Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Bigbird77/Archive

Report date February 1 2009, 20:45 (UTC)

 * Suspected sockpuppets


 * Evidence submitted by zazpot (talk)

I've not filed a sockpuppet investigation request before, so I hope I'm doing this correctly.

I noticed that user Bigbird77 vandalised several articles. One article Bigbird77 edited was the Richard Feynman article. This edit suggested that Feynman was at one point influenced by the mathematician "H. J. Pringle".

As a historian of science with a longstanding interest in Feynman, suggestion was novel to me, so I googled "H. J. Pringle math". It turns out that two of the top Google hits for this are Wikipedia articles on Roger Penrose and [[Jacques Tits]. The mentions of "H. J. Pringle" in those articles is similar to the mention in the Feynman article: they are uncited and unwikilinked. They were both introduced by user Operaghost77.

If the mathematician "H. J. Pringle" really had these notable connections, he might deserve a Wikipedia article himself. As it stands, I think Operaghost77 and Bigbird77 are likely the same user, playing the game of creating a fictional mathematician.

Further evidence of sockpuppetry includes the similar names of the two users (both having only one initial capital letter, both incorporating the name of a fictional character, both ending in "77") and some similarities in the style of vandalism: compare, for instance, this edit and this edit to the Jacobs article.


 * Comments by accused parties    See Defending yourself against claims.

There is a big gap between the last edit of Operaghost77 and Bigbird77: -- SockTime. Although it is likely that they are related, the Operaghost77 account appears to have been abandoned, and with the last contributions being over 30 days old, I don't think a checkuser is possible (logs are destroyed after 30 days), so I guess we'll never know. Foxy Loxy Pounce! 11:02, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Comments by other users
 * Bigbird77 - 14:52, January 29, 2009 (diff) (hist) Puffs
 * Operaghost77 - 01:38, August 21, 2008 (diff) (hist) Neil_Gaiman (Removed the Stardust Shakespeare reference, as it was not attributed to Gaiman.)


 * Clerk, patrolling admin and checkuser comments

with such a gap between the accounts, it is difficult to regard this as abusive socking. Mayalld (talk) 15:03, 18 February 2009 (UTC) Mayalld (talk) 15:03, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Conclusions