Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets/Evrik (2nd)

User:Evrik

 * Suspected sockpuppeteer


 * Suspected sockpuppets


 * Report submission by

Pigman ☿ 02:24, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Since South Philly is already indef blocked for sockpuppetry, a sock connection to Evrik would amount to a current evasion of an indef block. A checkuser showed the South Philly and Evrik accounts unrelated but the checkuser admin on the case, Alison, also said "checkuser results suggest these users are obviously unrelated, but there do appear to be strong meatpuppetry concerns." Close examination of the edit histories of South Philly, Evrik and Student erotica indicates sockpuppetry rather than meatpuppetry.
 * Evidence

My analysis of the editing patterns of the three accounts over the entire life of South Philly's account strongly suggests the use of two geographically separated computers for these accounts, possibly home and work or a similar arrangement. Evrik and South Philly's editing sessions never overlapped. Nor did either account ever overlap with the Student erotica account. There was usually a pause of between a half hour to two hours between log-ins and log-outs. There were a very few instances of faster switching (4 and 11 minutes) between edits of the different accounts which might be explained by signing out and in on the same computer. Unfortunately, the info on these particular examples is probably well outside the checkuser buffer/cache since they are over 6 months ago, so could not be examined by Checkuser. Two (or three?) accounts from the same geographic area (Philadelphia, PA, USA) who never overlap signins for twenty months seems highly unlikely to me. The two main accounts (Evrik and South Philly) both did heavy and long edit sessions, usually sequentially. The pause between the accounts' switchoff was always clean, clear, regular and unmistakable.

I'm not going to detail the specific WP policy violations committed by this use of sockpuppet accounts here because they are fairly well laid out at the South Philly checkuser report. The main concern is that this is a block evasion by an indef-blocked user.

I should also mention an early sockpuppet case against Evrik although the result was inconclusive and doesn't appear to be related to this case. Pigman ☿ 02:24, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Addendum: Also of note is that the very few times where switchover from one account to another was under a half hour occurred during disputes where the additional account opinion would make a marked difference in discussion and consensus. Pigman ☿ 02:51, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

I recuse myself from this case as I have known Evrik for a long time via the ScoutingWikiProject. — Rlevse  •  Talk  • 04:18, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Comments

This is a total waste of time. Thanks. --evrik (talk) 06:37, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
 * First, Student Erotica was banned for being a sockpuppet of South Philly. To repeat what was said above, "a checkuser showed the South Philly and Evrik accounts unrelated."
 * Second, when South Philly and Student erotica were both banned. I had no involvement and was not referenced in any manner. I'm amazed this is even coming up now.
 * Third, to my knowledge I have never interacted with Pigman before but in reality this is retaliation, and an abuse of the system. Recently Pigman said, "After his recent appearance in a few RfAs, I decided to look into what User:Evrik has been up to lately." Well, what he is referring to is my "oppose" vote in Kathryn NicDhàna's RfA. Pigman and Kathryn NicDhàna have worked together closely in the past. This is retaliation for that vote. My simple vote was responded to by pigman with this screed. Also, the claim of meatpuppetry was made a user who also supported Kathryn's RfA.
 * Fourth, twenty months? This went on for twenty months and the last evidence was 8 months ago? Most of the activity listed by Pigman at Requests for checkuser/Case/South Philly happened months ago. None of this was brought up at the time by any of the involved parties.
 * Finally, I'm not sure about some of the wording used by Pigman, specifically "overlapping." I never overlapped, but some edits were within 4 and 11 minutes? Does wikipedia have a policy on overlapping edits?
 * The word "overlapping" refers to editing sessions. Since you and South Philly allegedly live in the same time zone (and city), it would be expected that at some points your different individual account editing sessions would overlap. That is, you would both be signed in and editing at the same time on occasion. Thus, the different account editing sessions would overlap in time. For example, you (Evrik) might edit from 7pm to 11pm and South Philly from 9pm to 1am. Editing from both accounts would overlap between 9pm and 11pm. These two accounts never overlapped editing sessions. For this to happen over a twenty month period is very, very unlikely. At some points, both accounts were editing quite heavily for long periods yet there was always a gap of around 45 minutes plus or minus between when one account stopped editing and the other began. These gaps were quite regular. Of course there were longer gaps but these in particular were noticeable for their regularity. There were two gaps in editing sessions between accounts that were shorter than 30 minutes (4 and 11 minutes) which interested me because these particular exceptions happened during conflicts where an additional voice and account could make a difference in 3RR and votestacking. These instances still did not result in overlapping editing sessions of the accounts.


