Wikivoyage talk:Sock puppets Voyage Tips and guide

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Wikivoyage has not in the past had any significant problem with sock puppets, especially as we are open enough to ignore them, and because we do not employ majority rule anywhere on site.

Unfortunately, we are having a rather novel problem right now, not with necessarily a single user running multiple accounts, but rather a business running multiple accounts, for the ostensible purpose of advertising and spam. These accounts also make some good proofreading edits (although they all make the same mistakes with proper nouns), but their userpages attempt to mimic that of an actual traveler, plus loads of links to the business' site.

This strikes me as something we should not simply tolerate, despite our wide leniency with policy violations within userspace. I favor a policy where we blank user pages belonging to one business that are being used for the purpose of spam and advertising. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 01:01, 31 March 2009 (EDT)

How do you tell if an account is a sock-puppet? How will your proposed change stop and large organisation from asking each of their employees to create a userpage with a link? We need to get our user page policy back under control. Travel related. Personal details. No links to commercial operators. No bona-fide contributor is disadvantaged by this. --(WT-en) Inas 01:15, 31 March 2009 (EDT)

In short, we can't tell very easily, just as sure as we have limited means to tell whether people are plagiarizing in their contributions. But at a certain point we can be pretty sure—in this one case the business account itself has stated that it has multiple accounts (it claims for multiple users), and each is using its userpage as advertisement.

And to clarify, it should stop a large organization from having all its employees create accounts for advertising, because that is exactly what this policy is targeted at. I would encourage you to re-start the general discussion on what we allow in userspace, since there are obvious disagreements and uncertainty about where we are on that point. But do you support the policy here as I have outlined it? --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 01:35, 31 March 2009 (EDT)

Mm, this is tricky. Banning all "commercial" links is too much — we should encourage companies like HotelsCombined and User:(WT-en) WineCountryInn to contribute positively, and their user page is the one place where they can freely identify and/or link to themselves. I'm not sure I really have a problem even with MiamiMadness etc using links on their homepages, as long as they're also contributing -- it only becomes spam when you put links and don't give anything useful in return. (WT-en) Jpatokal 01:29, 31 March 2009 (EDT)

I'm absolutely not proposing that we ban all commercial links in userspace. I'm not proposing that we so much as discourage touting in userspace. This proposal is very limited: when one business is abusing our userspace policies by creating multiple accounts for the purpose of advertising, then we blank those additional userpages. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 01:35, 31 March 2009 (EDT)

Do I support the policy? I don't object to it, but I see little benefit in it. Firstly I think separate users, even from a single employer, should be encouraged to have their own accounts. Secondly, if we essentially allow unlimited advertising and links on all userpages, then attempting to reduce this by eliminating multiple userpages for one business would have little overall benefit to Wikivoyage currently, it is such a small part of the overall volume of userpage advertising. --(WT-en) Inas 01:57, 31 March 2009 (EDT)

Fair enough. My main goal is to get this policy started with something rather uncontentious and of little consequence, so we have some policy basis for dealing with potential future problems related to sock puppets. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 03:30, 31 March 2009 (EDT)

I think it's a necessary step. The problem with User:(WT-en) HotelsCombined, User:(WT-en) MiamiMadness, User:(WT-en) ChicagoChica, and User:(WT-en) SanFranciscoGirl wasn't that they work for a commercial enterprise — it's that they were the same person. If one person is contributing, fair enough, she can have commercial links on her user page to her business. But if one person is contributing and she has seventeen user names and user pages with commercial links to her business, that's not OK, and that's what this policy is for. In this case, there was reason to believe those four accounts were being run by the same individual — certainly the latter three, at least

Also, on a basic level — and hopefully, this will never be an issue — this policy would be a necessary supplement to Project:User ban nominations. If we ever had to ban a user — say, for a mandatory one-month wiki-break — and that user showed up the next day with a different username and the same problematic behavior patterns — we need the common sense statement that that's not allowed. (WT-en) Gorilla Jones 01:00, 2 April 2009 (EDT)

I Think there's more to this than meets the eye, and I investigated this a bit, and found; (copied in from User talk:(WT-en) HotelsCombined ->) my best guess is that Hotelscombined.com have leveraged on their (quite massive) affiliate program, and decided to do a bit of testing of wikivoyage, as a proving ground for receiving inbound links from web 2.0 sites - asking some affiliates to sign up here, do enough small grammar edits throughout a city or region, that someone get interested in the user, and check out their userpage. Hotelscombined then checks the referrer pages of inbound users on the site, paying? these affiliates a set percentage of final sales achieved through this method.

