Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Scibaby

Scibaby

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

Populated account categories: confirmed · suspected

Older archives were moved to an archive of the archive because of the page size and are listed below:

• Sockpuppet investigations/Scibaby/Archive/1
• Sockpuppet investigations/Scibaby/Archive/2
• Sockpuppet investigations/Scibaby/Archive/3

For archived investigations, see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Scibaby/Archive.

A long-term abuse case exists at Wikipedia:Long-term abuse/Scibaby.

Report date August 3 2009, 21:58 (UTC)

Suspected sockpuppets

• A Complete Fiasco (talk⁺ · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · spi block · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki) - sockpuppet of user:Scibaby
• GoRight (talk⁺ · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · spi block · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki) - Scibaby meatpuppet

Evidence submitted by Raul654

I was told that SPI is the proper venue to bring meatpuppetry complaints. user:GoRight has on multiple previous occasions meatpuppted on behalf of Scibaby:

• Tim Ball, March 17-18 2009: Scibaby edits Tim Ball's article to make false claims.. Scibaby is reverted. GoRight revert wars to include it, claiming Scibaby's edit is true. GoRight is proven wrong.
• Capitol Power Plant, March 11 2009: Scibaby adds biased, irrelavant information to an article. It's reverted. GoRight revert wars and later claims his revert wasn't a revert.
• A new account, user:Barstoole, starts editing Wikipedia articles, inserting inflammatory or misleading statements pertaining to global warming. In some cases, these edits [1][2] are word-for-word identical to edits made by previously blocked Scibaby sockpuppets. [3][4]. GoRight then complains that previous checkuser evidence pertaining to sockpuppetry was manufactured, implying that the word-for-word identical edits are just a coincidence. [5] Subsequent investigation by Nishkid shows that Barstoole is one of 15 newly registered scibaby accounts.[6]. GoRight continues claiming the evidence is fabricated [7] until informed that Nishkid made the identification. [8]

GoRight has been warned many times about this behavior, but continues to flagrantly violate the meatpuppetry policy. (In fact, there's an ongoing arbitration case where Abd is accused of behavior identical to GoRight's. GoRight has, in that arbitration case, made workshop proposals to redefine meatpuppetry to exclude his and Abd's actions)

Recently, Scibaby showed up and made this edit. The account was tagged, blocked, and reverted, and a "this user is a sockpuppet" comment was made in the edit history. GoRight later showed up and reverted back to that edit. This is a clear violation of Wikipedia:Ban#Editing_on_behalf_of_banned_users and Wikipedia:Ban#Enforcement_by_reverting_edits (Users are generally expected to refrain from reinstating edits made by banned users in violation of the ban, and such edits may be viewed as meatpuppetry.). Since this is his fourth violation, and since he's had multiple previous warnings, I think a substantial block is in order. Raul654 (talk) 21:58, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

(Replying to Nathon) - As you said, GoRight must prove that all of his restorations of Scibaby's edits were verifiable and that he had independent reasons for making them; otherwise he is in violation of the banning policy. All we have is his self-serving word that he made them independently, which is not credible on its face. What he is saying, in essence, is that he just happened to restore Scibaby's edit character-for-character, and was not influenced by Scibaby's edit? That is absurd on its face. Raul654 (talk) 03:17, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Comments by accused parties    See Defending yourself against claims.

I deny having ever been a meat puppet for Scibaby or anyone else. Any content that I have added or removed to or from the project I have done as a result of my own free will and a sincere desire to improve the encyclopedia.

