The #anti-harassment Tools team is going to be working on a tool to assist users in finding sockpuppets on Wikimedia projects. It is still quite early in the planning phase.
The planned feature ideas are something like below:
# User enters two usernames/IPs and the model returns a similarity score for the users with information about which features were a high match
# User enters a single username/IP and the model returns other users with a high similarity score and information about which features were a high match
# User enters a sequence of usernames/IPs and the model returns groups of which users seem to be similar and information about which features were a high match
This feature-set will likely be built into a new special page in mediawiki or be mae a part of the checkuser extension.
The work for building the machine learning model is being done in {T236299}. Once that work is complete, we will need an API for accessing this data via a MediaWiki interface. The API will need to be restricted to a specific user group (likely checkusers).
We would like to have the API available by November 2020.
Use machine learning to detect multiple accounts controlled by the same person used for sockpuppetry
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Core_Platform_Team/Initiative/Sockpuppet_Detection_API/Initiative_Vision
==== Linked tasks:
* {T236299}