Your comments on Wikipedia Review regarding Phdarts and Nocturnalsleeper
I fear that your comments veer close to misrepresenting what I said (or not disclosing all that I said) and you are also inconsistent with your own on-wiki statements opposing sockpuppetry (on my talk page yesterday, for example). I did say to you in an email in May "You have continued to attack FT2 on Wikipedia Review over other unrelated matters (Headleydown, whatever that is)," (emphasis added), but I also sent you a long message in July which I will quote here.

“ For background on the HeadleyDown situation you can start with these two pages:
Wikipedia:Requests_for_checkuser/Case/HeadleyDown
Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Neuro-linguistic_programming
On the RFCU page it talks about members of the University of Hong Kong skeptics club. Since that information is publicly available, I can confirm that Phdarts edits from several IPs in Hong Kong including the University of Hong Kong. That doesn't prove he is, of course, but if he were elsewhere it would rule it out.

If you read the RFAR case you will see that originally, HeadleyDown and others were merely reminded to follow NPOV and required to discuss reverts. The log of enforcement action at the bottom of the page documents an escalating series of blocks imposed for various reasons, including checkuser-confirmed sockpuppetry by HeadleyDown. Note that at that time FT2 was an editor only, he had no extra access (promoted to admin Jan 2007).

If you want Phdarts unblocked as a case of mistaken identity, then Phdarts needs to post {{unblock}} or email an appeal to Arbcom. Of course, Arbcom does not handle appeals well due to their work load and there are a couple of proposals for having Arbcom delegate some review authority to other editors. This is going to be a case decided based on patterns of behavior, so you need to hope for an independent review by someone openminded.

If you want Phdarts unblocked because he is HD but he is good now, he will again need to file his own appeal. HD was banned 2 years ago; apologies go a long way, and WP has recently taken a firmer hand against pseudoscience issues.
”

If Phdarts' claim is that he is not HeadleyDown, he will have to contact Arbcom about an unblock appeal. He will need a convincing argument to account not only for the geographic similarities but the editorial similarities, that takes into account the policies on proxy editing for banned users. (In other words, if he wants to claim he is a different member of the Skeptics Club, and that former member Headley has left a request that members of the club pursue this issue, that may very well be considered unacceptable.)

Alternatively, Phdarts could admit to being Headley and argue that he should be unblocked because he has learned from his past mistakes and that his edits as Phdarts were acceptable and avoided the problems that were sanctioned in the Arbcom case. He may find some arbitrators willing to consider that line of appeal, but he needs to make the appeal directly himself.

Regarding User:Burrburr, be aware that Nocturnalsleeper is in fact another sockpuppet of Burrburr (I did not have access to my original findings when I made my first reply to you yesterday.) FT2 has not blocked the majority of other sockpuppets found in the most recent search, I will look into it tomorrow. But Burrburr now has at least 120 checkuser-confirmed sockpuppets found by me, not counting any that were blocked on behavior or that were found by other checkusers. You say in one breath, "Who cares, he is doing good work" and in another breath "I hate socks, as you know, but I also like good editors." Obviously you can not say with certainty that he is doing "good work" unless you check the contribs of all his accounts, and even then you can not be sure that we have not missed some accounts. I am also personally troubled by Burrburr's original defense, which was that he was a teacher at a boys' school and that many of the accounts were really his students. That explanation never held water to begin with, and is certainly not true now, as all the recent sockpuppets are on a purely residential ISP. Do you not find that explanation the least bit suspicious, considering the topic area?

I can't imagine you will find much support even on Wikipedia Review for the proposition that someone who has used 120+ sockpuppets should be allowed to continue, no matter how golden his content contributions. Have you talked with Burrburr/Nocturnalsleeper to find out why he is acting this way? You can not realistically expect he will be unblocked until he makes assurances that he will stick to one account, and calling for a "nuclear war" over the subject seems completely over the top. Thatcher 11:14, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Peter_Damian"

4. On Burrburr/Nocturnalsleeper I am annoyed that FT2 chose to block when this is an editorial matter. I would like to look into the sockpuppeting and see if the real evil (to my mind) had occurred, namely using multiple accounts at the same time in the same article. That is unforgiveable. But in your previous message to me you suggested this was not the case.

As I understood the ANI thread, there was substantial overlap between what articles many of the accounts were editing; I haven't checked this myself, but neither have you.

