Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Wexperts/Archive

13 October 2013

 * Suspected sockpuppets


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Banned sock account, User:Wexperts (note the user name) claims to be part of a group of users taking money to write articles for clients. In his last paragraph he describes a process: "In our case, when we receive offers of paid wiki editing, if the respective topic is not yet covered there, we assess whether it would pass the notability threshold of Wikipedia. If it does not pass, we tell to the client about what is missing and is expected there. If it passes or if it already exists there in a poor state, we present a plan and we will assess a reasonable sum of money for our work on writing about the respective topic. We explain to the client about the choices we consider in rendering the text. In order to be efficient, the paid editing on Wikipedia supposes a long-term foresight. Each article is under the scrutiny of the entire community, determining the subsequent self-regulating process towards a balanced presentation, including all the legitimate points of view about the respective topic."

User:AKonanykin describes himself as part of an organization, named WikiExperts.us. At the wikiexperts.us website, it describes the exact same process which User:Wexperts described: (Google cache).

Similarity of structure of behaviour:

User:Wexperts first registered Special:Log/Wexperts and responded when the issue of paid editing came up for discussion. User:AKnonanykin first registered Special:Log/AKonanykhin and responded when the issue of paid editing came up for discussion. After a ~3 year hiatus of no editing, User:AKnonanykin again starting editing again in response to the issue of paid editing.

User:AKonanykihn meat puppetry independent of previous accounts:

Now, independent of the connection to the previously blocked sock accounts, here User:AKonanykhin explicitly says that he is part of an organization which supplies "a growing network of participating wikipedians with paid assignments". He also says that with these accounts he ignores WP:COI in order to avoid scrutiny. This is a clear indication of meat puppetry and a violation of WP:Sock puppetry in itself. Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 19:47, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

Update: Added User:Camper-mann to list of suspected sockpuppets. Added on the basis of being blocked for editing behaviour on Alex Konanykhin and KMGi Group; this was noted by another user here. Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 23:40, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