Interestingly this should say something about the sheer google power we actually leverage around here, and based on my own meandering experience, wikivoyage has gained a +1 notch in our google ranking sometime in the last few months, so my hunch would be we're going to have to deal with commercial contributors ever more often - which in my head translates into; we better be ready for 'em.

My suggestion would be to allow a link per company in user space, and either encourage or require other contributors from the same entity to state their affiliation in plain text. --Stefan (sertmann) Talk 23:29, 31 March 2009 (EDT)

Another HC puppet: User:(WT-en) Marboy. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 03:07, 9 April 2009 (EDT)

A not unrelated case is Offbeat Guides, which uses Wikivoyage content in their printed guides and pays people to trawl through Wikivoyage editing them for spelling and grammar (good) and making Wikivoyage articles format properly on their cruddy engine, often at the expense of "fixing" articles to use American spelling, Fahrenheit, removing empty headers, listings etc (bad). User:(WT-en) MarinaK and User:(WT-en) Candacedriskell are known offbeaters, and I'm fairly sure User:(WT-en) Amitac is one also. Unlike HotelsCombined, they try to maintain a low profile and don't spam, but their edits are still not always beneficial to Wikivoyage the site... (WT-en) Jpatokal 03:24, 1 April 2009 (EDT)

As sock puppets become an issue some users indicated that Wikipedia's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CheckUser might be a good idea. I think community should discuss first as trusted members of the community will be needed to fullfil that task. I would prefer the discussion to focus on the function and not so much an persons. Jc8136 (talk) 17:23, 9 October 2012 (CEST)

Good idea Jan. --Saqib (talk) 17:53, 9 October 2012 (CEST)

If I'm not mistaken, WikiMedia has its own criteria for selecting people to be checkusers, as they are not project-specific (if I'm wrong, please correct me!). So the questions we need to answer are a) under what circumstances should we ask for a checkuser / who should ask for a checkuser, and b) what is the proper response to finding that a user is using more than one account? To address the latter, I tend to think it should be context dependent--if the user is abusing multiple accounts for deceit or general trouble-making, that's something much more serious than if a user for no clear reason just really wants to have two different names ;) --Peter ^Talk 20:31, 9 October 2012 (CEST)

Peter, thank you for bringing in some juice!

a)I think in the case of Edit wars, major drama -waiting for the next ee;)- or any (political/religious/nationalistic/populistic) debate there should be an authority that checks if a single user tries to multiple it's opinion through multiple accounts or IPs. Also of course (psychiatric, neurotic, double/triple) identities arguing with themselves should be stopped.

b) I remember a couple of spammers that used multiple accounts at WT and made it quite hard to stop them. I have no problem with someone having like max. two/three accounts but above that i would be suspicious. I like to follow new users a bit to guide them and prevent spam. Imho the check user would ideally know who is using multiple accounts, so initial suspicious (falling in category a) is prevented.

As i don't wanted to start with a draft, i appreciated any suggestions which would form ultimately a draft policy. Jc8136 (talk) 21:40, 9 October 2012 (CEST)

AFAIK, Checkuser permissions are project-specific. That's certainly the impression I get from Wikipedia:CheckUser. LtPowers (talk) 22:50, 9 October 2012 (CEST)

You're right [1]. In that case, I think we would benefit from having 2-3 (at the very most) checkusers, to cover our major language versions? I'd trust pretty much any of our long-term admins with the tool, although it is pretty established (and understandable) WMF policy to strictly limit the number of checkusers.

The Meta guidelines that would be most important if we have checkusers would be:

Even if the user is committing abuse, it's best not to reveal personal information if possible.

Generally, do not reveal IPs. Only give information such as same network/not same network or similar. If detailed information is provided, make sure the person you are giving it to is a trusted person and will not reveal it himself.

If the user has said they're from somewhere and the IP confirms it, it's not releasing private information to confirm it if needed.

If you're in any doubt, give no detail.

I would adopt that verbatim, or even make it more strict—privacy should always be respected. All that would need to be revealed, I think, is the identification of sockpuppets themselves and the relations between them.

