Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Ecjones2/Archive

Suspected sockpuppets
I believe Erick Jones has for several years been operating sockpuppet/meatpuppet accounts to edit the article about himself in violation of WP:COI and WP:AUTO. These accounts are nominally associated with people or groups with whom Dr. Jones has a close professional involvement. Each of these users' contributions consist only of edits to Dr. Jones' article over relatively short periods before they are abandoned. More specifically:
 * Due to the username, Ecjones2 seems likely to be Dr. Jones himself, or at least a relative; contribs are all to the Erick Jones article, but except for the issue of COI in principle, these are benign.
 * Raidrfid shares a name with the laboratory at UT Arlington of which Dr. Jones was director, and with unsourced personal information, an unsourced increase in publication count, and Amazon purchase links for his books.
 * Of Dhavalpatel698's four total edits, all of them to Dr. Jones' page,  add large amounts of promotional language, much of it unsourced and repeated verbatim from the about-the-author pages in Dr Jones' own books. Much of this language remains in the article, uncited. Regrettably, I think it is also appropriate to invoke WP:PRIVACY: "If individuals have identified themselves without redacting or having it oversighted, such information can be used for discussions of conflict of interest (COI) in appropriate forums." Dr. Jones appears to have had a student by the same name at the time of the edits, which is suggestive of meatpuppeting but certainly at minimum COI. My evidence for this claim is publicly available, but out of an abundance of caution I am not linking to it here unless it is requested by relevant personnel.
 * All of Student350's edits are removals of problem tags from Erick Jones, mostly for peacock language and unsourced claims. In particular, dispatches a deserved  flag by removing the word "considered" from "[h]e is considered an expert" with no other changes.
 * UNREngineering shares a name with the college of which he is currently dean, was created during his tenure, and has once again only edited his article.

In the interest of fairness, it is necessary for me to disclose that I am a student in the College of Engineering at UNR (although I have never met or corresponded with Dr. Jones), which puts me in a potential conflict of interest. Dr. Jones is currently being investigated by the university due to allegations that he has improperly used a self-published journal to inflate his academic reputation. This motivated me to check his article for context, and I was surprised by the promotional language and blatant COI editing on display. Irrespective of my proximity to the situation, my first concern in this matter is as a Wikipedian, for the integrity of Wikipedia as a biographical source, and I think the evidence illustrates that this concern is legitimate. Moonjail (talk) 01:39, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Comments by other users

 * Accused parties may also comment/discuss in this section below. See Defending yourself against claims.

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments

 * Blocked the UNREngineering account, regardless of the result here it's a user name vio as implying a group account. Izno (talk) 02:49, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
 * The edits by these users are too old. Closing. Bbb23 (talk) 14:21, 14 February 2024 (UTC)