Currently, to open a sockpuppet investigation, you must name the two (or more) accounts that you believe to be sockpuppets with "clear, behavioural evidence of sock puppetry" which is typically in the form of pairs of edits that demonstrate similar edit behaviours that are unlikely to naturally occur. Now if you spend enough time on-wiki, you develop an intuition about behaviours you see on your watchlist and in article edit histories. Often I am highly suspicious that an account is a sockpuppet, but I cannot report them because I don't know which other account is involved.
As a example, I recently encounted User:Shelati an account about 1 day old at that time with nearly 100 edits in that day all about 1-2 minutes apart, mostly making a similar change to a large number of Australian place infoboxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Shelati <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Shelati&of fset=20190728053057&limit=100&target=Shelati> &offset=20190728053057&limit=100&target=Shelati Genuine new users do not edit that quickly, do not use templates and do not mess structurally with infoboxes (at most they try to change the values). It "smelled" like a sockpuppet. However, as I did not recognise that pattern of edit behaviour as being that of any other user I was familiar with, it wasn't something I could report for sockpuppet investigation. Anyhow after about 2 weeks, the user was blocked as a sockpuppet. Someone must have noticed and figured out the other account: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Meganesia/ Archive Two weeks and 1,279 edits later . that's over 1000 possibly problematic edits after I first suspected them. But that's nothing compared with another ongoing situation in which a very large number of different IPs are engaged in a pattern of problem edits on mostly Australian articles (a few different types of edits but an obvious "quack like a duck" situation). The IP number changes frequently (and one assumes deliberately). The edits potentially go back to 2013 but appear to have intensified in 2018/2019. Here's one user's summary of all the IP addresses involved, and the extent to which they have been cleaned up, given many thousands of edits are involved, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:IamNotU/History_cleanup As well as the damage done to the content (which harms the readers), these IP sockpuppets are consuming enormous amounts of effort to track them down and revert them, which could be more productively used to improve the content. We need better tools to foil these pests. So I want to put that challenge out to this list. Kerry _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
