Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Belmop/Archive

Suspected sockpuppets



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On July 9, Conflict of interest/Noticeboard was posted, indicating that the company "Wikiprofessionals" was claiming to have created thousands of undisclosed paid Wikipedia articles. The website of the company lists several dozen articles as examples, many of which have indications of having been created or edited by SPAs introducing promotional content. The above list constitutes the bulk of identified SPAs adding promotional content to the listed articles. BD2412 T 23:44, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * These are additional names uncovered in the above-noted investigation. BD2412  T 23:44, 10 July 2020 (UTC) ( moved from second simultaneous case)

Comments by other users
''Accused parties may also comment/discuss in this section below. See Defending yourself against claims.''

Just a note, Belmop is listed as the puppeteer here, but he's also in the list of puppets. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 00:25, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Also note that we only have these accounts due to pages advertised by the company as being edited by them. There's possibly more accounts/articles we don't know of, so if these accounts are indeed connected CU might bring up the rest? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 00:41, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Stale but probably related. Multiple listed accounts overlap between HungryHouse and Delivery Hero, both owned by same corp, and both had constant SPA editing. Pure PR writing initially, too. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 01:26, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Hello, apparently I'm on this list, although I'm not sure why. I've most certainly never been paid to make contributions to Wikipedia nor have I had any involvement with any parties who deal in such transactions. I made several contributions a few years ago as I was studying Journalism at the time and thought it would be useful writing practise. Living in Taiwan, I had been reporting on the electric vehicle industry and so had conducted intimate interviews with a number of new companies. I decided to further practise my writing by creating a Wikipedia page for one such company, which was done without the knowledge of said company. Shortly after I became too busy with studies and work to make further contributions. However, if time permits I'd like the opportunity to make further contributions from this side of the world. Once again, I'd like to stress that I have never had any involvement with any company that pays for Wikipedia contributions, nor have I ever received any payment for the few contributions I made. Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sam.w.90 (talk • contribs) 15:39, 11 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I would like to know how you were able to make this complexly formatted draft including an infobox and 20 citations as your third edit to Wikipedia. BD2412  T 02:37, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
 * It's not that much of a complicated task if I'm honest, especially as I had a previous career in IT and am familiar with web design. In regards to the infobox, if I remember correctly I simply copied it over from an existing similar page and then changed the information. As for the citations, it's fairly common knowledge that whenever you present information as being factual you must provide citations for your sources. Actually, if you check you'll find that a number of the citations link to published articles written by myself. These articles were published on an established and reputable media platform and contain strictly factual information that I had obtained through my interviews with the company whose page is in question. I would also think that the fact my user name is titled after my real name should probably tell you all you need to know.
 * I wasn't asking how you knew to include citations, but how you knew to format them all correctly in one go. I am also curious as to why some of your apostrophes are straight ("Musk's Tesla", "Mobility's Electric") and some are curly ("company’s technologies"; "world’s first"), since the Wikitext editor defaults to straight apostrophes. BD2412  T 03:31, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Understood. Again, it wasn't particularly difficult to work out as it's not a very complex system (relative of course). It's very easy to see how it's done by studying existing pages. As for the straight v curly apostrophe question, I'm not sure, but I do remember writing the article as a Word document and then copying and pasting parts straight into the editor. I'm sure I'll still have the Word document somewhere and would be more than happy to share it with you via another platform. Regardless, this seems to be besides the point as it's fairly clear that my account is not in any way a "sockpuppet". If I'm totally honest, I don't particularly mind if my account becomes deactivated or other such; as you can see I haven't had the time to contribute as much as I'd have liked, although I would appreciate the opportunity to potentially contribute more in the future. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sam.w.90 (talk • contribs) 11:52, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments

 * Merged two cases together here. GeneralNotability (talk) 00:35, 11 July 2020 (UTC)
 * - CU endorsed due to suspicion of widespread paid editing - most accounts are one-off and long-stale, but the suspected master and a couple of socks are still fresh. Ping as you CU-blocked one of the suspected socks (and, so they might be relevant here). I also note that another suspected sock is marked as a sock of Sockpuppet_investigations/ChildofMidnight, so that SPI may be also be relevant. GeneralNotability (talk) 00:39, 11 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Sorry y'all but what? These go back to 2009. I looked at a dozen of them or more, and I saw one or two edits that reaching into 2019. If y'all want CU to do something, don't give us a laundry list of stale stuff. Oh, Candleacabradabra was a jerk, but not a paid editor. Belmop did indeed make two edits in May, and that's all I can ascertain. Drmies (talk) 02:11, 11 July 2020 (UTC)
 * This is a fishing expedition and I haven't got my license yet. explicitly for the long list of accounts that have not edited this year, but if you can provide some sort of evidence of sockpuppetry for the three that are not stale, I'll take another look. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 17:57, 11 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Closing this, as it's obviously not going anywhere. Individual users can be brought back for another look, but please provide specific evidence of socking.  Alternatively, users can be blocked for WP:UPE, WP:NOTHERE, or other reasons supported by WP:BP.  As satisfying as it may be to see them blocked, nobody's going to waste time investigating an account which hasn't edited since 2009, per WP:BLOCKPREVENTATIVE. -- RoySmith (talk) 21:51, 20 August 2020 (UTC)