Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Gang14/Archive

Suspected sockpuppets



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In December 2018, an editor that I believe is the same person as Gang 14 began to use IP address 172.85.246.194 to make edits (some disruptive) to several articles involving American politics, in particular to articles involving elected officials from the cities of Lawrence and Lowell in Massachusetts's Merrimack Valley (Juana Matias and U.S. House freshman Lori Trahan). Perhaps his most disruptive edit came on January 13, 2019, when he decided, contra the longstanding consensus that was set forth, after discussion in the "List of African-American United States Representatives" article's Talk page, to declare that U.S. Representatives that first took office in 2019 are a "new generation" of African-American Representatives. The change was made without any source or discussion, and it was reverted by User:Mitchumch.

Then on January 19, user Gang14, who has a long history of editing articles involving politicians from Lawrence, Lowell and other parts of the Merrimack Valley but who hadn't edited an article under such name since a few edits in early October 2018 (and prior to that in July 2018), reappeared to make the *exact same edit* (declaring the new class of 2019 to be a "new generation" of African-American Representatives) to the List of African-American United States Representatives article, and when User:Mitchumch reverted the unsourced edit once again on Januar 20, Gang14 made the change once again without even discussing the issue on the Talk page (and leaving a sparse, circular explanation for the edit). See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_African-American_United_States_Representatives&diff=878231707&oldid=878231213 (the January 13 edit by IP address 172.85.246.194) and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_African-American_United_States_Representatives&diff=879240432&oldid=878496415 (the January 19 edit, later reoeated on January 20, by user Group14).

Meanwhile, the editor in question kept using IP address 172.85.246.194 on January 20 to make disruptive and POV edits to articles concerning U.S. politics, including to articles on two Lawrence, MA politicians (although he also has kept making the same unsourced, ungrammatical and POV change to the article on the 2018 gubernatorial election in Idaho, boasting that the Democratic nominee received the most *total* votes by any Democrat since 1990 when, in fact, such candidate received only the fifth-highest vote percentage among Democrats in the seven Idaho gubernatorial elections since 1990).

There can be little doubt that the same editor made that exact same change to the List of African-American United States Representatives articles and those articles related to Lawrence and Lowell politicians; here are the respective contributions histories for IP address 172.85.246.194 and user Gang14: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/172.85.246.194 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Gang14. I have no idea why Gang14 feels the need to post under his user name and new IP address simultaneously, unless he thinks that he can fool the editing community into believing that there are several editors clamoring for the same changes to articles. AuH2ORepublican (talk) 20:53, 20 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Now Gang14 is making disruptive edits to the Juana Matias article (one of the articles about a Lawrence, Mass. politician that IP address 172.85.246.194 kept editing in December and January) in his own name: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Juana_Matias&action=history. It is becoming harder and harder to fathom that they could be two different editors. AuH2ORepublican (talk) 23:05, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Comments by other users
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Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments

 * Since both IP and user account have gone inactive, I'm closing this case. Sro23 (talk) 06:22, 13 February 2019 (UTC)