Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Tarshawaterhouse/Archive

06 January 2012

 * Suspected sockpuppets




 * User compare report Auto-generated every hour.

This is the "ACG Schools" sockfarm; these accounts created a swarm of individual articles on schools of the Academic Colleges Group, most of which were deleted as non-notable spam and one or two others currently prodded. I first twigged to this being potential socking when one article that had been deleted, that I had userified upon request by one user, suddenly reappeared with only an external link having been changed - and backtracking, I realised that the user who had "worked" on the page in userspace was not the user whose userspace I had added it to, and upon digging into the contribution histories I realised that there were a series of SPIs working on spamming these things, virtually to the exclusion of any other contributions in many cases; some are clearly pure throwaway accounts. A few of the above are certainly stale but, based on contribs (and deleted contribs, as as noted a large number of these articles were tossed as spam) they're quacking so loudly that ; I suspect there may be more and I'm requesting a CU to check for them. The Bushranger One ping only 20:17, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

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

 * - Of these accounts, JasperHeijboer, Therondp, and Victor997 aren't stale. I'm endorsing for a check between those three, as I think it's possible there is collusion - but then again, they may just be colleagues. —  Hello Annyong  (say whaaat?!) 02:59, 7 January 2012 (UTC)


 * The little data that is still available leaves this I'm afraid. Like HelloAnnyong says, they may simply all just be students at that college. The AfD had a rather strong result so any trivial recreations of those articles can probably just be deleted. If further accounts pop up and/or those pages keep being recreated to the point of disruption feel of-course free to re-open this page.  Amalthea  18:10, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Closing it, per above. May all just be students from those colleges (happens regularly), and not pressing ATM to take any drastic measures. Amalthea  17:35, 9 January 2012 (UTC)