Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Laurent Simon/Archive

12 January 2012

 * Suspected sockpuppets




 * User compare report Auto-generated every hour.

Patterns of timing and editing-style have raised my suspition as to these two accounts are being operated by the same person. They both popped into existence in recent weeks, and show a great deal of similarity in the topics (relative backwater articles with few-to-no-regular editing - See (the editing history of) Dassault_Rafale (a recent addition by one account on a fairly minor subtopic of a bigger issue) and Aldebaran_(rocket) - both users working very coincidentally in a very specialised topic at the same time - even adding identical sentences to seperate articles and using the same sources, dispite supposedly being completely seperate editors.

When a number of established WP:Aviation editors repeatedly reverted additions by AirCraft, VHiTek very promptly shows up to lend support to AirCraft's additions, before re-adding them several times. I suspect the second account is being used to lend support to an agenda multiple editors have characterised as of a WP:POV-ish nature (see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Aircraft and Articles for deletion/Gripen vs Rafale vs Typhoon for collections of editor's discussions regarding the nature and style of the user's contributions). The timing is too coincidental IMO, and although I like to assume WP:Goodfaith, if these accounts are held by the same user per my raised suspitions, it would mean the editor is trying to force the direction of debate and has (via the two accounts) broken WP:3RR. Maybe I am wrong on this, but it raised my suspitions to the point where I've come here for the first time in over two years of editing; I would put forward that the similiarity is worth checking upon. Kyteto (talk) 19:29, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Comments by other users
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This user may also be linked to the other two. They are the one who added most of the disputed text on Multirole combat aircraft, the edit pattern is very similar and they stopped editing right before the creation of the 2 accounts listed above.--McSly (talk) 01:23, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
 * And here I was hoping I was mistaken/paranoid. Good job looking further back into the history, if I had been more thorough I might have picked that link up as well. Kyteto (talk) 01:48, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

I've been requested to link examples for reviewing. Three reverts by the user/users are located at:    The difficulty of pointing to an individual article revision is that the user is splattering their huge changes into dozens of rapidly made smaller edits, see as an example:,. In terms of a total collection of revert edits as per each group, VHiTek has been used to revert the article twice and Laurent Simon once; Airplane has been used in minor 'muddying-the-waters' revertions via colelctions of minor edits adding back up to a restoration. In total, independent editors have reverted the article back to base four times: Twice by Ahunt, Once by MilborneOne (an Admin), Once by McSly; every time the suspected puppets have worked together to rebuild it identical to its pre-rejected state. 20:48, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments
Thank you for all your evidence. I've also explored this behaviourally, and felt that something was going on and that there was more to it than meets the eye. In general, I consider it technically that all four of these accounts are operated by the same individual. Editorially speaking, my opinion is that they are. WilliamH (talk) 21:57, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Laurent Simon is a ✅ match to.
 * Comparing AirCraft and VHiTek, I mark it to  that this is the same individual.
 * Laurent is the oldest account and has the most edits, so I've moved this to show them as the master. I don't know if he tried to clean start or just change usernames over to AirCraft, but there was a bunch of overlap in December 2011, so it wasn't done well. As such I've blocked all the socks, and blocked Laurent for a week. —  Hello Annyong  (say whaaat?!) 16:01, 15 January 2012 (UTC)