Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/174.107.173.231/Archive

Suspected sockpuppets



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All of these IP addresses are in the central South Carolina area and the vast majority of them are either in Lexington or West Columbia in the Columbia metro area. The edits made under these IPs are in a lot of the same articles, such as the ones for Walt Disney World Railroad, Nilgiri Mountain Railway X class, DB Class 10, and N&W J class (1941); and a large number of the more recent edits (particularly in the Walt Disney World Railroad article), have been reverted due to being poorly sourced or poorly written. 174.107.173.231, which appears to be the master account, was recently blocked for three months, from February 2016 to May 2016. Starting shortly before the end of that block, three of the IPs listed above (98.25.196.54, 24.211.114.135, and 98.25.196.29), made edits in mutually exclusive date ranges in the same articles (30 April 2016 to 7 July 2016, 9 July 2016 to 26 July 2016, and 27 July 2016 to 7 August 2016, respectively). The current sockpuppet IP in use is 24.88.92.254, which began editing activity on 15 August 2016. The person making these bad edits appears to be trying to avoid detection by frequently changing his IP address. Given that this person has been doing these poorly written and poorly sourced edits for at least two years now, despite being threatened with being blocked on several of his IP's talk pages, it would be close to impossible for him not to know that what he is doing is wrong, and it's clear that he has no intention of stopping. I believe the best solution for this would be to block edits from all unregistered users in Lexington, South Carolina and West Columbia, South Carolina. Jackdude101 (talk) 06:27, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

Update: make note of the newly-discovered potential sockpuppet 207.144.99.8 added above. Per the rDNS link at the bottom of its contributions page, in addition to being located in Lexington, South Carolina just like the master account, they are both located at the exact same spot on the property of White Knoll High School, which just so happens to serve two communities: Lexington and West Columbia. Furthermore, the editing activity in September 2016 for that account is strikingly similar to the activity for the other accounts (one of the common patterns that all of these IPs follow is editing articles about non-fictional locomotives featured as new Thomas & Friends characters in the 2016 film Thomas & Friends: The Great Race). What's especially worthy of note about this IP is that it was blocked in September 2016 for one year. If this is the same person, that would make the use of the current IP in use, 24.88.92.254, a block evasion. Jackdude101 (talk) 13:55, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Comments by other users
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Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments
I am only commenting with respect to the one blocked IP (207.144.99.8) and the one active IP (24.88.92.254), as all of the others are too for any action to be warranted. 207.144 is schoolblocked, and based on narrow topic overlap and geolocation it would be tempting to say this is one user editing at school and somewhere else (home, for example). But between the two addresses there aren't a lot of intersects, and there aren't any dead-giveaway behavioural tells (at least none were provided and I didn't see any). Responding to the request: we have no mechanism to block anonymous edits from an entire city and would not do so if we could, per WP:ANYONECANEDIT - we would be preventing potentially legitimate edits from far too many users. And chasing an IP-hopping user in this way is rarely effective. I recommend that you visit WP:RFPP to request semiprotection if the user's edits are disruptive. 24.88.92.254 has not been sufficiently warned for a block to be warranted on the basis of their edits, so I see no more to do here and this case is closed. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 18:43, 26 October 2016 (UTC)