Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Librowall/Archive

19 March 2013

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There appears to be some socking/meatpuppeting on the Media of Somalia page. A newly registered account User:Librowall showed up on March 17 on the talk page and stated that he/she was part of a group project with a class titled Embattled Media: Conflict and War Journalism, and that they were looking to collaborate on the page. After some wiki searching, it turns out that there's a wiki course by that name associated with Georgetown University. Enrollment in it, however, is open to all registered wiki users (I successfully managed to add my own username there despite not being a GU student). Contrary to his/her claims, the Librowall account was also the only username listed on the course page with the Media of Somalia page as his/her article of interest. After I explained to the Librowall account that the material he/she expressed a desire to add was already covered on other wiki pages devoted to those subtopics and that that material was outside this page's immediate scope, the Librowall account stopped responding altogether on the talk page. Instead, about a day or two later, User:Fbahja, another newly-registered account, emerged out of the blue and added the exact material that the Librowall account had said he/she would add. The edit was well formatted too, which suggests a certain level of experience editing Wikipedia on this single purpose account's part, despite ostensibly having no prior contributions to his/her name. The anonymous ip above formatted the same material about an hour and a half later, and likewise does not appear to be a genuine newbie. Less than 10 minutes after I had reverted the SPA's edit, a third newly-registered account, User:Mas1014, appeared out of nowhere and added 2,685 kb worth of different material to the page. Besides the timing of it all, there is no way he/she could have written and sourced all of that in those few minutes. This is clearly someone who already had that material on standby, especially considering the fact that this is his/her first article edit since the accounted was registered in January.

Other signs of sockpuppetry are that the page itself has only ever had a handful of total contributors, it is included on fewer than 30 watchlists , yet the average number of page views per day rose sharply over this period. Given the foregoing, I would appreciate a Checkuser on these accounts. Middayexpress (talk) 16:03, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

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

 * - —  Rich wales (no relation to Jimbo) 02:42, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
 * ❌ Keegan (talk) 04:35, 20 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Fairly clearly meat. NativeForeigner Talk 06:46, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
 * It seems that this is part of a class, however misguided that class may be, so no action taken here. This does not prevent further action from being taken at other venues. Rschen7754 04:10, 28 March 2013 (UTC)