Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Cbubinas/Archive

03 March 2015

 * Suspected sockpuppets




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

This looks like a huge sock farm, or meat puppet army, raised to promote Rogue Wave Software and its products on Wikipedia. All of the above registered accounts do nothing but create and edit articles related to Rogue Wave Software, or insert references to Rogue Wave Software and its products in other articles. The material is often copied and pasted directly from Rogue Wave Software's website, and seemingly never reliably sourced. Our policies prevent me from identifying which of these account names are trivially connectable via web searches to Rogue Wave Software's current or former marketing staff.

The two IP accounts were also engaged in this behaviour (though one of them has some non-Rogue Wave edits), and WHOIS shows the IPs to be owned by companies acquired by Rogue Wave Software.

The promotion has been ongoing for about ten years. Most of the accounts were used a few times and then abandoned, though several of them seem to have been operating simultaneously, and at least one of them (Cbubinas) was editing as recently as yesterday. Checkuser is requested to flush any currently active sleepers and for the purposes of an IP rangeblock. Psychonaut (talk) 13:45, 3 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Chris, thanks for posting your explanation here. You should know that it's not just me but several other editors who consider the contributions by you or your colleagues to be obvious advertisements (e.g.,        ).  You should know that our guidelines explicitly prohibit the creation of "puff pieces and advertising" (see Conflict of interest).  In some jurisdictions, such as the United States, writing undisclosed advertisements may even be illegal (see Conflict of interest).  It is permitted (albeit highly discouraged) for you perform paid edits on behalf of your employer, provided that they do not violate our policies and guidelines.  However, paid edits must be conspicuously marked as such as required by our Terms of Use.  (You should recognize this document as the one that you confirm having read and agreed to every time you submit an edit here.)
 * If your accounts do not get blocked as a result of this report, then you should immediately see to it that you provide the disclosure required by the Terms of Use. In any case, please make sure that your boss is provided with a copy of the Terms of Use and that the section on paid contributions is brought to his or her attention. —Psychonaut (talk) 07:34, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Comments by other users
''Accused parties may also comment/discuss in this section below. See Defending yourself against claims.'' Hello folks, thank-you for looking into this although it is a little unclear if this is somewhat good news or terribly bad news or if I am required to do any further action at this point.

We do not intend to be sock puppets whatsoever, simply to get info related to our organization, products and capabilities, listed not in a promoting marketing way, but rather to simply list the facts related to our company and products.

I would suspect that many of the users mentioned were employees of Rogue Wave Software at some point but are no longer with the company (none of those names ring a bell with me but I am fairly new).

I am sure I did a bad job trying to do my first ever Wikipedia edits, I did copy and paste some "spun" text directly from our website, I was trying to learn how to do that, and the impetus was to update the outdated Rogue Wave Software logo, and your FAQs suggested I needed to make 10 edits before I would be granted permission to update that logo. So to be honest, being very busy and tired, I was trying to think of most anything I could quickly edit, on our own pages, just so I could update the logo and appease my boss.

I arrive at Rogue Wave Software because they acquired my previous employer, Klocwork. Here is the page our team built for Klocwork, and perhaps this demonstrates that we do not intent to make this spammy marketing type information, rather factual and technical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klocwork.

Again I apologize, my mission at this point really was to just update that old logo. We do have a mission to update a lot of this information that is up-to-date in the near future, but will do so more carefully.

FYI, my colleague who is more technical and does more writing than I, is the one who updated this page recently as it relates to Rogue Wave Software, and I hope it demonstrates far better writing prowess by your guidelines than what I did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_analysis#Multi-language

Thanks once again for your time, anything else you need from me to progress this situation please let me know.

Chris — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.161.118.254 (talk • contribs) 00:30, 5 March 2015‎

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments

 * Except for, all other listed accounts are . We do not comment on IP addresses. Running a CU won't yield anything useful here. - Mailer Diablo 23:39, 4 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Almost all of the accounts listed have not edited for years, in at least one case more than nine years. Only Cbubinas and 209.217.94.93 have edited recently, and their editing does not constitute sockpuppetry. I am therefore closing this case. The issue of promotional editing is another matter, and this is not the place to consider that. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 16:03, 21 March 2015 (UTC)