Category:Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of Young Zaphod

This category is for proven and suspected sock puppets of the user that has recently been mostly going by the name Young_Zaphod. The Template:SockpuppetProven tag will claim that the user has been indefinitely blocked, but even the proven ones haven't been indef. blocked as of March 10, 2006, so I'm using the Template:Sockpuppet which is intended for suspects instead. Ones that are blocked may be in Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Young Zaphod instead. The IP addresses seem to be those of a computer lab in Philadelphia, a local ISP, and a MUD hosting company (specifically, the machine that handles mugs.net and mudolc.org, where his web sites are hosted). He is commonly known as Locke on NiMUD MUD, m_m on Mudconnect.com, mad_merv/Mad Merv at other places. Because of the significance he assigns to trivial tasks, he seems to be a beginning programmer, and is likely a first year CS student. Google seems to bring up many biographies that he has submitted all over the place.

I (the person who created this category page) am User:Atari2600tim, and I have been changing related articles as things are found. Most of my information is based on readme files and USENET archives available from Google Groups. He has accused me of being other people, but it seems to be intended just to bother me (rather than to report me breaking rules or something), since he never provides any evidence. He does personal attacks against me and many other people, some people I have heard of from elsewhere, and some I don't know anything about.

Pattern
This user mostly edits Online creation and NiMUD, both articles were originally written by him. He and his dead friend are co-authors of some of NiMUD. The main noteworthy feature of NiMUD is its online creation system. I personally haven't used it, but it sounds fairly basic, and as far as I can tell from reading these articles and usenet postings and such, it sounds like it introduced nothing revolutionary, and has been done many times before. He edits both of the articles to claim various things in favor of himself or his software:

Major problems
He also edits other articles to link toward these two articles, and creates some vanity articles which are often speedied or overwhelmingly voted to delete. Most of the AfD's have him doing multiple votes with the socks.
 * Promotes incorrect earlier public release date for his software. Best available evidence suggests a July 29, 1994 release date, but it is claimed to be December 31, 1993, sometime in 1993, and sometime in 1992.
 * Promotes that his software was publicly available before any other related ones, even ones that were very obviously before his (such as ones that were released before Merc, which his is based on). He randomly sets his own release date AHEAD... I haven't noticed him changing dates on OTHER software to set them BACK, but it is something that should be watched for.
 * Claims that unrelated software were based on his software, stole his source code, or were inspired by his work.
 * SMAUG: he claims that this was reverse engineered from his work
 * Sauerbraten (game): claims that its in-game editor was inspired by NiMUD (Sauerbraten is a derivative of Cube, and Cube has an in-game editor, which it is in reality based on)
 * A few of his characters have added anti-circumcision stuff against consensus (and without any kind of scientific support) to circumcision and then started revert wars to keep it in.

Minor contradictions

 * At first, credited his dead friend for programming everything, with himself doing minor planning, then later reversed it.

Puppets proven via CheckUser
The following ones were proven to be the same in the results given on February 25. These were proven in the group of results given on February 12 for a request that ironically backfired.

Suspected users

 * claims to be just a friend, but has been editing with the same patterns
 * seems to be the same as JanKees, as JanKees had reverted to include his vandalism
 * has no prior edits aside from a couple within 5 minutes of his edits just to avoid having NiMUD be his first edit. King_queermo's edits so far were to basically reintroduce random stuff that he has added in the past.  I'm adding him to the list very early on in this persona's time, after 7 total edits; 2 NiMUD edits, all within 5 minutes of each other... but, I won't add the tag to his user/talk page until he gets extra blatant.  Homosexual thing matches his pattern as well.
 * was used quite a bit in Aug-Sep '06
 * (incomplete)
 * (incomplete)

Warnings

 * Eggster
 * Eggster's talk page has not been blanked, as of today, all warnings are still there.


 * Young_Zaphod
 * Online creation 3RR 16 Feb 2006
 * NiMUD 3RR 16 Feb 2006
 * NPA 18 Feb 2006
 * Blanked 22 March 2006
 * YZ also has various clarifications and minor warnings regarding socks, vandalism, removing notices, and nonsense mentioned throughout his talk page.


 * IPs have gotten multiple warnings, some even enough to be blocked on their own contributions alone. I'll update with a list later if I have time to.

Administrative action
He has been blocked from editing for 24 hours multiple times:
 * Blocked Young Zaphod and 68.162.128.9 on 9 March 2006 block log as a result of 3rr using socks (admin 3rr notice board )
 * Blocked Eggster on 11 February 2006 block log as a result of 3rr using socks (admin notice board )
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&user=&page=User:Doctor_Octagon block log] got blocked some

Vandalism blocks:
 * Blocked 67.165.85.111 on 16 March 2006 for 48 hours for vandalism (after multiple warnings for that IP alone).  block log

Incivility:
 * 68.162.128.9 on 11 March 2006 for 1 week

Misc.
He has re-created Paranoia_MUD after it was deleted after a vote was held Feb 16-Mar 4 (votes were 12:1 see Articles for deletion/Paranoia MUD), which resulted in the newer one being speedied (delete log).

Created Markus_Greene article which was speedied. Entire content of article was "Markus Greene was a fictional character in a science fiction tale of survival written by Herbert Elwood Gilliland III in 1994."

He's also re-created Vabungula three times now. Vabungula is a made up language that happens to include the name of his software, 'Nimud' as a word. See Articles for deletion/Verbungula, delete log for Vabungula, delete log for Verbungula.

Recreated NiMUD article after an AfD vote which supported its deletion.

Miscellaneous vanity articles about himself (Mad merv/Mad Merv ) and his friends .

As GuruCMU, he put 2 votes in the same edit to keep the Mudder article rather than having it redirect to MUD. These were in addition to the votes he made as Implementor, Implementer (I know, genius to use both spellings of a user name in the same vote, but he did it), moniker, and locke (he doesn't post as Locke on here, but signed with that name anyway).

As Eggster, he put words into another users' mouth in order to keep some unhelpful images.

Contributions on other articles
It might be good to show a summary of edits here for articles which he is not personally mentioned in, and do not involve NiMUD.

Positive
67.165.85.111 made one edit on article WPGA, on a day where none of the MUD-related articles had edits from this IP (likely just another person in the computer lab)

Negative
circumcision