Wikipedia talk:Sockpuppet investigations/Editor2626744

Pseudonym
This account is closely connected to Deep K. Patel, a young author of mostly formulaic business articles and clickbait. These accounts have very aggressively tried to create article for Patel and his book, and have also added many spammy refs to Patel's blog posts. His contributions to Huffington Post are WP:SPS, since they fall under the "contributor" banner, also called "The Blog". This content has little editorial oversight and is not generally reliable.

At some point, links to Huffington Post clickbait written by Patel were added to Ranker and The Surreal Life.

At some later point, these two articles shifted to another author. The links are the same, but the articles now list Jeff Copelan as having written them. The Ranker ref was updated but the other was not, which is how I noticed this. (It was spam, anyway so I removed it)

Patel is still active on Huffington Post as of August 2017, but Copelan's two most recent post have been removed without explanation. His most recent active post is from April 2017.

It's pretty clear this is a pseudonym. Copelan's author page's url includes "dpk", which is presumably a reference to Patel's initials. They've also published alternate universe versions of the same article: 3 Tips for Executing a Successful Kickstarter Campaign and 3 Rules to Have a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign. The three things are not the same, so this is not self-plagiarism or anything, but still obviously similar.

Since I've removed the spam links, this would be very difficult to notice if this sock farm starts up again, which is why I'm leaving a note here. Grayfell (talk) 21:43, 14 September 2017 (UTC)