I think there's a certain "smoke = fire" effect going on here - if he weren't up to anything wrong, why is he using dozens of sockpuppets? Regardless of anything FT2 may have said about content, the actual blocks were on the basis of the sockpuppetry alone.

I am always suspicious of checkuser-"proved" sockpuppetry involving university-based IPs. Universities are overrun with identically-configured computers with relatively open access, often use IP translation schemes that mask IP coherency between end-user access device and public IP, are populated with one of Wikipedia's most active demographics, and often foster organized groups of like-minded individuals who routinely communicate with one another on a daily basis. Such is the nature of residential universities. The discovery of two or more user accounts accessing Wikipedia apparently from the same set of IP addresses using substantially identical browser configurations, when the IP range belongs to a university or other educational institution, is simply not probative of sockpuppety, even when the accounts involved edit on intersecting topics. Any checkuser who insists otherwise is, at best, incompetent.

You [Damian] write:
“ 2. In June you refer to pages that FT2 had set up, but that (I assumed) was a direct result of our emails, and certainly confirms my point (as with Alex B also) that when FT2 claims that nearly everyone in the community has bad things to say about Headley Down, it turns out that they were relying on FT2, or things FT2 had written in those pages. That was my whole point in this thread. ”

I can not recall my state of mind when I said "Whatever that means", but if you will look at Wikipedia:Requests_for_checkuser/Case/HeadleyDown you will see that I commented on one of the checkuser cases in my capacity as checkuser clerk, so I was certainly aware of the matter at the time, even if I had forgotten that I knew about it. See also Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Neuro-linguistic_programming#Documentation_of_bans. Both the RFCU case page and the RFAR block log are contemporaneous records reflecting ongoing admin action and sockpuppetry. Certainly the RFCU complaints were made by FT2, and it seems probable that FT2 was involved (in at least some instances) in bringing complaints to the attention of the various admins who ended up taking administrative action based on the RFAR. But we assume generally that administrators review requests for action, declining those that are not worthy of action and taking responsibility for actions that they take. And of course, negative findings and (mildly) coercive remedies were approved by 7 to 9 arbitrators. So it seems fair to say that HeadleyDown's behavior was recognized as disruptive by many editors. As long as HeadleyDown is banned, blocking his sockpuppets is not an editorial matter in the same way that FT2 would not be permitted to directly block you due to your recent conflicts.

On the matter of Burrburr, he needs to edit from a single account if he does not want to be banned, or perhaps for some reason he chooses to make throwaway accounts and does not care if they are blocked because he has a dynamic IP address and never invests very much in any one account anyway. And I remain concerned about his "explanation." He is free to contact me or another checkuser about designating one account that he will use. Assuming he limited himself to one account, I see nothing else in his edits that would require administrative action. Thatcher 14:01, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

And in reply to Kelly Martin, Burrburr's ISP was not a university. One was a residential provider that he claimed was a boarding school, and the other is Clearwire, a provider of wireless internet access that does business from kiosks in shopping malls. I see no reason to believe his explanation, and on top of the technical evidence you have the similarity of contributions. Who really believes that a bunch of middle school kids would all share scholarly interest in the sexual habits of historical figures and none of them would have any edits to pop culture topics? Thatcher 14:08, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Peter_Damian"

There is also evidence of sockpuppetry itself, to be honest (but not incivil, and I can't blame it, given it was happening on the other side as well).

Sockpuppetry to defeat sockpuppetry is certainly not a defence.

Re-reading, I guess Kelly was talking about HeadleyDown and the HK University Skeptics Club, and not Burrburr. I guess she has a point here. But, if you have an editor, and he gets a bunch of his friends to all edit for him and to revert for him and make the same changes he is making, isn't that also a bad thing? I'm sure you would object if you found out that NAMBLA was circulating an email asking people to register accounts and make certain edits, just as there have been several recent stinks over allegations that CAMERA is doing the same thing with respect to Israeli articles. It's more complicated than simple socking (which you acknowledge was going on too) and I don't think there is an obvious black and white answer that fits every editor and every situation. Phdarts needs to make his own case, I think, if he wants to argue that even though he is involved in the skeptics group and edits with the same point of view, he should be allowed to edit regardless of the past history. It would be a tough case to make but not unprecedented. Thatcher 14:59, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

So, if I formed a 'NPOV club', and we decided to edit Wikipedia with a neutral point of view, removing edits that weren't, I'm sure you wouldn't have a problem with that.

NPOV editing on Wikipedia! the very idea!.
You're supposed to just profess it, not actually do it.