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Wikipedia:Long-term abuse/Scibaby

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Scibaby (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · edit filter log · block user · block log) is a prolific sockpuppeteer who edits "global warming" and related articles to insert material skeptical of global warming and its consequences. He has been active since September 2006, and has been considered to be de facto community-banned from Wikipedia.

He has been the subject of several sockpuppet investigations, Checkuser requests, as well as duck tests, and as of August 20, 2021, these have confirmed 1,078 sockpuppets, and he is suspected of having 224 more. As a result, many articles related to global warming have had to be repeatedly semi-protected to keep him from editing, but in general his socks often establish themselves on other pages first and often sleep for a while before attacking GW.

Please report all ongoing incidents of abuse to AIV or ANI.

Modus operandi

When certain specific behaviors by Scibaby have been mentioned publicly, he has changed those behaviors. For example, when admins were told to look in user logs because he was using one sockpuppet account to register others, he stopped doing it. Therefore, admins should absolutely avoid publicly discussing specific techniques and methods for detecting him.

All Scibaby sockpuppets will eventually show up as new users editing on global warming related articles. (The converse that all new users on global warming articles are Scibaby sockpuppets is not true.)

Detection

Abuse filters

  • 205 - Abuse filter 205 is designed to detect possible Scibaby sockpuppets.

Abuse filter 206 was another edit filter that was more refined than 205, but was eventually disabled for performance reasons.

Checkuser

In 17 July 2009, a number of IP ranges known to be used by Scibaby were unblocked (ANI discussion). They are:

Means of identification

What to do

If you suspect an account to be Scibaby, do one of the following:

Sockpuppets

See Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Scibaby and Category:Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of Scibaby for all tagged accounts and IPs. See also Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser/Case/Scibaby for the discovery of many of his socks (prior to January 16, 2009).

See also

Notes

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