Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Stewaj7/Archive

Evidence submitted by Mr.grantevans2
Constant reverts of Reliably Sourced content by these single article User names for the purpose of maintaining a 100% promotional and complimentary BLP of the Subject Michael Welner; please see the Revision history. The sockmaster has been warned repeatedly to stop it but will not do so. Mr.Grantevans2 (talk) 19:31, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Auto-generated every six hours.
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Comments by accused parties
See Defending yourself against claims.

Clerk, patrolling admin and checkuser comments
Stewaj7 and Torrent012 are, while the other registered accounts are ❌. No comment with regards to the IP addresses. –MuZemike 21:17, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Torrent012 blocked and tagged, Stewaj7 blocked for a week. Marking for close. TN X Man  03:35, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

29 November 2010

 * Suspected sockpuppets




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''Please list evidence below this line. Remember to sign at the end of your section with 4 tilde characters " ~ "''

This relates to two SPA's who edit exclusively at the BLP Michael Welner and closely-related articles. The two have been edit-warring at that article, including a collective 8 reversions in 24 hours, resulting in a 2-week lockdown of the article at the 3RR Noticeboard. Problems with the article created by SPAs are being discussed at COIN. Stewaj7 was blocked previously for sockpuppetry but reinstated.

This sequence on that article's talk page makes it pretty obvious that there is some ongoing sockpuppetry/meatpuppetry:
 * Empirical9's post of Nov 24:
 * Stewaj7 posts virtually the same thing, using almost identical language, four hours later
 * Anon IP 68.200.186.183 two days later "seconds" Stewaj7's post
 * Stewaj7 then signs a second post by the Anon IP. Stewaj7 is using the anon IP to second his own post?
 * Stewaj7 then tries to cover his/her tracks by deleting Stewaj7's Nov 24 post parroting Empirical9's post and the Anon IP's post seconding Stewaj7's post.

It's pretty obvious from the foregoing alone, that Stewaj7, Empirical9 and 69.200 etc are all the same editor or at minimum meatpuppets working in close concert. The broader editing behaviors make it even more obvious. Fladrif (talk) 17:55, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

@TnXman - You can't rely solely on checkuser, and the prior SPI didn't look at the Anon IPs, and did not consider the new Anon IP. You have to look at the actual diffs. Two ostensibly different editors post the same lengthy talkpage comment in virtully identical language four hours apart, and an Anon IP who turns out to be Stewaj7 chimes in to second his own comment. How can anyone conclude that anything other than sockpuppetry is going on? The same person logging in as two editors through two different ISP's is still sockpuppetry. Who you gonna believe? Checkuser or your own eyes? Fladrif (talk) 18:27, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

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

I am my own editor and do not have any other accounts. While I was happy to have one other editor seemingly working in concert with me to defend the integrity of Michael Welner's BLP, I am in no way a 'sock' or 'meat' puppet. I utilized the talk page to gain consensus on edits, reverting only when the edits were completely agenda driven and lacking NPOV. When the main editor of the page claimed sources were dead links but refused to find appropriate links, I tried to find them, most of which were simple Google searches on the topic. I also did my best to prevent the BLP from becoming a page about Omar Khadr and maintaing its intention of being a page about Dr. Michael Welner and his overall body of work. I do not understand these sockpuppet or meatpuppet allegations but they are completely unfounded. Empirical9 (talk) 18:35, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments
I'm sorry, but I don't see how this is any different than the case in archive. and have already been found to be ❌. TN X Man 18:10, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Just a note that checkuser will not connect named accounts to IPs, as per our privacy policy. Any connections will need to be based on behavior and the checkuser results already posted. TN X Man  18:39, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
 * @Fladrif: If a checkuser says an account is unrelated, that means they've taken in the consideration that they're simply connecting to another ISP. Generally, unrelated means that they're not only editing from different ISPs, but also different computers, and there is no logical reason why they would be switching computers; often this is because there simply is not enough time to switch between the two giving the timing of edits, due to a large geographical distance between the two. I have not conducted a check here myself, and I doubt Tnxman has either, but I trust MuZemike to know what he's doing with Checkuser, and his check was conducted less than a month ago. As for the IP address, our checkuser policy does not allow us to connect a registered account with an IP address except in extreme circumstances. This is certainly not one of them.
 * How is this for an explanation, since you're so insistent on the matter: There's this thing called "Page history" that allows anyone to go through, see what used to be on the page, and copy that content back into the current revision of the page. Ta-da! Any minor changes can be attributed to the fact that he copied all of this from the diff directly, causing things to be broken up; he would have needed to add a few words of his own to make the once-separate paragraphs connect. As for the IP address, it quite possibly is one or the other logging out to show additional support, but as I said above, I will not be conducting a check to determine who, and it's still entirely possible it's a random drive-by troll.
 * I'm closing this request with no action taken and would strongly recommend that you drop this; we have established that these users are not the same person, and if there are other problems with their editing, that should be addressed in a more appropriate forum. Hers fold  (t/a/c) 18:44, 29 November 2010 (UTC)