Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-17/Discussion report

Impersonating an admin

 * Author's note: This might be a violation of WP:BEANS; read at your own risk.

What would you do as a CEO, if a user contacted you claiming they could write an article for you? What would you do if the article was deleted and the user demanded payment for the article to be reinstated? This is what happened to New Net Technologies Ltd. However, that is not the worst about this report. The user claiming to be able to reinstate a deleted article was impersonating another user "with high privileges", in this case an administrator.

receives a message on her talk page from a user asking for further information about the user's article. Sarahj2107 has never edited this article, and asks how she can help out. This causes the user to explain that has received emails from another user, claiming to be Sarah. This causes Sarahj2107 to report this to the Administrators' noticeboard.

On the noticeboard a discussion starts regarding how common something like this might be, where users impersonate other users in order to scam people for money. Multiple OTRS-tickets from past events are mentioned, showing a clear pattern demonstrating that this is a recurring phenomenon.

A Checkuser is conducted, resulting in multiple users being discovered, causing users to get even more concerned about this event.

"My guess is this might be just the tip of a WikiPR-like iceberg, and I think there's more than one group of people or companies involved."

The user who alerted Sarahj2107 was blocked for not following Wikipedia's policies; however, this block was overturned after consensus on the noticeboard.

"But he was approached by what he thought was an admin so he thought that he was complying with WP in his actions. [...] He brought it forward after smelling a rat and did the right thing. He has cooperated by sending information via email for the investigation."

Mailing list, a land without rules...
...as long as you are a moderator. In a recent pipermail to the mailing list Wikimedia-l, writes that he has been on moderation on that list for over ten months, and that because there are no set rules for moderators, nor a way to appeal a moderation, it is failing one of our prime directives, transparency.

"However, this being a mailing list, with the moderation team having no accountability to anyone, and abusing their status multiple times in the past year, such decisions come without any discussion -- mostly because they are made behind closed doors in the spirit of Wikimedia transparency."

User, who has also been on moderation on different mailing lists, adds that he shares these views on moderation and the need for some guidelines to be created.

"At the moment moderation can happen without warning, without a rationale being given when requested and with no possibility of appeal."

His claim, however, of having been moderated "without a clear explanation or evidence" leads a moderator to admonish this user, stating, "You're off mod now, but please don't start up again."

A message to you
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