Just a note that you can still go through warnings for vandalism etc. and report to AIV.
Or at that edit speed, you may have a chance at AN at reporting for bot-like edits which will draw attention to the account. If you ever need help, things like #wikipedia-en-help on Freenode IRC exist so you can ask other users. RhinosF1 Miraheze Volunteer On Fri, 23 Aug 2019 at 06:57, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raym...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Shelati&offset=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 > -- RhinosF1 Miraheze Volunteer _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
