Does anyone know how far back, if someone lodges a complaint, can an admin check the login and IP history of a suspected sockpuppet and sockpuppeteer? 12 months? 6 months? 1 month? ??Thanks..

At least two months, possibly three. Account creation details are kept forever.

Thanks.

By the way, welcome to Wikipedia Review!

I guess that means you can stop worrying about your socks being discovered

Haha no, I believe that an admin has been using socks on the side but I need to be 100% sure myself.

It's not just edits that are logged but anything that goes into the log files, such as image uploads and page moves. I would guess that admin actions such as blocks and page deletions are too, but I don't know.

A word of advice. Be at least 110% sure.

...as if being right makes a difference?

The other point is that if someone performs a checkuser, he (usually he except for Alison, isn't it?) can keep the results indefinitely to compare with his or others' later checks. I believe that on WQ they've agreed to delete all such stuff after a year, but I don't suppose there's such a policy on WP.

Umm ... there's Becca and FloNight, too And yes, it goes without saying that checkusers can and do keep data from checks privately. WP doesn't have a policy on such matters & maybe it should. Of course, it would have to be on a trusted basis (and how many enwiki checkusers do you trust? )

Checkusers can do this. The checkuser function uses the raw server logs, which are kept for about a month. However, if this person showed up in an older checkuser run, and the person performing the check user saves the results then you might be able to go further back.



Nothing wrong with using socks - I'm sure most admins do. Using socks abusively is another matter.

No, at least two months at the moment. Wikimedia Foundation can't produce en.wp backups reliably, but they keep the logs!!

Definitely three months on two of the smaller wikis, according to a very well-placed source. Maybe it's less on English Wikipedia due to the huge volume of data.