I can make a few blanket statements at the outset:

1. I was never recruited by Scibaby. If Raul has evidence that I was he should present it here and now.
2. I have never acted at the direction of Scibaby. If Raul has evidence that I have he should present it here and now.
3. I have never acted with the intention to specifically aid Scibaby in any way. If Raul has evidence that I ever had such intent he should present it here and now.
4. If I ever unknowingly restored something of Scibaby's that cannot be considered meat puppetry.
5. If I ever knowingly restored something of Scibaby's all of the following will have been true:
   • I will not have done so at the direction of Scibaby.
   • I will not have done so with the intent to aid Scibaby in any way.
   • I will have personally verified any material that I restored as being WP:V.
   • I will have personally accepted responsibility for the content that I restored.
   • I will have had my own independent reasons for restoring the content.
6. WP:MEAT and WP:BAN make it clear that when someone is banned it is the user who is banned and not the POV or ideas that they may have held. As such WP:BAN provides a number of important exceptions to protect users such as myself from needless and disruptive accusations as we see here from Raul. The simple fact that I might hold views which resemble Scibaby, or that I choose to adopt some theme that was once posited by Scibaby, does NOT make me a meat puppet for Scibaby. This should be obvious.

In this case Raul is seeking to use Scibaby as a tool to control and intimidate those with whom he disagrees in content disputes as a means of pushing his own personal POV. In so doing he abuses his substantial administrator and checkuser privileges to gain advantage in those content disputes, and he does so to the detriment of the project. This is not the intended purpose of either WP:MEAT or WP:BAN.

I hereby claim that it should be all too obvious that this is merely another in a long line of actions on Raul's part to try and have me banned or otherwise sanctioned merely because he disagrees with my POV on global warming and other issues. A brief summary of that history can be found here and more recently on the following ArbCom pages: Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William M. Connolley/Evidence and Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William M. Connolley/Workshop.

As a example of Raul's veracity in making such charges against me, please take the time to review the descriptions he has placed in the WP:ATTACKPAGE he maintains against me here and then follow the links and read my edits in context. I believe that they demonstrate a clear propensity on his part to stretch the truth beyond all reasonable recognition or proportion. The same is being done here today, but merely in a different forum and from a newly devised angle of attack.

As a single example of what I mean, Raul previously claimed that I had "provoked [an incident for which he blocked me and was subsequently overturned] by making this series of inflammatory edits [9][10][11] ..." to which an uninvolved administrator, User:B, remarked "There is nothing inflammatory about those edits - all three were in good faith and there is no way that an unbiased, uninvolved admin would consider them to be disruptive."

The bottom line is that you CANNOT take Raul at his word on ANY of these issues. You will have to follow the links and read them in context to form your own opinion of the reality behind his facade.

I will attempt to address the evidence he has provided in detail over the next day or two but I have other pressing matters at the current ArbCom proceedings to attend to first. I ask your indulgence in this regard. If this is not an acceptable timeframe please let me know and I shall try to accommodate you accordingly. There is no pressing danger to the project here. Given the literally thousands upon thousands of edits that Scibaby has likely made in total the paltry few incidents that Raul has been able to dredge up actually speaks volumes on whether I am a meat puppet for Scibaby, or not. --GoRight (talk) 02:04, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Comments by other users

