Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Wendystarland/Archive

Suspected sockpuppets
Pro forma report (filed purely for record-keeping). See below. Mz7 (talk) 02:49, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

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Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments

 * ✅. This is a series of single-purpose accounts involved with the Wendy Starland article. Based on certain patterns in the technical data, I believe it is more likely that these accounts are all one person, rather than multiple closely related individuals. (I will say, the age of these accounts is pretty remarkable: the master account was created in 2008, Albertliggins in 2015.), closing. Mz7 (talk) 02:49, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

Suspected sockpuppets

 * ( originally filed under this user)

Both accounts are WP:SPAs, with Albertliggins only having edited Wendy Starland plus one other article (since 2015), and Duanepem only having edited Wendy Starland (since 2020). Until the episode described below both users were inactive, having previously edited 25 April 2022 and 7 August 2022, respectively. Yesterday, July 31, Albertliggins made a series of highly promotional additions to the article (which included copyviolations), then readded them when reverted. In addition, the article was nominated for deletion and this same editor twice removed the AfD notice (first was part of previous diff, and here). At this point this editor stopped and 1hr 14mins later Duanepem started making the same edits over and over again and aparrently without fear of being blocked; they readded the same content here and here and removed the AfD notice (once part of previous diff, here, here and here, amongst others). For their disruptive editing Duanepem was issued a temporary block.

It is, of course, possible that these two completely independent SPAs, one of which strongly agreed with the edits the other had tried and given up making - but the fact the two accounts were making the same edits, having both been inactive for a year, and that the fact that Duanepem effectively "sacrificed" themself to protect Albertliggins, strikes me as highly suspicious and worthy of investigation. At the very least we appear to have meatpuppetry here. Dorsetonian (talk) 07:50, 1 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Note - both editors have now been blocked as sockpuppets, per Sockpuppet investigations/Wendystarland. Dorsetonian (talk) 06:05, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

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Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments

 * Merged case from Sockpuppet investigations/Albertliggins, closing. Thanks, Spicy (talk) 05:25, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Suspected sockpuppets
declared COI for Wendy Starland, after a month's absence. 20 minutes later they recreated in a single edit a deeply spammy draft quite close to the Wayback version of Wendy Starland at Draft:Wendy Starland (American Singer and Songwriter), then hit submit. I've moved it to Draft:Wendy Starland. Wikishovel (talk) 16:24, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

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Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments

 * The draft is an identical copy to this revision. 0x Deadbeef →∞ (talk to me) 09:20, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
 * When I meant identical, I actually meant "Almost identical" - there are some differences, but there are so many places where the sentences are exactly the same with the citation to the same link. 0x Deadbeef →∞ (talk to me) 11:10, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Requesting CU: although all accounts except this one are stale, I was hoping if there were logs/data kept from the old case. It's likely that this person/group will come back to haunt us, and technical data (if they exist) would be useful in evaluating whether this is a MEAT/SOCK or different people who are closely related. 0x Deadbeef →∞ (talk to me) 12:32, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
 * - Is the old CU data useful here?  Vanjagenije   (talk)  01:00, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
 * There is some data available; based on that, Tsmith47 is somewhere between and  RoySmith (talk) 16:33, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I suppose I'm being a bit lenient here, but I've left them a final warning. Should they continue to waste our time, I'll block. If anyone thinks they should be blocked instead, feel free to replace my warning with a block message. 0x Deadbeef →∞ (talk to me) 11:25, 11 December 2023 (UTC)