Update: On Novermber 10, 2010, 15:36 default time, User:Eclipsed starts adding material to the page Alex Konanykhin. Same date, 17:50 default time, new user named "Konanykhin" on Commons adds a photo of "Alex Konanykhin, author of book Defiance" and describes it as "own work". Same date at 23:46 default time, User:Eclipsed adds that photo to Alex Konanykhin article. User:Eclipsed continues to edit Alex Konanykhin article, which also involved removing potentially negative information (November 20, 2010: ). User:Eclipsed also edits the KMGi (advertising agency) article, including uploading the KMGi logo and adding it to the article. On January 4, 2011 User:Eclipsed indicates that he does paid editing and says that he has a "financial connection" with Alex Konanykhin and KMGi (advertising agency). Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 21:01, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Comments by other users
Note 2, that is me, as my username in the captured page shows. Note 3 shows an old, outdated version of our website talking about how we edited Wikipedia at that time. There are some similiarities between how we do things and how all other paid editing companies do things. That's true. But to say that means we are all the same is false. Note 4 states that WExperts talked about paid editing on Wikipedia in June 2009 again, then note five tries to claim that when I spoke about paid editing in November 2010 that must have been the same thing. There were dozens of people talking about paid editing in these conversations, yet somehow two comments a year and a half apart must be the same person? This is a very tenuous, and false, link. Note 6 shows that I only recently began talking about paid editing again on Wikipedia--that is very true. Please note it is from the exact same account, not from a different one, as the account I used in November 2010. Note 7 revisits my November 2010 posts. In the post they are referring to, I state that running shadow operations is bad business and not what we do. In the "here" note in between 6 and 7, I explain that we have different editors that can take on written assignments. That is true. However, the policy against meatpuppetry prohibits editors to work in concert with one another, which is something we never do. Each editor is independent and does not ever know of the existence of the other editors being paid to edit the site let alone work with them to ensure they do not have the option to function outside the rules. The editors are instructed only to make constructive improvements to Wikipedia and never to break any Wikipedia policies. They do the research and writing on their own, and we only vet the articles to make sure they are neutral before posting them. If we found out an editor was using sockpuppetry, we would fire them. As for User:Camper-mann, his actions were a very long time ago, in February of 2009. To be honest, I may well have sought out an editor at that time to adjust our pages, long before I ever got into the Wikipedia editing business. Obviously that user did a bad job. Their edits in July 2009 were to add categories to the pages they had previously edited, which I can see from their contribution log. This was all long before the launch of WikiExperts, by more than a year. When discussing User:Eclipsed, let me point out that he declared COI on the articles he edited very clearly. From what I recall, he asked me to submit a photo for my page, and I uploaded the photo to Wikipedia Commons so that it could be added to the page. This is common practice on Wikipedia, for individuals on Wikipedia to submit photos of themselves that they own to Wikipedia, releasing them into the public domain so that they can be used. Not knowing the ins and outs of Wikipedia accounts at that time, I assumed I needed a different account for Wikipedia Commons than the one I had for Wikipedia, so I opened one there under my name. That account has never been used for anything other than uploading that one photo, and was never used on Wikipedia. Obviously I've since learned that you can use your Wikipedia account to upload photos onto Wikipedia Commons, but this was foreign to me in November 2010. Note, that my WP account is also using my last name and was never used for making any edits on any page, so there’s no attempt to do activity using two accounts, let alone to pretend that they are not connected. So correct me if I'm wrong, you are saying that I am a sock or meat/sockpuppet because: a) An organization existed with a username similar to our company name over a year prior to the company's existence; b) I may have asked a Wikipedia editor to update my page and the page of KMGi in February 2009, almost two years before I founded WikiExperts, and they did a rotten job; and c) I opened a Wikipedia Commons account, using my own name as the account name, to add a photo, instead of using my Wikipedia account, so that an editor that had clearly declared a conflict of interest could post that photo to Wikipedia? Let me be clear that the February 2009 incident occurred before I understood anything about Wikipedia and long before I founded WikiExperts, which has never engaged in such shoddy practices as User:Camper-mann did, and has never engaged in sockpuppetry. I am fully willing to apologize for hiring a bad editor in February 2009 to update my page, and for opening a Wikipedia Commons account due to my lack of knowledge of the differences between those two sites. I would also like to add that User:Atethnekos has purposely removed the source supporting the founding date WikiExperts from its Wikipedia page, at the same time they were formulating this argument against me. This is unfortunate as there are many sources that support our founding date, and the one they removed was removed only because it is a deadlink, not because it did not support our founding date. I find this to be troubling behaviour, as the user's argument relies on making tenuous connections between distant and largely unrelated events stronger, which could possibly be achieved by altering the sourcing on the WikiExperts.us Wikipedia page. To that end, can somebody please replace that deadlink with this live link for the article? AKonanykhin (talk) 17:14, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
 * WExperts explains in the link given as Note 1 that he is a member of a group of veteran Wikipedia editors forming an alliance to speak about paid editing. This is done at the end of June 2009, over a year before WikiExperts comes into being. In addition, WikiExperts was founded by myself and Silvina Moschini, without any Wikipedia editors being a part of the ownership or original management structure. We had no knowledge of the existence of WExperts until it was brought up here and at the AN. They are somebody else. I can see how the usernames are similar, yes, but that's not surprising as Wikipedia and Expert fit well together in many permutations; permutations that could be attractive to an organization looking to declare itself experts in Wikipedia. However, we have nothing to do with them, and they have nothing to do with us.

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments

 * - CheckUser is not necessary or helpful in cases of meatpuppetry. King of &hearts;   &diams;   &clubs;  &spades; 06:06, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks, King. But why do you think the relationship between AKonanykhin, Wexperts and Camper-mann is more likely to be meat-puppetry than sock-puppetry if anything at all?  I think particularly the similarities between User:AKonanykhin and User:Wexperts suggest they are the very same person. -- Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 06:18, 14 October 2013 (UTC)


 * blocked and banned per community consensus: . Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:30, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Everyone's blocked. Rschen7754 09:07, 18 October 2013 (UTC)