 * While this is circumstantial evidence, it is extremely strong evidence. To be blunt, as an admin I believe the evidence is strong enough for me to block you without bringing it here. I'm bringing it here in the interest of transparency and your long history on Wikipedia. Pigman ☿ 19:40, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, I can't really speak as to the overlap, but I don't really know if what you say is true. The raw data may be there for every to see, but I'm not going to go through 20 months of edits in an effort to defend myself. This is ludicrous. It's a waste of time. I feel sorry for you that you felt compelled to waste your own time in doing this research.

I also believe that no matter what I say you wouldn't be convinced. I've said all I could say. I did file a notice here Administrators%27 noticeboard. --evrik (talk) 04:44, 3 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I find it interesting that neither here nor at your complaint against me on the Admin Noticeboard do you actually explicitly address or deny the connection I've asserted between the accounts. As to the waste of my time, I believe that, as an admin, investigating this sort of thing is part of my responsibilities on Wikipedia. I probably wouldn't have spent the time on it if I hadn't become an admin. I certainly wouldn't have posted this if I wasn't confident in my findings. These are extremely serious violations of policy, and manipulation of consensus through sockpuppetry goes to the heart of Wikipedia process of decision-making . If we can't trust that the voices discussing issues on talk and project pages are separate people, the process becomes very tainted and unreliable. Pigman ☿ 22:56, 3 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I am nobod's sock or meatpuppet. What you call meatpupptery, I call loyalty, you understand that concept pigman, don't you? It was your loyalty to Kathryn NicDhàna that made you feel compelled to start this whole mess. Also, your theory doesn't take into account that people also edit under IP addresses and on the other projects. Have you taken that into account, or did you just look at the english wikipedia? By the way, i've asked to be unblocked again. South Philly 00:48, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I thought when I said, "a checkuser showed the South Philly and Evrik accounts unrelated" that I had explicitly addressed and denied the connection. You can say what you want about your responsibilities, but your motivations are based in retribution for some perceived slight. --evrik (talk) 19:39, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

I find it mildly interesting that pigman is using quite a strong language just because he finds there is no overlapping. Man, you look very much like the number one to me. Stop pissing and do show real evidence. Otherwise I may suspect you are an ally of the enemy. I am also an admin and I might just as well block you just for this.

Yes, I have come here to pester you because you seem so literally overcome with the sense of power. Many years without writing and what do I find: shit again. Bye. Pfortuny (talk) 10:52, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Comments from User:Shalom: Rlevse asked me via email to look at this case. I've spent more than two hours working on it, which is much longer than I've spent on any other sock puppet case.

I'm really torn. Evrik hasn't exactly been a model citizen, but he's been around for more than two years (longer than me) and has done good things. It would require very strong proof to block such an established contributor. Alison said in the checkuser that Evrik and South Philly are "clearly unrelated", but there are "strong meatpuppetry concerns."

There is no doubt that Evrik and South Philly have had much interaction on Wikipedia, and have worked cooperatively in debates. Pigman laid out some evidence in the checkuser case, which he linked above. I looked and found that some other edits left by each user on the other's talk page, or on a third user's talk page, corroborate this connection.

So, are they the same person?

Let's suppose they are. If that's true, we would have to establish the following scenario. Evrik started in Summer 2005 and became active fairly quickly. In February 2006 he was editing for several hours a day, at somewhat erratic time spans and intervals. He was engaged in a month-long revert war with Boothy443 about whether to categorize Philadelphia as a county (Boothy said no, Evrik said yes). On February 16 around 1:00 UTC, South Philly makes his first edit. In his 3rd edit, he substitutes his signature for an IP signature on a comment to Boothy443 saying he should be "banned from wikipedia." On the 4th edit, he reverts the category to Evrik's version. A little less than an hour later, he leaves a barnstar on Evrik's page, thanking him for standing up against miscreants. Evrik later leaves a comment, thanking South Philly for the barnstar.

Pigman has documented cooperation between the two accounts in a mediation, an arbitration, an AFD, and several "votes" at WikiProject awards. I will not review this evidence in detail here, but I did look at almost all of it.

