Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/RandomGuy2018/Archive

Suspected sockpuppets

 * 1) Initial suspicion: the above suspected socks – 2 Latvian IPs, a 2 day old account (MichaelBeEveryWhere) and TheBritishVampire (200 edits) – showed up to be RandomGuy's only supporters at an an RfC here at Vladimir (name). RandomGuy had edited the article with an idiosyncratic/distinctive POV insisting that listed Presidents and prime ministers have lengthy recitations of all their military conflicts - not obvious why that's necessary in a list of presidents and political leaders. (See overlong list for Putin and Zelensky.) The 4 other (+ me) participating editors posted more conventional condense/remove views.
 * 2) Editor Interaction Analyser: Despite Vampire only having 200 edits they and RandomGuy edited a large number of the same pages. The small number of topics are too different just to be coincidental shared interests: World War 2 articles, given names articles, United States and Bob Bergen. (9 out of MichaelBeEverywhere's total of 15 edits are to pages already edited by RandomGuy, including St Lucia edited by RandomGuy in May.)
 * 3) Note that Robert is the single most edited article by both Vampire and RandomGuy and represents very big chunks of both accounts' focus. 45% of all Vampire's edits and 36% of all RandomGuy's edits are to that article. According to this, they are the top 2 authors of the article.
 * 4) But more than that they were clearly working together having spot checked a number of the jointly edited pages:
 * Operation Barbarossa: RandomGuy has this edit reverted, Vampire restores.
 * Kanalkampf: Vampire has this edit reverted, RandomGuy restores
 * Eastern Front (World War II): RandomGuy has this edit reverted Vampire restores, gets reverted, and Vampire restores again, gets reverted again and RandomGuy restores again.
 * Battle of Britain: RandomGuy has this edit reverted and Vampire restores
 * Second Boer War: Vampire has this edit reverted, RandomGuy restores (5 months later)
 * Bob Bergen: Vampire has this edit reverted, RandomGuy restores
 * Italian front (World War I): Vampire has this edit reverted, RandomGuy restores 5 months later.
 * United States: Vampire makes this edit 25 March 2022, RandomGuy adds to it 13 April 2022.
 * World War I: Vampire, on the day the account was created (2nd edit), chimes in on this talk page thread, in which RandomGuy had posted, in support of RandomGuy's position (This is the edit RandomGuy referred to in his earlier post in that thread. Note the common view of including Borden and George V as well as the common view of having an expansive list).
 * Many of these "collaborations" where when Vampire was a new user with hardly any edits. They still only have 200. So can't be a coincidence.
 * I believe RandomGuy, TheBritishVampire, the 2 Latvian IPs and MichaelBeEverywhere are the same user. DeCausa (talk) 12:23, 21 June 2022 (UTC) DeCausa (talk) 12:23, 21 June 2022 (UTC)


 * Just adding this note re the Latvian IPs for future reference, before this is archived. The sockmaster stated via the RandomGuy and MichaelBeEverywhere accounts that he is from Latvia here and here. DeCausa (talk) 17:35, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

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

 * These three accounts are ✅ to each other. There are a couple of other accounts on the same narrow ranges which might very well be them as well, but they haven't edited and I'm not quite ready to block them. If any 'new but not new' accounts show up in the same areas, come back and we can take another look. No comment on these specific IPs, but do will note that the person behind these accounts has engaged in logged out editing as well as using these accounts.  Girth Summit  (blether)  09:29, 22 June 2022 (UTC)