• This is nothing more than continued harassment of GoRight, going on for more than a year, and which is related to a current RfAr in which Raul654 raises the claim of meat puppetry against GoRight and myself without a shred of evidence, based on viciously wikilawyered interpretations of WP:MEAT. . Hence this is forum-shopping in a long-standing crusade to persuade other administrators to block GoRight. Sockpuppet investigations are not to be used in the service of content disputes, which is what this is at root. The most recent sequence described by Raul is three months old.
  • The first Timothy F. Ball edit is IP. No evidence is provided other than Raul's statement that this is Scibaby, and surely the edit itself is hardly evidence of that. While it's possible that checkuser Raul654 has secret or other evidence on this, he is a vigorous and dedicated anti-Scibaby crusader, Scibaby being a massive sock farm, 300 socks and counting, that he inspired in 2007 through his abuse, and the battle is doing substantial collateral damage; if that edit is typical for Scibaby, and it seems it is, this is hardly worth extensive range blocks which result in massive inability to edit Wikipedia by IP editors, confounding Foundation policy.
  • The reverting editor is Raul654 himself, highly involved in the overall content dispute.
  • It's true that GoRight responds to Raul654's revert, which was a bald revert, the kind that matches the intention of the prohibition for edit warring, whereas GoRight restores different content, with three sources. That's not revert warring, and even if we accept Raul's claim that this is Scibaby, and that Scibaby is banned, bans are not of content, but of editors, and if a banned editor asserts content that is later sourced and reinserted, this is not meat puppetry unless it was done at the direction of or with the intention of acting for another editor.
  • Raul654 then reverted GoRight's sourced edit as "vandalism."
  • More revert warring ensued, with Raul654 reverting up there with the rest. I fail to see anything resembling meat puppetry. If that IP was Scibaby, so what? It was a bare suggestion of a fact; we are not prohibited from asserting facts because a banned editor first points them out. Was this a fact? I don't know. Raul654 asserts that GoRight was "proven wrong." He cites as the proof, above, his own revert, apparently referring to a link he gives in his edit summary. He doesn't mention that the paragraph he restored was then removed by a sitting arbitrator, Cool Hand Luke, who was apparently not convinced by this "proof." I wonder why Raul isn't filing SSP reports claiming meat puppetry for the arb?
  • The current article does not have the material that Raul654 was revert warring to keep in. It was all removed March 23 by Atmoz, and that stuck. Great edit summary: (BLP; UNDUE; OR; RS; and a partidge in a pear tree) I.e., Raul654, one of our most highly privileged editors, was editing to maintain material that violated numerous policies. Read it and weep.
  • What I see here is what I've seen by a group of editors, including Raul654, since I first noticed and investigated Raul654's charges in Wikipedia:Requests for comment/GoRight, a year before: Tag team revert-warring and incivility, by several administrators and certain supporters. It's shameful that it's been allowed to continue.
  • When the first example is this bad, I won't bother to cover the older reports. The claims of revert warring are irrelevant, this is not the 3RR noticeboard, which Raul654 shopped at previously to this. The meat puppetry charges are being addressed before ArbComm already, so this is pure disruptive distraction. --Abd (talk) 02:56, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

• Comment I'm uninvolved in this and don't know about the history here, the RfAr, etc., all I know is what I saw in the recent AN3 report. No offense intended to Raul, but personally I don't see any evidence there that GoRight is nothing but a meatpuppet. Per the MEAT policy, simply restoring edits of a banned user doesn't automatically make you a meatpuppet; it may be frowned upon, but the fact of the matter is sometimes a user will see a banned edit that they happen to agree with, and restore it. I myself have done so before (on Montpellier, when a banned user made an edit that happened to include a useful copyedit without any pov problems [12]). The definition of a true "meatpuppet" is much stronger than this; it requires not only that you did a similar edit as a banned user, but that you literally are getting e-mails from the banned user or whatever and doing what he tells you to do. Raul's diffs above might show that GoRight was inappropriately edit-warring or inappropriately restoring banned-user edits without consensus, but as of yet I don't see evidence that he is truly getting instructions from SciBaby and carrying them out; without such evidence, I don't see how we could take any administrative action. Note: I don't know anything about the other edits discussed, I'm only referring to the ones I saw at the AN3 report; I'm not really interested in all the drama so I don't have any comment on the other edits. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 19:44, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Clerk, patrolling admin and checkuser comments

•  Clerk note: - I have informed GoRight of this SPI. NW (Talk) 22:24, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

I'll reproduce the relevant portions of the applicable policies here:

From WP:BAN

Editing on behalf of banned users Wikipedians are not permitted to post or edit material at the direction of a banned user, an activity sometimes called "proxying," unless they are able to confirm that the changes are verifiable and have independent reasons for making them. Edits which involve proxying that have not been confirmed to that effect may be reverted. WP:SOCK defines "meatpuppetry" as the recruitment of new editors to Wikipedia for the purpose of influencing a survey, performing reverts, or otherwise attempting to give the appearance of consensus. It strongly discourages this form of editing, and new users who engage in the same behavior as a banned or blocked user in the same context, and who appear to be editing Wikipedia solely for that purpose, are subject to the remedies applied to the user whose behavior they are joining. Enforcement by reverting edits Users are generally expected to refrain from reinstating edits made by banned users in violation of the ban, and such edits may be viewed as meatpuppetry. Users who reinstate such edits take complete responsibility for the content by so doing. It is not possible to revert newly created pages, as there is nothing to revert to. Such pages may be speedily deleted. Any user can put a {{db-g5}}, or its alternative name {{db-banned}}, to mark such a page. If the banned editor is the only contributor to the page or its talk page, speedy deletion is probably correct. If other editors have unwittingly made good-faith contributions to the page or its talk page, it is courteous to inform them that the page was created by a banned user, and then decide on a case-by-case basis what to do.

From WP:MEAT

Meatpuppets Meatpuppetry is a Wikipedia term meaning the recruitment of (typically, new) editors to join a discussion on behalf of or as proxy for another editor, usually with the aim of swaying consensus in that discussion. Meatpuppetry gives a misleading impression of participation in the discussion, and of the support and opposition to different views expressed. While Wikipedia assumes good faith especially for new users, the recruitment of new editors to Wikipedia for the purpose of influencing a survey, performing reverts, or otherwise attempting to give the appearance of consensus is strongly discouraged. A new user who engages in the same behavior as another user in the same context, and who appears to be editing Wikipedia solely for that purpose, may be subject to the remedies applied to the user whose behavior they are joining. The term meatpuppet is derogatory and should be used only with care.

As to meatpuppetry; while the ban policy does say that reinstating edits of a banned user may be considered meatpuppetry, the meatpuppetry policy is clear that it refers to editors who have been recruited to Wikipedia "for the purpose of influencing a survey, performing reverts, or otherwise attempting to give the appearance of consensus." No evidence has been presented that Scibaby recruited GoRight, or that GoRight is a new user. In order to "be subject to the remedies applied to the user whose behavior [he is] joining" GoRight must be substantially replicating the behavior that led to the ban against Scibaby. It's not clear, from the evidence posted above, what led to Scibaby's ban - from the history of the Scibaby case at SPI, it would appear to relate to abusive sockpuppetry. Has GoRight engaged in this type of behavior?

As to the ban policy; no evidence has been presented that GoRight is editing at the behest of a banned user. Reinstating edits on a constellation of articles indicates primarily that GoRight and Scibaby hold similar opinions - opinions not uncommon, despite being wrong. The ban policy includes two "loopholes" for editors who reinstate edits made by banned users. One, that users may not reinstate such edits "unless they are able to confirm that the changes are verifiable and have independent reasons for making them." Two, that "users who reinstate such edits take complete responsibility for the content by so doing."

Further evidence is needed, in my opinion, to justify enforcement action against GoRight via SPI. I don't know much more about this conflict than is presented in this case, and its contents don't as yet form a convincing argument that GoRight should be blocked for violating WP:SOCK. Nathan ^T 02:42, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

• Just note from another, previously uninvolved editor (me)...lately I've been getting involved with a few of the Global Warming articles, because I've observed for some time (several years) that a group of editors appears to actively try to minimize mention of contrary opinions or views in those articles. I notice that suspected Scibaby edits get reverted immediately, no matter how credible they are, and other heavy-handed tactics appear to be used, such as range blocks, which may have blocked unsuspecting editors [13]. If I see an otherwise policy-compliant edit reverted simply because it's from a "suspected Scibaby sock" I may redo the edit myself. I guess, judging from this page, that, as a result, I might be earning myself a Scibaby meatpuppet investigation. Cla68 (talk) 23:27, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Conclusions

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