Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Sonia Murillo Perales/Archive

06 June 2012

 * Suspected sockpuppets




 * User compare report Auto-generated every hour.

See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants for a thorough discussion of this user, including diffs. The putative sockmaster,, was indef blocked for spamming. All users are consistent in their usage of broken English and claim that they are from Spain. All users show interest in the same topics and most have edited the same articles, including Biodiversity of New Caledonia, Ocotea, Lauraceae, Conquistador, Laurel forest, House of Aragon, Adenodaphne. The users seems particularly interested in tropical trees, adding copyrighted, incoherent, and incorrect (mostly unreferenced) information to articles, then complains to other editors hoping that they'll intervene. The behavior has become disruptive to the point that one sockpuppet, Curritocurrito, chased off an excellent contributor into retirement. To get more attention, the user then spams nearly all of the active WP:PLANTS members talk pages, mine included, with pleas for help. Finally, the user reaches WT:PLANTS and in the course of discussion there, s/he develops a new sockpuppet, the only purpose of which is to, I assume, mock one of our newer WP:PLANTS contributors who joined the discussion and made a comment about Curritocurrito's behavior, User:Sminthopsis84. Most telling of all, I suppose, is that Sonia Murillo Perales was blocked on 24 February 2012, one of the last edits being on Conquistador, and CurritoCurrito appeared on 6 March 2012, one of the first edits being on Conquistador. The activity of the IP addresses is better detailed with diffs by others at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants. Rkitko (talk) 14:17, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

Comments by other users
''Accused parties may also comment/discuss in this section below. See Defending yourself against claims.''

Is there a bot or a system for reverting all these users' & IPs' edits all the way back, except where other editors have made later changes? This user represents a really massive amount of information that will take many skilled users thousands of hours to review, revise, & correct. There are many eggregious errors here, for instance adding nerds & charcoal to a list of fauna at Monasterio de Piedra (diff). This user blindly adds material without even reading the article to see if the material is already there (in a much better syntax & accuracy). There are so many edits, and they are often on obscure articles, so these blatant errors could persist for years or even decades. Wikipedia would be much better off if we could delete all of their edits possible. --Tom Hulse (talk) 19:50, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * User:Curritocurrito is now rapidly creating content-free stubs for plant genera. I hope that these can be rapidly deleted because their existence reduces the overall quality of plant articles. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 21:13, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

Just reverting unedited pages doesn't solve the problem - for example I partially fixed Cistus laurifolius, but there still stuff in their which is incomprehensible. We still haven't fully cleaned up after Carol Spears.

I don't see any problem with leaving stubs if they are accurate (but the lack of engagement on the user's part is a problem). However Balanocarpus is partially plagiarised from here. Lavateraguy (talk) 10:00, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
 * 88.19.159.146 is continuing the same type of editing, notably reverting Lavateraguy's carefully researched change to a redirect at Balanocarpus. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 17:32, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments

 * Checkuser note: and  are a ✅ match;  is stale, so could not be checked. No comments regarding the various IPs. I softblocked  for a violation of WP:U; reviewing admin, please feel free to change it to a hardblock.  Salvio  Let's talk about it! 14:27, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * No outstanding accounts to examine, so closing case. AGK  [•] 22:03, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

15 October 2012

 * Suspected sockpuppets


 * User compare report Auto-generated every hour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Machilus&diff=prev&oldid=517817714  —  Jeff G. ツ  (talk)   01:09, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Comments by other users
''Accused parties may also comment/discuss in this section below. See Defending yourself against claims.''

At the archived case that looked into Sonia Murillo Perales/Curritocurrito, several IP addresses were also listed as suspected accounts of the user. These IP addresses all displayed the same editing style and approach, concentrating on similar articles (principally any article with possible connections to the Lauraceae plant family, and/or island ecosystems). All the IP addresses listed are geolocated at Zaragoza in Spain. The IP 83.42.105.207 also geolocates to Zaragoza in Spain, and has a similar editing approach and style to Sonia Murillo Perales/Curritocurrito and all the other IP addresses. The user is problematic for several reasons:
 * 1) The text they add is often of poor quality English, resulting in sentences which are difficult to comprehend or even nonsensical. For example, these sentences: "The differences are ecological adaptations to different environments over a relatively dry-wet climate", "They does not form large stands but rather small groups of trees with a density of up to one individual per five hectares", "They grow mostly in tropical forests and cloud forest, But has also been found in stubbles, pastures, in the coastal ranges and interior in wet areas to dry regions", "It growing up to 500 meters or higher up", which were all added as part of this diff.
 * 2) Where text is of decent quality, it is sometimes (if not always) copyvio material (the source of the text is rarely given, so often cannot be checked).
 * 3) A general lack of supporting citations.
 * 4) The user doesn't look to see if the material which they add already exists within the article, resulting in repetition.
 * 5) Sometimes another user may work through the problematic additions of this user, making corrections, deletions and adding tags as necessary, resulting in a text which is at least not misleading to the reader, but then the problem user just reverts it all. (An example of this behaviour from this particular IP account of the user is shown by the revision history of Mezilaurus between 9th and 15th October 2012: after myself and Sminthopsis84 had made some adjustments to dubious text originally added by Sonia Murillo Perales and another Zaragoza IP (85.251.28.10) in 2011, the IP 83.42.105.207 reverts back to text that requires tags, clarification and work, even reverting the copyedited phrase "This genus has some species of high commercial value, with few or no chemical or biological studies" back to "This genus have many high commercial value plant species with few or none chemical or biological studies", which demonstrates how this user doesn't read what they are editing).
 * 6) Perhaps most problematic of all, this user never engages with other users on article talk pages.

