Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Drgale/Archive

07 June 2014

 * Suspected sockpuppets




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In 2007, User:Drgale created an article Chicago Postcard Museum which was A7'd. The history of that page was deleted and appears to have been the user's only edit at the time, thus I'm not able to provide a diff however the relevant talk notice is here. The page was independently recreated some years later, and just recently Drgale returned to edit the page. Days later, User:Neil Gale appeared, identified himself as the owner of the subject institution, and blanked the page repeatedly citing copyright violations (see thread at AN/I) and posted what could be interpreted as a legal threat on the article's talk page. The owner of the institution is listed elsewhere as Dr. Neil Jan Gale. It appears from the discussion at Articles for deletion/Chicago Postcard Museum that Dr. Gale is angry that a page on one of his other projects' Wiki articles was deleted, and is out to disrupt things to make a point, and may be saving Drgale as a "good hand" account, or a sleeper for future disruption. Other than commenting at the Afd, I have no prior interactions with the user (that I'm aware of). Ivanvector (talk) 17:33, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

Comments by other users
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 * I don't see any bad faith here. Neil Gale said in this edit in an AfD discussion that he couldn't log in with DrGale, so created a new account. The use of the same last name strongly substantiates that there was no effort to deceive anyone by creating a second account. Agyle (talk) 01:10, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
 * I just saw that post this evening. That`s fine; if the user lost their login credentials and created a new account, then recovered their login credentials and attempted to "retire" the old account, then there's no reason to expect wrongdoing as far as sockpuppetry is concerned. Would we normally put a notice or block the old account in cases like this? Ivanvector (talk) 05:42, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments

 * Comment: It appears to me that this is a simple case of a user choosing to abandon one account, while starting a new one - the only "overlapping" edit was to add an "abandoned account" notice to . - The Bushranger One ping only 21:41, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Closing. Ivanvector: We typically assume good faith and don't take any action against the old account unless it starts editing disruptively. King of &hearts;   &diams;   &clubs;  &spades; 04:25, 10 June 2014 (UTC)