Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Santos33/Archive

Suspected sockpuppets



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all three accounts have been active for a limited time and made edits to topics and companies relevant to the "quantified self" and especially the company Qardio which sells medical devices (scale, heart monitor, etc) that connect to the iphone's health app and have added unsourced/badly sourced promotional content to the Qardio article. All are similarly named. These are are likely disposable sock accounts of a Qardio employee, PR company, or freelancer. I don't think a CU is needed, but these are DUCK. Jytdog (talk) 02:23, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Santos33 made 53 edits and was active Sept 2014 to Feb 2016 with almost all the edits coming at the end of that time, and made to the Qardio article, including creating it on Feb 23 2016 and making a bunch of edits that day, and one more on Feb 29 2016
 * IP 's first edit was Sept 2015 and those edits were like Santos55, on quantified health stuff, then it became active at the same time as Santos33 working on Qardio, and their edits include this for example on Feb 23, 2016 (an edit to the talk page of the sandbox where Santos33 was drafting the article). and then another Feb 29, and then subsequent edits in Aug 2016, Jan 2017, and April 2017 all to Qardio.
 * Aspiret00 was active for 1 day, March 1 2016, made 11 edits to three articles that Santos33 had edited, including 6 to Qardio. Three of the others were trying to WL to Qardio.
 * Sentinel5 account was created Dec 2016 and made 2 edits to an article the master had edited, then nothing til today when they added a boatload of spammy content to the Qardio article, which they didn't even bother to source.


 * All of these accounts are abusing their editing privileges for promotion. These are also very clearly tossed off socks.  If you think that level of disdain for the obligation to create a sustained identity, which forms the basis for there to actually be an editing community, and disdain for our mission to provide people with accepted knowledge and avoid promotion, are both fine, then I don't know what to say.


 * What do I want? I want you to block this person for creating multiple throwaway accounts, which they use to abuse their editing privileges. Jytdog (talk) 18:33, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
 * The abuse is PROMO; the multiple accounts are the means to do that. Jytdog (talk) 19:04, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Let me clarify further.  WP:PROMO is policy.  One way to avoid scrutiny and make edits seem more legit, is to make it seem as though multiple, independent editors are all working to add stuff.  One of our flags for identifying advocates or conflicted editors is exactly the kind of concentrated effort that these socks together have made.  Using multiple accounts to avoid scrutiny is exactly described in the SOCK policy. Jytdog (talk) 20:04, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

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

 * Help me understand where the abuse of multiple accounts is, because I'm not seeing it. The accounts were never used simultaneously except for one instance with the IP and Santos33 (which still technically isn't a violation of WP:ILLEGIT per WP:EWLO, perhaps the user forgot to log in?), and were not evading blocks/bans. Say this is all the same person - I'm not a fan of account-hopping, but that's no reason to hand out blocks, what if you forgot your password? All accounts are abandoned except for Sentinel5, so what do you want us to do here? Sro23 (talk) 17:16, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Okay, but again, I'm still not seeing any abuse of multiple accounts. I feel undisclosed paid editors are above my paygrade, and though I get that it's often connected to sockpuppetry, this is still Sockpuppet investigations, not Wikipedia:Promotional account investigations. There has to be better venues to report spammers (like the Conflict of interest noticeboard, maybe?). Sro23 (talk) 18:54, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
 * if what says is accurate, this pattern falls under "contributing to the same page or discussion with multiple accounts" in the WP:SOCK policy. It also falls under "circumventing policy" and "avoiding scrutiny"; really those are all inter-related. It's pretty brick-in-the-face obvious that Santos33 and Aspiret00 are the same user: both of their first edits are to the same article but two years apart, then they worked together to build up the Qardio article. Santos33 built the article from scratch inside a week, then never edited again; a brand new account Aspiret00 took over the very next day, with no overlap. Maybe they forgot their password? Sure, but they remembered it easily enough earlier that week when they hadn't edited for two years. It could be coincidence, yes, but when you have an editor with barely a handful of edits and inactive for two years suddenly spring into action furiously constructing an article on a company with very borderline notability (I don't think they're notable at all), it's almost guaranteed you're observing paid editing. That they never did anything else afterwards, but a brand new account appears to continue the work on the very next day, shows that in all likelihood this is one editor trying to create a false impression of collaborative interest, not actually several editors collaborating. (And if they are multiple editors, an Arbcom ruling says we can treat them as one with respect to their violations of the WP:PAY policy).
 * What ties Sentinel5 into this is also their first edits, along with the obviously related IP "managing" the page over a long period. I'm not going to elaborate more per WP:BEANS but please email me if you'd like more details. Thanks for asking the questions, sometimes SPI is more art than science. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 18:53, 29 November 2017 (UTC)


 * Master is blocked for 2 weeks, all sock accounts . I have very little confidence we've identified the actual master, given master's age, use of throwaways, and long apparent gaps in activity. Editing histories show a possible overlap with Sockpuppet investigations/RogerPTStevenson but behaviour is inconclusive. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 18:53, 29 November 2017 (UTC)