The overall effect of all the above is that the user continually adds misleading or copyrighted material to articles, and never listens to or engages with other editors when they try to raise these issues. A more detailed discussion of this user's behaviour from other IP accounts is archived at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants/Archive59. PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 04:27, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments
— Berean Hunter   (talk)  15:05, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
 * The IP has been blocked by Reaper. Can a checkuser please look for any new sleepers? Afterwards this case should be archived to Sockpuppet investigations/Sonia Murillo Perales where Curritocurrito is listed. De728631 (talk) 15:37, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Nobody else related in the range. There was an unrelated troll/vandal socking that got caught playing from that same range (sucks for him).  This is a dedicated server range; ima block it for a year.  &mdash; Coren (talk) 13:44, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Ok, I have now blocked 83.42.105.0/24 for one year (or so I hope, this is my first rangeblock). De728631 (talk) 15:54, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Closing.

07 December 2012

 * Suspected sockpuppets




 * User compare report Auto-generated every hour.
 * Editor interaction utility

Discussion of the IP is at Talk:Influences on the Spanish language. This IP geolocates to Zaragoza, Spain, as did the previous IPs. There is considerable overlap in choice of pages with User:CurritoCurrito and previous socks, very similar editing style that generally involves blocks of unsourced, poorly written text with factual errors that consume considerable resources of dedicated editors to try to correct it. This is a relatively small example that demonstrates the rambling unencyclopedic style.

Evidence for the signon SoniaMurilloPerales is that the name is the same as a previously blocked signon, without the spaces, and the edit history overlaps with pages that have been prime targets of this string of sockpuppets. The signon is not currently active, but signons in this string have previously been used for creating new pages while the bulk of editing is done from an IP, so this one might be dormant in anticipation of such use. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 22:40, 7 December 2012 (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

 * Obvious sock for both, blocked. The IP rotates quickly, so long blocks would be useless and they just have to be whacked as they arise.  Closing. Dennis Brown -  2&cent;    &copy;   Join WER 04:07, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

09 December 2012

 * Suspected sockpuppets




 * User compare report Auto-generated every hour.
 * Editor interaction utility

Creating new pages from this signon follows a pattern of the previously identified sockpuppets in that while much of the text was added from IPs, new pages were created in bursts from a signon. This signon has not touched what we have previously seen as the core pages of interest to these sockpuppets, so it is worrying that this could be a strategy to avoid detection while forcing many competent editors to scramble and reducing the overall quality of the English wikipedia. There is a similar interest in plant and insect species; a similar clumsy style of broken English that suggest that Spanish could be the native language of the writer; many factual errors; inventive disruptive activities such as in this edit replacing a taxobox with a "missingtaxobox" template; this person rarely uses edit summaries and doesn't engage in discussion with other editors. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 14:51, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Comments by other users
''Accused parties may also comment/discuss in this section below. See Defending yourself against claims.''

Seeing as checkuser has been declined due to the other accounts being stale, is it theoretically possible to geolocate the account User:Dotti9? If it is possible, this may be a proxy for checkuser, seeing as the other stale accounts have been geolocated to Zaragoza in Spain (or at least the confirmed IP socks have been geolocated to Zaragoza). I strongly suspect that User:Dotti9 is a sock of User:Sonia Murillo Perales, due to the similar editing pattern of creating large quantities of poor quality new articles which contain basic errors, probable copyvio issues, and nonsensical English. PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 00:29, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Can it be compared against IP:79.159.238.252, the latest of the confirmed sockpuppets, whose case was closed 7 December 2012? By the way, there is more discussion of similarities in edits between the sockpuppet stream and this user's contributions at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Plants, but being new to checkuser requests, I thought that it was equivalent to geolocation, and thought that the pointer to discussion would clutter this page. Lesson learned. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 15:24, 10 December 2012 (UTC)


 * One creates a lot of new articles on flora, the other works on Spanish history. I'm not saying they aren't related, I'm saying that with the current evidence, I can't find enough evidence to take administrative action, which requires a high degree of certainly.  Dennis Brown -  2&cent;    &copy;   Join WER 15:38, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
 * No, it isn't as simple as one working here and another working there, not if the whole editing history of this user is studied. I think a more thorough presentation of the evidence is required. The confirmed sock User:Curritocurrito used to create a lot of flora articles too. This user uses named accounts for article creation, whereas the IP accounts only edit existing ones. The IP accounts that were listed under the initial investigation performed many edits on a wide range of articles, principally subtropical flora, island ecologies and Spanish colonial history. If more time can be granted, more convincing evidence can be collated, I am sure - unless it would be preferable just to let this close and then start a new investigation afresh? PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 15:53, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments

 * - Can you please supply some diffs from both accounts which demonstrate similarity? Basa lisk  inspect damage⁄berate 15:52, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
 * -  Basa lisk  inspect damage⁄berate 16:10, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
 * This edit by the suspected sock is very similar to this one by a previous confirmed sock. Similar areas of editing too. There are other similar edits in the contribution history. Basa lisk  inspect damage⁄berate 16:09, 9 December 2012 (UTC)


 * - I have nothing to compare the account to, everything in the archive is . Tiptoety  talk 20:58, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
 * A lack of crossover or convincing behavioral evidence makes it impossible to connect the dots at this time. Closing. Dennis Brown -  2&cent;    &copy;   Join WER 15:11, 10 December 2012 (UTC)