User:Merlinme/sandbox

For those who are not aware, User:Jagged_85 was a user who was banned "for long-term and systematic misrepresentation of sources, despite a previous RFC/U on the same problem". Their initial area of interest was Islamic medieval history. They wrote thousands of edits of plausible sounding text which was apparently backed up by references. However, when other editors checked the references, the sources were frequently being misrepresented. The normal problem was that Jagged_85 was determined to say that medieval Islamic thinker X was the father/ founder/ first to do Z, ignoring any evidence to the contrary. A particular favoured area was that the Islamic world had invented something when there were earlier examples in the Greek or Roman world. The sources quoted were sometimes from slightly odd sources, or extremely difficult to obtain sources. Following a request for comment, Jagged_85 agreed to stop editing Islamic history articles. They started editing Computer games related articles instead. They were soon back to misrepresenting sources however. They tended to inflate sales figures for their favoured games, and go back to claiming game X was the first to do Z, when game X was an example of doing Z (not the first example). Frequently the apparently referenced edits displayed a misunderstanding of the technology described in the sources, using 'buzz words' inappropriately to make the subject sound more exciting and groundbreaking. It is also hard to overestimate the sheer scale of the edits. Jagged_85 made 87,237 edits between 2005 and 2012, roughly 11,000 edits a year. The vast majority of those edits were apparently referenced edits to articles, which obviously put a huge burden on anyone trying to check text and references added by Jagged_85. Following the apparent inability of Jagged_85 to restrain their misuse of sources, they were banned. I first became aware of Maestro2016 because user DMKR2005 emailed me. This user had become aware of the Jagged_85 saga, and had some suspicions about Maestro2016, largely because of edits Maestro2016 made at the MOSFET page. They asked me if I had any advice. I had a look at Maestro2016's edit history, and what I saw concerned me. To conclude then, I think Maestro2016 is a sockpuppet of banned user User:Jagged_85, and needs to be blocked before they do any more damage to the encyclopedia with abuse of sources.
 * 1) Maestro2016 appears to have emerged as a fully formed editor in 2016. They have a blank user page. They initially seemed to make fairly unobjectionable edits on pop music etc.
 * 2) I searched through Maestro2016's contributions for something which I could potentially identify based on Jagged_85's style. Jagged_85 had some interest in pop music, see, for example, but I am most familiar with Jagged's edits on Islamic history, and to a lesser extent on computer games history. I found this edit:  Jagged_85 had some interest in the history India, see:  I think it's important to emphasise that I did not exhaustively attempt to check all of Maestro2016's contributions. If this is the first example I found, it is highly likely that there are far worse examples in Maestro2016's edit history. I simply looked for the first significant referenced edit in something which could be considered broadly related to history, particularly Islamic history. The first significant edit I found on history in Maestro2016's edit history had the following problems with sources: Article says: "Workers in the textile industry, for example, earned more in Bengal and Mysore than they did in Britain, while agricultural labour in Britain had to work longer hours to earn the same amount as in Mysore." Reference says: "earnings were comparable" for Bengal and Britain, doesn't say anything about Mysore, doesn't say anything about hours. Article says: "per-capita agricultural output and standards of consumption in 17th-century Mughal India was higher than in 17th-century Europe and early 20th-century British India." Reference says per capita output was "certainly not lower and probably higher than contemporary European."
 * 3) I then looked for something which could be compared to Jagged_85's edits in computer games. The first thing I found was this:  The film Hero is added using a couple of references for the worldwide gross. How the worldwide gross is calculated is fascinating however. The edit references Box Office Mojo, which is considered a Reliable Source for box office data (see, for example, ). However the figures this edit adds are not the figures Box Office Mojo uses for worldwide gross. The figures this edit uses are based on a passing remark in an article on a different film on a dead website. The article is actually about The Eternal Zero being at the top of Japanese box office in 2014. In the second paragraph the article says: "The last time a domestic live-action film remained at the top of the box office for seven consecutive weeks was Hero ＨＥＲＯ (2007), which made a total of ¥8.15 billion (US$80.4 million) in 2007." Maestro2016's edit takes the dollar figure from this article, adds the Asia Pacific figure from Box Office Mojo, ignores the figure from Box Office Mojo for the worldwide gross, and comes up with a worldwide gross of $83.38 million, which conveniently is just good enough to get Hero into the top 10 in this article. Compare, for example,  for various Jagged_85 abuses of sources regarding computer game sales figures. Again, this is the first example I found, there are almost certainly worse examples.
 * 4) Having found enough that I was beginning to have some concerns that Maestro2016 might be Jagged_85, back under a new name and abusing sources once more, I then attempted to compare writing style, so I compared Talk page space edits. Maestro2016 seems to be generally less verbose than Jagged_85, but that is a relatively simple way of making comparisons harder. And I think there are some quite significant similarities. Compare, for example:  with
 * 5) Having started looking at Maestro2016's Talk page, I noticed that Maestro2016 had been warned about use/abuse of sources by: User:Worldbruce, User:Betty_Logan, User:Phmoreno, User:Cyphoidbomb, User:Raymond3023, User:Almostangelic123, User:619XXXX, User:Wiki KuthiVaiyans, User:Scabab, plus other Talk page entries for edits lacking a reliable source, using less reliable source, using unreliable source.
