Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Brandon9827/Archive

19 August 2015

 * Suspected sockpuppets




 * User compare report Auto-generated every hour.
 * Editor interaction utility

All eight accounts have edited the article Markel Corporation. Six of the eight have only edited that article. All eight accounts are similar in having no user talk page and no user page. All accounts date from August 2013. All edits, with one exception, are edits of articles about corporations. All edits of corporations are consistent with someone being paid to improve Wikipedia articles about those corporations, by updating them or (mostly) adding positive information from company sources (PR releases) or neutral sources, if any sources are given at all.

For example, this is a diff for 11 consecutive edits by Fiscal0911 - on 19 December 2014, over the course of 1 hour 20 minutes, adding lengthy (unsourced) information. Here is the only edit ever done by Fin7890 -, removing a top warning template (advertisement), with a lengthy edit summary explaining his/her action.

The oldest account, User:Brandon9827, has a total of 19 edits, of which 18 are for the Markel Corporation article or articles of companies that the Markel Corporation partners with. Brandon9827's first edit was to create a new article, which included wikilinks and footnotes; that's obviously not the norm for a new editor. The other account with edits outside of Markel Corporation is User:Semlady; the edits for that account are almost all additions of less than 600 characters to a Wikipedia articles about businesses, bulking out these articles with relatively unimportant information - for example, and.

I am requesting checkuser review of the underlying IP addresses of these accounts because I am concerned that there may be a PR firm or similar organization (or individual) that is being paid to monitor and update corporate articles. I'm also concerned because it's possible that the originator of these edits has decided to start using small, throw-away accounts (as exemplified by the six accounts that edited only the Markel Corporation article) rather than editing multiple corporations with a single account (Brandon98l7, Semlady). Without checkuser, it's simply not possible to link together such throw-away accounts. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:00, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

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


 * I'm almost positive that behavioural analysis isn't going to be helpful here. And even if it could show that these accounts were related (I'm doubtful), there is no point in blocking them, since they're inactive. What I was after was to find an IP address that would lead to active sockpuppets. So I respectfully recommend that this investigation be put on hold. I plan to monitor some articles to see if anything new pops up. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:04, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments
Checkuser can only see 90 days into the past. There's literally nothing to check, behaviour will have to call this one. Courcelles (talk) 08:34, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree with . Behavioral evidence is not enough here. Closing the case.  Vanjagenije  (talk)  19:31, 23 August 2015 (UTC)