Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Thetranslaterofhistory

Zezzoo24

Zezzoo24 (talk⁺ · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · spi block · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki)

Please note that a case was originally opened under Thetranslaterofhistory (talk · contribs) but has been moved to Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/ Zezzoo24. Future cases should be placed under Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/ Zezzoo24.

19 January 2021

– This SPI case is open.

Suspected sockpuppets

• Ha19870001 (talk⁺ · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · spi block · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki)
• 51.39.65.144 (talk⁺ · tag · contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RBLs · proxy check · block user · spi block · block log · cross-wiki contribs · CheckUser (log))
• 197.113.172.178 (talk⁺ · tag · contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RBLs · proxy check · block user · spi block · block log · cross-wiki contribs · CheckUser (log))

• Tools: Editor interaction utility • Interaction Timeline • User compare report Auto-generated every hour.

These accounts have all been created recently or started editing recently, are all making very similar and disruptive edits on very similar sets of pages, and all within similar time-frames. This is apparent from their respective edit histories but here are some specific examples that seem clear to me:

1. At Emirate of Granada, compare the following 4 edits: by Ha19870001 on January 5, Zezzoo24 on Jan 15, 197.113.172.178 on Jan 15, and 51.39.65.144 on Jan 15. All of them involve inserting "Arab" or replacing other content with "Arab" in multiple spots, which is dubious at best, unsupported by any sources or discussion on the talk page, and in any case a pure POV edit. The most consistent thing is the removal/replacement of "Berber" (a non-Arab ethnicity) in each edit.
2. At Emirate of Sicily, the following 3 edits: by Zezzoo24 on Jan 15, 197.113.172.178 on Jan 15, and Ha19870001 on Jan 18. Again, inserting "Arab" in multiple spots without good reason, and consistently removing "Berber" from the same lead paragraph.
3. At Ali ibn al-Athir, the following 3 edits, which are completely identical and happened within hours of each other on January 15: Zezzoo24, 51.39.65.144, and 197.113.172.178.
4. Lastly, an earlier but less obvious example are these two edits at Moorish architecture: Zezzoo24 on December 25 and Ha19870001 on January 2. The second added more details but both of them involved removing "Berber" and "North Africa" from the same spot.

For what it's worth I already wrote a warning on Zezzoo24's talk page on January 18, and later that day the Ha19870001 account was going at it again (as seen at Emirate of Sicily, already noted above). R Prazeres (talk) 08:21, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Addendum (January 20): Not sure if it's premature or appropriate to add this now, but after this investigation request was posted a new account popped up which seems to be doing very similar things: see their history here. More specifically, their disruptive edits at Emirate of Sicily, which come fresh on the back of previous reverted edits by the other accounts noted above, have the same hallmarks as the others (i.e. removing "Berber" and "North Africa" and needlessly inserting "Arab"): examples here, here, here, and here. For what it's worth, the "fixed typo" edit summary and the type of edit is also worryingly similar to a slew of vandalisms along a similar (but admittedly a little different) pattern reported earlier here and here.

Comments by other users

Accused parties may also comment/discuss in this section below. See Defending yourself against claims.

I am ambivalent about this being sock- as opposed to meat-puppet behavior, but it does appear to be part of a concerted effort to attribute all actions by Muslims in the medieval western Mediterranean specifically to ethnic Arabs, inaccurately replacing every mention of 'Muslim' or 'Moor' with 'Arab', removing attributions to other ethnicities (Berberized-Arab becomes simply Arab, Berber itself is removed entirely), and adding the Arab ethnicity to biographies where it is arguably irrelevant or disputed. It has been going on since December, involving dozens of IPs making the same types of edits on a score of pages. Some of them labeled all of their edits as 'fixed typo', continuing to do so after warnings, one today accepted admonishment and started to use accurate (if misplaced) edit summaries, some have used accurate summaries all along and many have not entered a summary at all. This suggests to me that it is probably not all the same human, but there is certainly some IP hopping by the same person and I don't know about the formal logins. Almost all are new SPAs (and for the IPs with a history, there are long enough gaps to think they are not stable). Not a one of them has gone to a Talk page. Clearly a problem; I just don't know if it is one that can be addressed at SPI here given it is mostly IP behavior. Semi-protecting the entire range of possible pages seems impracticable, so we may need a 1RR topic sanction against changing ethnicity on such pages without discussion to facilitate policing what will likely continue as IP whac-a-mole ad infinitum. Agricolae (talk) 19:43, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, the newest user Thetranslaterofhistory (not listed above but mentioned in my addendum) is behaving less similarly now; whether it's a different person or simply the same person's behaviour evolving (while retaining some bad habits) is, I agree, unclear. I'm not sure how to functionally differentiate between meatpuppets and sockpuppets in this context. Maybe the situation will become clearer after a few days too, depending on how the other accounts behave. R Prazeres (talk) 22:12, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

And after backsliding, Thetranslaterofhistory has just been indeff'ed. I was never quite clear whether they were a vandal pretending to be clue-challenged, or someone so clue-challenged that it made their edits look like vandalism, but someone else made the call, which if nothing else will save me some time on their Talk page. Anyhow, the usual way to distinguish socks from meat for login accounts is a CheckUser, which via top secret black magic often but not always can detect if different accounts are being used by the same human (or at least that the same computer), but there has to be a good case made before a CheckUser is performed, and it is not done to compare IPs to accounts because of 'outing' concerns. For IPs SPI is pretty much restricted to the WP:DUCK standard. Agricolae (talk) 22:05, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

And after User:Thetranslaterofhistory was blocked yesterday, User:Cbrownmax1212 shows up today making a WP:DUCK edit to Emirate of Sicily. Agricolae (talk) 16:51, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

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