Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets/Josef09


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the case of suspected sockpuppetry. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page. All edits should go to the talk page of this case. If you are seeing this page as a result of an attempt to open a new case of sockpuppetry of the same user, read this for detailed instructions.

User:Josef09

 * Suspected sockpuppeteer


 * Suspected sockpuppets

Dyanega 17:40, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Report submission by


 * Evidence

This user has been incessantly reverting a chunk of text in the Colony Collapse Disorder article which - in this case - is inappropriate for inclusion, and for which I devoted a huge explanation as to WHY it was inappropriate (in this April 27 edit: ) - all of this after earlier warnings that parts of his edits were a violation of WP:NOR. Instead of responding, within a matter of hours of my posting this explanation, a series of identical edits has begun appearing, all from what appear to be public computers in the user's home city of Vienna, Austria. These edits are all anonymous, and the two most recent have come after I warned the user that he should sign his edits when editing from multiple IP addresses. The effort here appears to be to circumvent WP:3RR, and there are two points that suggest this sockpuppetry is deliberate; (1) in one edit, the editor referred to the primary account in the third person. (2) on the talk page, on several occasions, he has concealed his username by using the following trick: bogobogo, in edits such as this one:. If you examine the edits to this article from the IP numbers listed above, they are all the same (even including the same misspelling of "Georgia" as "Gorgia") - though other edits from these IP numbers indicate that multiple users have access to these machines.

P.S. This user, after I posted the sockpuppet notice on his talk page, reverted again via 195.3.113.178 and included his username, Josef09, in the "comment"; see, and then several unsigned reverts followed via 81.223.24.208 - the total number of identical reverts now stands at around a dozen. Dyanega 16:32, 2 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Comments

I have been as patient and polite as possible, and even warned him that failure to sign his posts when using multiple IPs could result in administrative intervention. His edits and reverts are disruptive and inappropriate, toy with the fringes of WP:NOR, and - honestly - if some admin can simply take him aside, and explain to him that he needs to leave that article alone, that would be plenty for me. Apparently, though, this is the only article in WP that he has ever edited, so it may be the sole reason he has an account (his edits have universally promoted a "conspiracy theory" interpretation, that the honey bee dieoffs are due to genetically modified crops, suggesting that his motivations involve environmental activism). There is nothing wrong with activism, inherently (ironically, I myself am an environmental activist - but also a professional scientist), but the selective misquotes, revert warring, and manipulation of sockpuppets take this beyond the point where any appeal to reason seems likely to work (he has stated, for example, "it would be great if there could be a citation - but I do not think that Wikipedia is all about that what authorities say" and "but I do not drop such personel opinions though there is no reference"). I do not think he understands what WP is, or how it works.

I can only conclude that the anonymous edits from these various IP numbers are deliberate violations of policy as outlined in WP:SOCK; the odds of so many identical or near-identical edits, all from Vienna, Austria, and all within a span of four days, staggers the imagination.


 * Conclusions
 * These edits are probably all by the same person, but I've left them unblocked for now, and semi-protected the article and its talk page instead. Hopefully the user will discuss his desired changes. --Akhilleus (talk) 18:26, 3 May 2007 (UTC)