Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5797509-20140902002109/@comment--20140902220621

Hello,

To give an official Wikia reply, Wikia does not give out CheckUser privileges to any local communities except in extreme circumstances. What qualifies as "extreme" is admittedly subjective. As Sactage stated, it often depends on the relationship we have with the community as a whole and the admin team itself. Trust is something that is slowly accrued and while Wikia has had a good relationship with the Plants vs. Zombies Wiki, we have not been proactively involved with the community enough to either get a good feel for what a CheckUser group would do to the social aspects of the wikia or know the admins themselves to ensure they can use the tool responsibly. While Wikia always tries to act in good faith working with users/admins we don't quite know and trust yet, please keep in mind that we have a ethical and legal responsibility to protect the online privacy of our users. Please see our Privacy Policy for more. We are always going to defer to limit IP data access when we have any doubt about the wisdom of giving out a tool.

Brainulator9, I understand that you may still have some frustration regarding how I used the tool a few years ago. Contextually, as I explained to you then, there was a bug in some of our data that led to a false conclusion, which I corrected and apologized for. Staff are in no way perfect and CheckUser is not a fail-proof tool (another reason we are hestitant to give it out). I'm sorry you had a bad experience a few years ago, but it is not a fair reflection of our system.

Wikia's Community Support team replies to CheckUser reports/requests within 2 business days, often much sooner. If a suspected sockpuppet is causing that much damage to your community's wellbeing, they should be blocked regardless of whether they are a sock or not. Simply because a user is a sockpuppet does not mean your community is in deep trouble. Simply file a request with a reasonable explanation of why you suspect a user is a sockpuppet, and we will quickly get back to you to either confirm or deny this assumption.