Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/1027E/Archive

Report date May 15 2009, 20:18 (UTC)

 * Suspected sockpuppets


 * Evidence submitted by Mbinebri

A suspicious succession of SPA-related activity. User “Efsawyer” began using the Christie Brinkley article to promote himself as the photographer who discovered her. After much hostility from him on the talk page and a COI warning from me, the account goes dormant and the article Errol Sawyer is soon created by user “Drolmalinda,” who continues the hostility on my talk page before disappearing a la Efsawyer after a sockpuppet accusation. The article is subsequently speedied. A month later, the article is recreated by “Decker4,” who includes numerous scans of unpublished pieces of Sawyer’s work that only Sawyer himself (or a close affiliate) would have access to. Decker4 then disappears and the article is taken over by the account “1027”, followed by “1027E,” who I view as the puppet master due to the largest number of edits, and who made use of the all-too-convenient "Hey, I didn't create the article" argument against COI concerns. 1027E quickly began Efsawyer’s hostile approach to dealing with disagreeing editors and, after the Sawyer article is deleted via AfD, has the article userfied and then brought back without addressing notability issues. Tellingly, in an effort to prove the notability of the Sawyer article through emails from curators, 1027E provides on the talk page an email response that begins “Dear Errol.” This doesn’t work, so 1027E goes canvassing for notability support, but elicits none (due in part to a tendency toward racism accusations  that other suspected puppet accounts have also made). Following this failure, 1027E disappears and “Mdeloos” pops up and starts “supporting” 1027E on Sawyer’s notability using the same unsubstantiated arguments (such as Sawyer being "ground-breaking" as an African American artist in the 70s in Paris), the same attacks and misspelling of my username (“Mbineri”), similar edit summary wording (such as “notability tag out” as opposed to “removed notability tag”), and the same one-of-a-kind habit of signing edit summaries with tildes (before this, 1027/1027E was leaving everything unsigned, just as the previous accounts mentioned did). Mdeloos already has two warnings for disruptive behavior.  Mbinebri  talk &larr; 20:18, 15 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Comments by accused parties    See Defending yourself against claims.


 * Comments by other users


 * Request for CheckUser
 * Requested by Tiptoety  talk
 * - Evidence suggests sockpuppetry, also it would be nice to see if another master account is behind this. Tiptoety  talk 21:46, 15 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Clerk, patrolling admin and checkuser comments
 * 1027, Efsawyer, Drolmalinda, Decker4
 * that Mdeloos is 1027E -- Versa  geek  22:48, 15 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Conclusions
 * Seeing as none of the accounts with the exception of the master are active, nor is there much technical evidence to support a block, I am proposing this be closed with no action take at this time without prejudice to re-open it should other evidence of socking come to light or when those accounts become active again and show signs of being sockpuppets. Tiptoety  talk 06:02, 16 May 2009 (UTC)