 * 6) I now looked in detail at edits Maestro2016 had made to the MOSFET page, which was the original reason DMKR2005 emailed me. I looked at the first set of edits Maestro2016 made to this page:  There are some dubious edits in that initial diff: as an offshoot to the patented FET design becomes building on the earlier FET design. There is a further edit to downplay the original patent in favour of the invention of Atalla and Kahng. However the really interesting edits begin here:  Note addition of text "A breakthrough came with the work of Egyptian engineer Mohamed M. Atalla in the late 1950s" which is sourced to this:  Reference actually says: "The first long-awaited breakthrough came from Atalla and Kahng at Bell labs." The reference goes on to describe the importance of the work of Deal, Grove, Sarace, Klein, Faggin but for some reason Maestro2016 only chooses to concentrate on the work of "Egyptian engineeer" Mohammad Atalla. Source actually calls him "John Atalla", doesn't mention Atalla's nationality (which is described in his Wiki article as "Egyptian-American"), and for some reason Kahng appears to have been sidelined.
 * 7) The number of edits Maestro2016 made to the MOSFET article is huge. For example, from 17th July to 31st July 2019 Mojo2016 made dozens of edits adding several thousand characters of referenced text to the article. This is, in my experience, unusual. Most editors do not have the time to make this number of edits. Most editors find it hard to add more than a handful of referenced edits per day; adding references can be fiddly, and finding good quality sources can be difficult. This was not a problem that ever troubled Jagged_85. Compare:  where Jagged_85 made dozens of 'referenced' edits to the Avicenna article in November 2007. E.g. 'the first descriptions on bacteria and viral organisms', which got instantly reverted with 'not supported by this reference'. As noted before, Jagged_85 made about 11,000 edits a year, 95% of them in article space. This is partly because having made a bad edit in one article, Jagged_85 would make the same bad edit in lots of related articles. In somewhat over  four years Maestro2016 has made 44,350 edits, the vast majority of them in article space. Compare Maestro2016's hundreds of edits on Mohamed_M._Atalla with Maestro2016's hundreds of edits in the same time period on MOSFET and Passivation. And they are bad edits. For example:  which claims 'surface passivation' is known as 'Atalla passivation'. Atalla certainly created a new technique for passivation that was crucial to the development of MOSFET, however that's a different thing to having a technique named after you. Compare Atalla's biography article here:  where it is described as 'a method', 'a crucial step', but it is not described as "Atalla passivation". The reference cited says: "The first time the Atalla passivation technique was used was in 1960 at Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. as an improvement in the fabrication process for bipolar transistors (the planarprocess)." Note it does not put "Atalla passivation" in quotes. It is describing what Atalla did; it is not describing something which is widely known as 'Atalla's technique' in the same way as, say, a Faraday cage is named after Faraday. I did a web search for 'Atalla passivation' and found nothing except Wikipedia articles which Maestro2016 had edited. This is absolutely classic Jagged_85, where badly sourced and exaggerated claims about a particular Islamic 'great man' pollute the encyclopedia.
 * 8) Without trying particularly hard, I found numerous dubious edits to the MOSFET page where the text was not really supported by the reference. The reference says: 'perhaps the most important invention'. The edit says: 'the most important invention'. The reference says: 'Arguably the most important device'. The edit says: 'most important device'. One of the sources appears to be a workshop abstract. The abstract mentions three things as being important, the edit only mentions one. One of the sources appears to be a plagiarised engineering course pdf. Various edits are used to imply Atalla should have got a Nobel prize, based on a couple of throwaway lines in articles about other things. However the clincher for me is this:  This edit introduced the following text (with expanded reference): "In 1965, the Victor 3900 desktop calculator was the first LSI MOS calculator, with 29 LSI MOS ICs.author=Nigel Tout |url=http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/sharp_qt-8d.html |title=Sharp QT-8D "micro Compet" |work=Vintage Calculators Web Museum |accessdate=September 29, 2010" This is very characteristic of Jagged_85 in full flow, where references are thrown in with, at best, tangential relevance to the text being cited. Why is the reference accessdate 2010? Why is the reference for the sharp_qt-8d rather than the Victor 3900? If you follow the sharp reference:, you find that the sharp_qt-8d.html was 'The first calculator to use MOS LSI (Metal Oxide Semiconductor, Large Scale Integration) integrated circuits'; it 'uses five MOS LSI integrated circuits' and was 'Introduced October 1969'. If you find the Victor 3900 reference:  it says: 'The first calculator using integrated circuits, 1965'; and 'Electronics uses 29 MOS integrated circuits.' Note it does not use LSI technology, which is not surprising, bearing in mind the 1969 Sharp was the first calculator to do so, four years later. However in Maestro2016's edit the 1965 calculator is four years ahead of its time. See, for example,  for another example of Jagged_85 making something in advance of its time.
 * 9) I then thought I would at least try to find something which was unambiguously in Jagged_85's area, so for example, Islamic history. Jagged_85 is believed to have used various IP addresses for editing Islamic history articles, so I did wonder if they would avoid using a named user, given how suspicious people would be if they started making Jagged_85 like edits. After going back less than a month however I found this:  in Mughal Empire. What is particularly interesting about this edit is that it was immediately reverted by User:Worldbruce for misrepresenting the source: Talk:Mughal_Empire/Archive_2.
 * 10) I would also like to highlight Maestro2016's suspicious behaviour since I started this investigation. I had no contact with DMKR2005 before they emailed me a couple of weeks ago. I had no contact with Maestro2016 before I started this investigation. I have never made an edit to the MOSFET page. Yet, for some reason, since I started my investigation on the Jagged_85 project page, Maestro2016 has deleted their own talk page archive: . After I commented on this:  Maestro2016 reinstated the archive:  Since I've listed various issues on the Jagged 85 page Maestro2016 has apparently been on a cleanup:   Maestro2016 is clearly aware of my criticisms; what I would like to know is how Maestro2016 was aware of my edits on the Jagged_85 project page.