Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/NEBE Ethiopia/Archive

Suspected sockpuppets



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Aschalew musema account was created 3 hours after NEBE Ethiopia account was blocked for "Promotional username, promotional edits". Same edit pattern, content, external links. Both have edited exclusively in a single article National Election Board of Ethiopia (SPAs), and Aschalew musema has six times reverted large cleanup edits by two other more experienced editors who tried to remove unsourced and copyvio-type content. IP editor 196.188.115.240 may be the same person since their single edit occurred just 18 minutes prior to NEBE Ethiopia's first edit.

Platonk (talk) 23:07, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Both editors have been struggling to format the page to their liking.
 * Both try using an html 'justify' markup, NEBE Aschalew.
 * Both try using an html line break, NEBE Aschalew Aschalew.
 * Both insert a specific external link into the lead sentence in the same manner, NEBE Aschalew.
 * Both make incremental edits, then revert them or try something else, rearrange paragraphs and images, remove templates, add them back, and in general are 'tinkering' with the page's format and content (which is easily noticed if you tab through a series of their edits).
 * The first editor was blocked for "Promotional username, promotional edits", and the second editor shows OWN behavior by writing "the National election board of ethiopia should looks like this" in an edit summary as he reverts another editor's fix of ADVERT. (One of 6 such reverts over the last month.)
 * The IP editor is unsure of usage of plural-s in English like NEBE is.

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

 * Yeah, it's obvious these are the same person, but I'd like to try a mix of WP:AGF and WP:IAR here to see if we can turn a bad situation into a good one. Is our goal really to prevent the government of a country from writing about their own election process?  I don't think so. I propose that  alter their block from uw-spamublock to uw-softerblock, which I don't think is much of a stretch.  And,  commits to reading our policies such as WP:COI, WP:OWN, and to working with other editors on the talk page rather than just reverting things to their preferred version.  And to use WP:TEA to ask questions if anything is not clear.  If we can do that, then I'll be willing to close this with no further action.  The alternative is to block  for obvious socking and block evasion, which I don't think will really be in the best interests of anybody. -- RoySmith (talk) 01:07, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Regarding Is our goal really to prevent the government of a country from writing about their own election process?, I am indeed not sure how tacitly encouraging that would benefit the encyclopaedia, or indeed the citizens of any given country – or, to posit the issue in a different way, how employees of a government institution editing about said institution is better or worse than any other employee editing about their employer. --Blablubbs (talk) 01:40, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, that's a fair question, but that's how IAR works :-) How I really got there is I started with, "The original block was for username, so they just picked a new name like we told them to, so it's not really socking".  Then I noticed that it was the hard version of that, which I thought was a bit excessive, and I figured if we could just unwind that, maybe we could turn this into an educational moment rather than an enforcement moment.  There's also very little down side to bending over backwards here.  The worst that could happen is they fail to follow all our rules going forward and they end up getting blocked.  The best that could happen is we turn them into a productive editor.  I figure it's worth a shot. -- RoySmith (talk) 02:01, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Except their command of the English language seems rudimentary, they are treating the article as their own, and they didn't respond well when other editors tried to correct the article. I got here because one of those other editors, frustrated, had asked me to look into it. I'm not sure how/who you think are going to educate the new editor. If, however, you at least block them from their employer's article (is that a 'partial block'?) then my concerns would be rendered moot. Platonk (talk) 02:59, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
 * I've tried to cut the baby in half here by pblocking Aschalew musema from the article in question. Further block evasion will not end as well for them. GeneralNotability (talk) 18:25, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
 * FWIW, I just axed most of the article history because of copyright violations. --Blablubbs (talk) 18:27, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Suspected sockpuppets



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Same editing style and same edit summaries as NEBE Ethiopia Ue3lman (talk) 02:31, 23 January 2022 (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

 * CU confirms that this account is operating out of the same range as the others. It could very well be a different person working in the same office - which would also explain the editing interests - but that would still lead me to conclude that they are editing against WP:PAID guidelines. I'm going to p-block from the article, and give some advice; I'm doing to do likewise for, who also came up.  Girth Summit  (blether)  15:20, 23 January 2022 (UTC)