The WMF, as I understand it, also needs a real-world identity confirmation for the checkuser. That shouldn't be a big issue, since real names are pretty popular in our project. --Peter ^Talk 01:38, 10 October 2012 (CEST)

As far as I know we don't have any real policy against sock puppets. So what role would a checkuser have? They discover a sockpuppet account, so what? Aren't we putting the cart before the horse here? First, decide if we wish to have a policy against sock puppets, and then move to discuss whether a checkuser is required? --Inas (talk) 02:30, 10 October 2012 (CEST)

[re-indenting] Well, yes, that's more or less question A. I'd propose that sockpuppets can be permanently blocked from editing, while not (necessarily) blocking the user's principal account. This would only be an issue, though, if a user were being disruptive enough to warrant a checkuser investigation in the first place. Does that sound reasonable? --Peter ^Talk 04:49, 10 October 2012 (CEST)

@Inas: My proposal is listed on the talkpage of our current sockpuppet policy because i think we need to revise this policy. Main reason is that sockpuppets do cause problems when they start trolling, causing drama or the perception of more involvement of users than in reality is. This is why i like the proposal from Peter, so that we not only discourage sock puppets anymore but block und limit user to a principal account. The check user would be the instiution that verifies if user utilizes more than one account during discussions etc. Currently that is not possible as we don't have policies in place for that. An just to make it clear: I don't mind if a user has two or three accounts (for whatever reason, i do not care about) as long as it does not disrupt the community and only uses one account in polls/discussion etc.

@Peter: I'm with you. I suggest that we try to setup a procedure that we not proactively permit the check user to patrol all the times user accounts and IPs. I think if someone suspects that other user use sockpoppets than the check user will get active and check if disruptive/unfair methods (sock puppets to give the perception of more support of its case) are in use. I'm currently a bit under pressure, so any draft is welcome. Otherwise i will try to structure something next week. Jc8136 (talk) 13:16, 10 October 2012 (CEST)

I know I should see it, but where is the proposed sockpuppet policy? Is it simply that in all cases we block secondary accounts that are sockpuppets of primary ones? If it is, lets get consensus on that first. --Inas (talk) 05:23, 11 October 2012 (CEST)

Inas, there is no new proposed policy yet as we are discussing the frame and structure. Peter et al refer to the old policy Wikivoyage:Sock puppets which we will need to rewrite as check user was not possible in the past due to IB. Jc8136 (talk) 09:31, 11 October 2012 (CEST)

I have put up a very basic draft policy, which yes, proposes banning secondary accounts. But the process would only be initiated if a user was suspected of using sockpuppets to be disruptive--otherwise they would be ignored. To discuss it, let's start a new thread, since this thread is about checkuser status. --Peter ^Talk 14:51, 11 October 2012 (CEST)

Ok, then let's start a Wikivoyage:Check user policy and corresponding discussion. Jc8136 (talk) 15:29, 11 October 2012 (CEST)

If I understand the drift of these arguments, it is that we are more concerned with the directing intelligence rather than the physical keyboard that gives effect to that directing (Human) intelligence.

I will give a clarifying example. In Glasgow, I live 300m from the Mitchell Library, which has several public FREE internet terminals and is open 6 days a week (other Glasgow libraries are open 7 days a week). Each terminal shares the same IP and each (of the more than 50 terminals) has the same OS, browser, etc. What this means is that checkuser would identify all of the more than 50 terminals as exactly the "same" and is incapable of distinguishing the separate terminals.

If I, W. Frank log on to a terminal and then log on to Wikivoyage and edit then, in my terms I, W. Frank, am the directing (Human) intelligence making the edits. If another Wikivoyage user, X, logs on to that same terminal later (or a different terminal at the same time) and then logs on to Wikivoyage then a checkuser would identify one as the sockpuppet of the other - even though X is an entirely separate and distinct directing human intelligence making the edits from me!

I suggest that there should be a procedure whereby two individual accounts accused of sockpuppetry may voluntarily present themselves to a named admin along with their passports, driving licences and other documentary evidence that they are separate and distinct human beings and be cleared of sock puppetry - even if they have used the "same keyboard" as far as checkuser is concerned.

