Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Coldcreation/Archive

17 September 2015

 * Suspected sockpuppets




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

Suspect some off-wiki coordination between above accounts. evidence: 1 See user interaction report here, and 2. Users TC262 and Coldcreation have almost identical sequence of userboxes on their talk pages, including 14 identical user boxes in same sequence. See userboxes at top of Tc262 talk page, and  userboxes at bottom of Coldcreation talk page. 3 Sudden appearance of hard-to-find references at Articles_for_deletion/Thomas_Charvériat supporting Charveriat notability suggest something strange going on. 4 Discussion at Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard suggests TC262 and accounts listed above are linked in a possible walled garden. New Media Theorist (talk) 20:25, 17 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Some clarification, per the CU's comment below. Hopefully this will help. There are perhaps two situations here, both of which could include SP and seem to rationalize a checkuser inquiry.
 * 1) the Article Thomas Charveriat (redirected after a recent AfD) included many edits by User:Tc262 and was vigorously supported at its  AfD by User:Coldcreation, who also provided references posted only hours earlier on the official Thomas Charveriat web site. I agree with Vrac that there may have been coordination between these accounts and that they deserve a CU lookup. Additional evidence would be the identical series of 14 userboxes on the user pages of these accounts. See  userboxes at top of Tc262 talk page, and  userboxes at bottom of Coldcreation talk page. One user in the COIN discussion calculated that the odds of this happening to two unconnected users was 1047. Form the above I conclude that there is some kind of SP or MP activity going on between these accounts, in terms of editing and supporting the now redirected article. Grounds for running Checkuser on these accounts: possible Sock or Meat puppetry; Disruption  of Afd above; legitimate concern about bad faith editing.
 * 2) The remaining accounts are associated with Island6 projects. All are SPA accounts that have been used to create a Walled garden, which includes the now redirected Thomas Charveriat page. I suspect collusion among these accounts to prop up these pages. Grounds for running Checkuser on these accounts: possible Sock or Meat puppetry; Disruption Wikipedia project; legitimate concern about bad faith editing. New Media Theorist (talk) 18:36, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Comments by other users
''Accused parties may also comment/discuss in this section below. See Defending yourself against claims.''
 * While there may very well be sock puppetry going on here, the more glaring problem is COI/SPA and meat puppetry, for which there is strong evidence (see the COIN case. I am unclear on the proper procedure for dealing with WP:MEAT and if SPI is the right place for this. In any case these accounts are not stale and could warrant a checkuser:

A similar walled garden exists in frwiki created/maintained by other SPA accounts only active in fr plus Tc262, another situation I am unclear on how to deal with. Vrac (talk) 13:00, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Not relevant. Coldcreation (talk) 16:43, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments

 * This SPI needs a fair amount of fixing. A clerk needs to sort out who is the oldest account (the listed master is not), which accounts are stale, and whether there is sufficient evidence to run a CU.--Bbb23 (talk) 01:21, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
 * The following accounts are ❌:
 * --Bbb23 (talk) 18:10, 21 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Per negative CU result. Behavioral evidence is too weak to form a conclusion on that alone. King of &hearts;   &diams;   &clubs;  &spades; 03:40, 22 September 2015 (UTC)
 * --Bbb23 (talk) 18:10, 21 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Per negative CU result. Behavioral evidence is too weak to form a conclusion on that alone. King of &hearts;   &diams;   &clubs;  &spades; 03:40, 22 September 2015 (UTC)
 * --Bbb23 (talk) 18:10, 21 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Per negative CU result. Behavioral evidence is too weak to form a conclusion on that alone. King of &hearts;   &diams;   &clubs;  &spades; 03:40, 22 September 2015 (UTC)