If they are the same person, they would probably have similar writing styles. Unfortunately, forensic examination of writing samples is an inexact technique for which I am no expert. I notice that Evrik's writing style is more precise. He likes to use multiple bullet points in a discussion, as he has done here and on the checkuser page. South Philly occasionally does this too, but not as much. I found it interesting that on the Monserratt AFD, Evrik cited news articles using bullet points, whereas South Philly wrote in an ordinary running paragraph with a noticeably different style. I've also noticed that South Philly makes a lot of spelling mistakes, which doesn't seem to be much of a problem for Evrik.

Pigman has suggested that South Philly and Evrik are likely to be the same person because they never exactly overlapped in their editing times, but they came within a few minutes of doing that during heated debates. Honestly, I'm not too impressed by evidence based on the fact that an overlap didn't happen. The fact that the two accounts did a revert on the same page within minutes of each other is, of course, significant.

I think the collaborative revert warring and mediation on pentagram, etc. can be explained as two people having the same opinion and watchlisting the same pages. That doesn't explain how South Philly got started on Evrik's issues in Feb. 2006, probably not as a truly "new" user, but I think it's possible to explain that as meat puppetry rather than sock puppetry.

The real killer for me is the overall editing pattern. I rely on a sense that two editors are interested in the same subjects if I want to consider them the same person. There is some overlap on Philadelphia-related subjects, but there is also a lot of separation. Evrik, somewhat like me, edits anything and everything. He has amassed more than 25,000 edits to a range of namespaces, including more than 3,000 edits each to Talk:, User talk:, and Wikipedia:. He's maintained a consistently high activity level for more than two years. (No, this is not an RFA.) He's made more than 150 edits each to Scouting in Connecticut and Saint symbology and has been active in both Wikiprojects on Scouting and Saints. South Philly has had nothing to do with either topic.

South Philly edited a little in February 2006, then reached a peak of activity in June through August 2006 before becoming fairly inactive until he was banned. The increase in editing by South Philly did not have a measurable effect on the edit rate of Evrik. Notably, in July 2006, at the peak of his activity, South Philly edited 1070 times, but Evrik also reached the peak of his activity in the same month, with 2059 edits (slightly more than his second-most of 2031 in October). If Evrik and South Philly were the same person, we would have to believe that this person edited Wikipedia 3,100 times in July 2006, but never edited 2,100 times (more than 1,000 less!) in any other month.

It's also noteworthy that South Philly concentrated most of his editing on (guess what?) South Philly, and did not branch out as much into other topics. He did not focus a lot of energy on any single article. His maximum number of edits to a single article was Erotica with 12 edits; second place is Rocky Steps with 10; third is South Philadelphia with 8; and so on. Evrik routinely edited many articles 40, 50 or even 100 times, and these articles generally had little or nothing to do with Philadelphia. If these two accounts are the same person, he would have to consciously focus on Scouting, Saints and whatnot with his main account, then save his Philadelphia-related editing for the sock puppet. I'm not quite sure if I believe this is plausible.

The more I think about this case, the more convinced I am that these are probably two different people. Definitely there are "meat puppetry concerns", as Alison put it, and I'm not thrilled about all the conflicts Evrik has been involved in. In the best-case scenario, it looks like Evrik drafted a friend to help revert-war with Boothy443, then this friend went on to do some editing independently, always staying loyal to his teacher in various disputes, big and small. Even though Boothy443 was not a model citizen either, I cannot perceive all this controversy as laudatory behavior by any of the sides.

But, after reviewing this case as carefully as I am able, I suggest a verdict of not guilty for Evrik. There are some things in the "one-person" hypothesis that just don't add up. In a sense, I'm glad that as a non-admin, I don't have to take responsibility for these decisions, but to anyone who wishes to take responsibility, I would say this: in order to block an established user with 2+ years of activity and 25,000 edits, you better have no doubt about it. I've raised some serious doubts, and that should be enough to let Evrik off the hook. Shalom (Hello • Peace) 05:53, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Note: Here are the "Interiot's tool" edit counter pages for Evrik, South Philly, and Student erotica:
 * Evrik
 * South Philly
 * Student erotica

Evidence provided does not support a conclusion of sockpuppetry. Concur with Shalom’s extensive analysis. &mdash; User: (talk) 01:50, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Conclusions