There should also be a voluntary procedure to cope with allegations of a common "corporate directing intelligence" where accounts accused of editing under the directions of the same employer or marketing agency may

1. Personally identify themselves using the same procedure outlined above and then
2. sign an affidavit on pain of the sanctions of criminal perjury (only available in common law countries such as US, Canada,UK, Ireland, Australia, etc) that they are not directed by or employed by a specific natural or legal person. A scan of the affidavit could then be linked to their user page. --W. Frank^e-mail_talk 15:58, 10 October 2012 (CEST)

PS: I'm very willing to discuss my own personal identity with any named Wikivoyager that cares to email me. (sign contribution made 16:01, 10 October 2012‎ by IP: 89.242.181.198) --W. Frank^e-mail_talk 16:03, 10 October 2012 (CEST)

There are a number of red flags that have to go up before a checkuser process would even come into play. It is very rare for those red flags to pop up without at least some substance behind them. Furthermore, the checkuser process can help provide evidence that a particular IP belongs to a community resource like a library. Keep in mind as well that the checkuser process provides evidence only, not a conclusive yes-or-no result; it is just one tool in a set that can be put toward detecting abusive sockpuppetry, not the be-all and end-all. LtPowers (talk) 20:00, 10 October 2012 (CEST)

@Frank, any remorse;) I think even if your case would be true (which imho i don't believe), i think it would still be suspicious because your history at Wikipedia [2] just strenghen the case that your puppets disrupted Wikipedia's community and that you started drama here as well (which earned you the first block on the weekend). Exactly for trolls/puppets like you this policy is drafted.

@Powers: Yes, the check user is designed to only provide evidence. The community will, based on the evidence provided, make a decision on how to proceed with the relevant user. Jc8136 (talk) 09:26, 11 October 2012 (CEST)

Editors on a shared IP address should declare on their user page that they're on a shared IP address to avoid accusations of sock puppetry like Frank said. --Saqib (talk) 22:00, 11 October 2012 (CEST)

I don't think they should necessarily have to. Only when problems arise. --Globe-trotter (talk) 22:04, 11 October 2012 (CEST)

The issues that I see that WikiVoyage faces, compared to the broader sister sites that you have joined, is that your users often come here with specific vested interest(s) — and usually commercial interests — with the links and information that they bring, and that is acceptable as long as they 'play within the objectives' and 'play fair'.

There is a statement on this project page that there is less need to address sockpuppets as you don't vote. Well the only means you have for elevated user rights is typically going to be via a vote, so there is one area of importance that the policy is going to need to cover. Under the sock policy you have no means to apply such a filter of one person, one vote, it is only 'discouraged'.

So to me, having a "sock puppet" policy is a slippery beast, as it already pre-judges the user and as the implication for a "sock puppet" is evil. In my experience such is a judgment call and one that is view-dependent unless strictly stipulated or defined. I would encourage you to look to a policy that is broader and have it that expresses these principles

• preference of one account per person
• where a person has more than one account that it is overtly expressed and preferably interlinked
• that where voting takes place that it is one person, one vote, and not one vote per account
• (other statements of where this may be required to be expressed, if any)

Some existing links that I hope can assist and offer perspectives

• w:Wikipedia:Sock puppetry — how they define sock puppets
• m:Help:Unified login — information about WMF accounts, remembering that you are part of a larger whole
• s:Wikisource:Alternate accounts — a similar model that it discourages but does not ban alternate accounts, and circumvents the definition of whether it is a sock or not.

In my experience at WMF'd wikis, where we have and rely on just black and white 'rules' and complex policy, I find that there will be many who are able to slip through loopholes, and say "it doesn't say that I cannot do it". Where we have objectives, statements of principles, and talk about duties, outcomes and outputs, you will find that it is easier to manage breaches, and align policy and practice.

Anyway, I hope that my perspective is of value. I urge you to reconfigure your perspective to have a holistic view of user accounts where "sock puppets" are a component, not the feature. If you are not going to progress down a "one person, one account" model (enWP), then I believe that there are benefits from a holistic declarative approach to account management. Billinghurst (talk) 11:55, 15 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

We really don't have voting, though. I think we've voted once. User rights are not assigned by voting, even if the lists of support/not yet look like voting. It's still very much a consensus-based process.

In the interest of rationalizing our policies in no small part by reducing their large number, could we move this to a subsection of Wikivoyage:Checkuser? It's only really relevant in that regard, I think. --Peter ^Talk 05:24, 22 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

The other way around, wouldn't it be? Checkuser only being a tool for uncovering sockpuppets? LtPowers (talk) 14:59, 22 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, I guess so. Either way. --Peter ^Talk 23:05, 22 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

I have done the merge as you suggested. --Peter ^Talk 21:08, 28 February 2013 (UTC)Reply