Wikipedia talk:Sock farming

About this page
I have not sorted out the published research on sock farming. I have heard lots of people who do data analysis on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects say that it appears to exist as an automated process. I am not aware of anyone having research detecting a large human-managed sock farm, but there do seem to be automated processes for farming socks which are fairly easy to detect with automated detection processes.

I do not have the data at hand. I think no one has featured this topic as the subject of research, and that all descriptions of this are incidental discoveries in pursuit of some other research goal.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  14:38, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

August 2019 steward bottleneck
 Blue Rasberry  (talk)  17:27, 29 August 2019 (UTC)
 * meta:Wikimedia_Forum/Archives/2019-08

Detection information
User:Bluerasberry There is an ongoing case that looks very much like a sock farm. Are there available tools or code somewhere that might be of assistance? -- Green  C  16:16, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
 * user:GreenC I am not aware of anything. People who do data analysis believe they find sock farms, but I know of no one who has described a method of identification. The only way I know to identify a sock farm is to have a team do analysis, which is not easy. Every team or researcher would do it a different way. There is no tool to do this automatically. If you have a story that you want to share then I encourage you to briefly write it up and post it on this page. If you are shy to write for whatever reason, then I could help, perhaps by meeting you for voice chat, interviewing you, taking notes, then posting those. Best wishes for your circumstance. I can only suggest to post to the admin noticeboard for other thoughts.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  16:25, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I was wondering about "Various machine learning projects are identifying what seem to be clusters of sock farmed accounts" in case you knew what those projects are. The case at arb request is a matter of "this looks really strange", sock farm is one candidate theory.  --  Green  C  17:50, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
 * One of the projects is meta:Research:Automatic Detection of Online Abuse. That project had many findings and documented only a few, as research projects do. Among the undocumented findings was the seeming existence of sock farms generated and managed by an automated process. The method of detection was using machine learning to cluster accounts with behavior in common, and finding many odd accounts with a common odd pattern of behavior.
 * If you like I could say something at ArbCom, but what would be useful? I am nearly at the limit of the information I have to share.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  18:13, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I would suggest wait for evidence gathering phase if it gets accepted, if you want to comment on the editing patterns observed in some of those accounts that look farm-like. You only get 500 characters words in the current phase which is not an evidence phase. Thanks for the Research link. It looks like a broad sweep of accounts to pick out cases for review rather than inputing a small number of cases and looking for patterns that look like sock farming. -- Green  C  18:32, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Can you please ping me if and when you think my description would be useful? I would say that such farms exist and link to this description I wrote here. I otherwise do not know the case, but am happy to share this much. I would not be able to evaluate any particular cases.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  18:42, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
 * No problem will do. It's running 50/50 chance of being accepted by ArbCom. -- Green  C  20:23, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Merge Suggestion
I suggest we merge this with Sockpuppetry. I feel like it has to little information for its own article. PrincessJoey2024 (talk) 02:36, 29 January 2024 (UTC)