Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Baruch Omale/Archive

Suspected sockpuppets
The pattern looks a bit like this: create account 1, make a wave of edits, dump it, create account 2, make another wave of edits, abandon it, then create account 3, make third wave of edits, and so on.

Edit summaries of all the listed socks are exactly the same: "added few words and references". The original account had some more detailed edit summaries. Other common traits are the placing of references before punctuation, and the Visual Editor tag.

At Women's Initiatives for Gender Justice, Clement peter added an unsourced paragraph to the article, created a bunch of empty sections, filled in some of those empty sections with new unsourced paragraphs (1, 2), then added some references to those previously unsourced paragraphs to the article (1, 2, 3, 4). After that, Franciske came in using the exact same edit summaries to fill in the rest of those empty sections created by Clement peter again, with unreferenced paragraphs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Note that diffs 2 and 4 here are slightly different redos of 1 and 3 respectively.

At Physical abuse, Ifyeke significantly expanded the lead section with references added to it (whereas before, there were no refs in lead), this was followed by Ugwuowo samuel adding some unsourced paragraphs, then Ezema James adding references to one of the unsourced additions (1, 2), Ugwuowo samuel doing the same thing to a different paragraph (1, 2), and Clement peter adding another unreferenced paragraph to finish it off. All edits under the exact same edit summary.

I suspect Baruch Omale is the sockmaster, as the account was abandoned just a few days before the beginning of the new chain of accounts, and its latest edits also involved adding references and paragraphs to articles just like the socks, although one commonality it doesn't have is refs before punctuation. AP 499D25 (talk) 13:50, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Comments by other users

 * Accused parties may also comment/discuss in this section below. See Defending yourself against claims.

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments

 * - According to their edits on Meta, Baruch Omale organizes Wikipedia editathons in Nigeria . I'd like to hear from, , , and  about what is going on here. Thanks, Spicy (talk) 22:08, 25 March 2023 (UTC)
 * With no response for a week, I went ahead and ran some checks. All of the accounts listed under "Suspected sockpuppets" are  to each other.  It would be justifiable to call them ✅, but they're all a very common UA in an area which is known to have IP allocations which are difficult for CU to make any sense of.  I'd call   to that group.  There's also some indication this may be happening at an educational institution, so one possible explanation for the matching UAs is that they're in a school computer lab or library.  I'm not sure where to go with this.  I'm tempted to suggest that given that nobody's edited in a week and a half, maybe just drop them all warnings and let it go at that.  On the other hand, blocking them all as suspected socks would not be unreasonable.  I'll leave that call to a clerk. -- RoySmith (talk) 01:16, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * , I'd lean towards closing with no action. The editing pattern looks very much like an editathon to me, and the technical data seems to be consistent with that. Since none of the users have edited recently, there is no need for immediate action. Spicy (talk) 10:41, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Closing per Spicy, on the assumption that was just running an editathon.  I would suggest that for future events, you include something on your userpage announcing the event, to head off any investigations like this one. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:30, 4 April 2023 (UTC)