of the project and is enshrined in policy at WP:VALIDALT. Publicly disclosed alternate accounts are fully free to edit in any way with few restrictions, however WP:PROJSOCK states that undisclosed accounts may not edit the Misplaced Pages namespace. English Misplaced Pages is something of an outlier in this regard, many other WMF projects regard undisclosed alternate accounts as illegitimate sock puppets. Therefore, behavior that is technically acceptable at EN.WP can have serious consequences if practiced on many other WMF wikis. Existing policy makes it clear that private disclosure to AbrCom or individual functionaries does not allow for policy violations, but this is often misunderstood by users and can lead to frustration both on the side of users and of CheckUsers.

Issues

• A blanket ban on undisclosed alternative accounts editing project space results in a situation where content created by an alt could be under discussion, for example via WP:AFD, or the users behavior may be under discussion at forums such as WP:ANI and by the letter of current policy, the user cannot participate in those discussions at all.
• Only the Arbitration Committee has access to the list of known undisclosed alternative accounts. This information is considered private and generally cannot be shared, even with checkusers. This means a user could have disclosed their alt account to the committee, only to be blocked for socking, and the connection between the accounts publicly revealed, in the course of a legitimate sockpuppet investigation.
• There is not actually a hard obligation to disclose alternative accounts at all, to anyone. It is therefore likely that the accounts known to the arbitration committee or individual checkusers are mostly those who would not abuse them anyway, and represent only a small portion of the total number of such accounts.
• There is no reasonable way to police all the edits of all known alternative accounts to insure they are within policy.

Proposed remedies

• Remedy A: Make disclosure to arbcom a hard requirement, and allow arbcom to disclose relationships between accounts to checkusers upon request. Any account that fails to disclose in advance of being detected will be treated as a regular sockpuppet. If blocked for socking, the onus is on the alt account to point out to CUs/arbcom that they are already listed. This may be done privately by email.
• Remedy B: Change language of policy to actively discourage privacy alts and to make it clear that if the connection is discovered it is not the responsibility of the community, the functionaries or the Arbitration Committee to conceal the connection. If the connection is obvious from the privacy alt's behavior, that is the fault of the account operator.
• Remedy C: Carve out narrow exemptions to the project space ban for deletion discussions related to content created or edited by the alt account, or discussions of the alt accounts' own behavior. Broader discussions on site policy, other users behavior, etc, are still strictly off limits.
• Remedy D: Undisclosed alternate accounts are prohibited entirely and will be treated as sockpuppets. This would not apply to legitimate clean start accounts where one account was abandoned before the new account began editing. (this option is mutually exclusive with the other proposed options)