Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Skyhook1/Archive

13 August 2014

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 * Please see This ANI incident
 * Long term history of tendentious editing at Skyhook (structure), and Talk:Skyhook (structure)
 * ANI was about to be closed, after article had been reverted to consensus version - Athena99 is created, and reverts article with first edit.
 * Requesting checkuser as agreed in discussion with at ANI linked above  Begoon &thinsp; talk  15:38, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

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Related Sockpuppet investigations/Athena99 --Neil N  talk to me 17:51, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

I have added User:Flash500. -- Diannaa (talk) 18:23, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

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 * ✅ the three name accounts and blocked. (I saw an RFPP request before the SPI) Courcelles 19:43, 13 August 2014 (UTC)
 * All accounts blocked. The IP hasn't edited since late June, so a block isn't needed. Moving to close. Mike V  •  Talk  19:56, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

14 August 2014

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WP:DUCK. Same article, same edit. Neil N  talk to me 20:47, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

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 * I agree with the duck edit and also blocked the account per the username policy. Mike V  •  Talk  20:55, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Confirmed, plus User:Rknrl as a sleeper. Will block. Courcelles 21:12, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

17 February 2015

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Matching edits pushing "Skyhook" Information Deunanknute (talk) 00:41, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

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 * Please note that checkuser will not be used when you only present IPs. Also, you don't need to create an individual case entry for each IP. They can be reported collectively as shown above. In regards to the user, it's most certainly him. However the IPs are switching quite fast, so any block will be useless right now. I've semi-protected a number of the recently targeted pages, which should help stop some of the concerns. Mike V • Talk 03:24, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

14 October 2015

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The text entered in this redirect to SpaceX, is actually a copy of the Original Research he kept introducing at Skyhook (structure) and was banned from that. He then used a few sock puppets to restore his OR, until January 2015 when he hijacked this redirect to SpaceX: Space exploration technologies (see diffs at ) to publish his assay on skyhooks. Thank you BatteryIncluded (talk) 20:34, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

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 * All accounts have been blocked. The two IPs are really stale. Closing. Bbb23 (talk) 21:18, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

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Copied from here A large part of the article is a verbatim copy of a web page called "Skyhooks and space elevators" at this address: https://skyhooksandspaceelevators.wordpress.com/tag/space-elevator/ Consequently I removed it as a Copyright violation but restored it and said that the Wikipedia material pre-dated the external web site. It's hard to tell if Wikipedia copied the external web site or if the external web site copied Wikipedia. Examining the edit history of our earlier "Space exploration technologies" article, we see that:
 * In 2005, this was a redirect to SpaceX, whose full name is "Space Exploration Technologies Corporation"
 * On 6 January 2015, an IP editor inserted 68 kB of text, let's call it, which is structured like a massive essay on skyhooks and assorted hypothetical space transportation technologies allowing to reach them, mixed with a few links to real artifacts such as the VASIMR and the DC-X
 * Over the following days, the article was slightly modified by two other editors, then on 17 February 2015 the contents were blanked and the SpaceX redirect was restored by, with edit summary "Rv to proper redirect, page was changed by sock of User:Skyhook1."
 * On 17 June 2015, restored the full text, asking "why was this removed?"
 * On 14 October 2015, deleted the contents again, complaining about an article "hijack" by User:Skyhook1 again. An opponent calling himself  briefly restored the text, which BatteryIncluded removed. The page was protected by administrator  and locked for admins only by.

It strikes me as woefully improbable that a fully formed Version A appeared out of nowhere on the whim of an IP passer-by: this must have been copied from elsewhere yet. Because version A has sections with wiki markup and sources, and sections which are totally unsourced essays, I suspect that it was copied in part from another, earlier Wikipedia article, and in part from an external uncited source. On the other hand, the "Skyhooks and space elevators" external site is hosted as a Wordpress blog with only one entry, dated April 2015. Assuming that the publication date is genuine, this massive article must have come from somewhere else earlier as well.

The next step in the investigation is to check contributions of user Skyhook1. He was blocked as a sockmaster on 13 August 2014, but we can still see his sandbox containing a draft of the skyhook stuff which he had been gradually building up with hundreds of edits between 27 June 2014 and 9 August 2014. And on this very talk page, we see Skyhook1 saying After reading the instruction on original work, I agree with you, my entire article was original work. Every last word of it. but that was still earlier: 7 March 2014. In the following months, we see a whole lot of drama with IPs and sock accounts, until Skyhook1 was blocked and some editors salvaged what was considered encyclopedic in August 2014. The article was then relatively untouched until the 2015 events. Skyhook1 had earlier created the article Orbiting skyhook and developed it from 12 January to 24 February 2014, at which point it was merged with Skyhook (structure). The Martian bits were added on 27 February and 3 March 2014.

Our little enquiry wouldn't be complete without a trip to the web site of Mr. Eagle Sarmont at http://www.high-frontier.org/, which talks a lot about skyhooks as the way to conquer the Solar System, and promotes the idea of combination launch systems, involving launching stuff on a suborbital trajectory which would be intercepted by the skyhook. This other article is in the same style as Version A: essay-like and mostly unsourced. It looks likely that User:Skyhook1 was Mr. Sarmont himself, especially considering his comments in the August 2014 incident discussion : I am an aeronautical engineer, a rocket scientist, a former test pilot, and probably the largest single contributor to former President Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration". I have 4 degrees. which is very similar in tone to his self-bio at http://www.high-frontier.org/about-the-author/. Given the context, I must reluctantly ask : do you have any connection with Mr. Sarmont?

Finally, the question of authorship cannot be resolved easily. The wordpress site may indeed have been copied from Wikipedia, but we can't prove it. Lost of the material can be traced to User:Skyhook1 but his contributions have been criticized. I'd appreciate some input from the editors who were involved in this story earlier. — JFG talk 04:20, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Copied by Neil N  talk to me 16:17, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

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Blocked. Copied here for the record only. --<b style="color:navy">Neil N </b> <i style="color:blue">talk to me</i> 16:17, 16 May 2017 (UTC)