Last modified: 2005-11-07 09:47:35 UTC
I can only assume that this feature doesn't exist already, since I've seen "Despite this IP being a proxy, there have been no valid edits in the past 3 weeks to warrant this IP not being blocked." and "This IP continues to post nothing but vandalism.", when I myself was contributing from that IP while being logged in. Since it wouldn't be secure to just have everyone be able to see who uses an IP address, this would have to be limited to administrators or sysops, but it's valuable information in determining how long an IP should be blocked. Of course, the need for such might be made obsolete if bug 3899 becomes fixed, but it's still useful.
This is what CheckUser does, and as it's considered a serious privacy breech to let just anyone check that it's currently very tightly restricted. Check around on the wiki for existing discussion on this tool.
As an example, some users on the English Wikipedia tried to implement a policy change recently which, had it all gone their way, would have effectively allowed Stewards to grant CheckUser access to individual members of the community in a "requests for CheckUser"-type process. This was shot down on several levels.
Ah. So it's just a power that an extremely few people (T.S., D.G., and some stewards) possess. That's understandable. So I guess a solution would have to be a policy of requesting a CheckUser on an IP before a particularly long block is put in place, to see if there are any registered users contributing positively through that proxy, so as to avoid assertions like "This IP posts nothing but vandalism."
