Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Mishae

Mishae

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

Populated account categories: confirmed · suspected

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

12 January 2020

– This SPI case is open.

Suspected sockpuppets

• Biografer (talk⁺ · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · spi block · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki)
• Tools: Editor interaction utility • Interaction Timeline • User compare report Auto-generated every hour.

Apologies for the length, but this involves two editors with tens of thousands of edits each, and given the timing it almost certainly has to be a behavioral case. I hesitated to bring this here, but the similarities between the users and the ongoing content-related concerns with the more recent account convinced me to put together this SPI.

Mishae was banned from English Wikipedia by the community after a failed unblock request on 25 February 2017. The Biografer account was created on 29 March 2017, and immediately began a similar pattern of creating short, thinly sourced articles in many of the same topic areas as Mishae, including paralympic athletes, ballet dancers, musicians, and minor-but-marginally-notable academics. Given the sheer number of each account's contributions (hundreds of articles), it's difficult to condense an SPI case into a short form. But basically there are broad content similarities between the accounts, unusually specific interactions at obscure/orphaned articles by the accounts (sometimes where the two accounts are the only substantive contributors), and similarities in some competence-related areas, particularly around adding erroneous information while closely paraphrasing sources.

First, the broad content similarities. Both users have created a lot of stub/start articles at a rapid clip, across the same domains (paralympic athletes, some plants and beetles, ballet dancers, musicians, minor-but-marginally-notable academic scientists). Here are sample article-space-page-creation-only contributions pages from Mishae [1] and Biografer [2]. The stub and start class articles that Biografer and Mishae have created are very similar in style and approach. For example, the stub/start articles on academics are usually about a subject who meets one minimum criterion of WP:PROF (e.g. fellow of IEEE), are sourced to one or two primary sources, are basically prose interpretations of a posted CV, and often closely paraphrase source material. Similarly, for both Mishae and Biografer, the plant/beetle articles they have created are usually done in one alphabetic chunk, e.g. going through the "c" or "d" part of a genus/species list (this can be seen in the corresponding contributions lists). Here are some examples of articles from each editor for comparison of style, content, and coverage.

Examples of Mishae academic biographies at/near time of creation:

• Claudia Felser
• Christiaan Both
• Charles Santori
• Biswanath Mukherjee

Examples of Biografer academic biographies at/near time of creation:

• Osamu Wada
• Kinji Ono
• Nick Sahinidis
• Haibao Tang
• Jean Barrette

Examples of Mishae artist biographies at/near time of creation:

• Tamara Novichenko
• Vika Kuropyatnikova
• Muneko Otani
• Masuko Ushioda

Examples of Biografer artist biographies at/near time of creation:

• Nadezda Golubeva
• Pavel Smelkov
• Justyna Gabzdyl
• Natalia Tsyplakova

Second, the specific intersections. Mishae and Biografer have some fairly unique intersections on obscure articles that would not be expected from two unrelated editors, for example:

• Fixing references on video game Death to Spies: Moment of Truth: Mishae [3], Biografer [4]
• Creating and expanding paralympic football athlete Tyler Bennett: Mishae [5], Biografer [6]
• Updating the reference date for Carabus obsoletus obsoletus: Mishae [7], Biografer [8]
• Creating and updating ballet dancer Nina Kaptsova: Mishae [9], Biografer [10]
• Updating ballet dancer Ekaterina Krysanova: Mishae [11], Biografer [12]
• Creating and updating Canadian paralympic wheelchair basketball player Karla Tritten: Mishae [13] [14], Biografer [15]
• Creating and updating near-orphan article on former Russian Metro (train) director Ivan Besedin: Mishae [16], Biografer [17]
• Updating reference date on Zabrus seidlitzi: Mishae [18], Biografer [19]
• Creating and updating orphan article Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler: Mishae [20] [21], Biografer [22]

Third, there are some competence-related issues that are similar, in my opinion, between the two accounts. For Mishae, some of these were raised at a previous ANI discussion, particularly around close paraphrasing and rapid fire edits that are "often wrong, misleading, or hard to follow". In multiple biographies of living persons created just in the last few days by Biografer, I have found basic and obvious errors that fit that description. Some of these can be put down to just editing too quickly (e.g. marking an honorary 2011 Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada as having graduated high school in 2013 rather than 1974), but the kinds of errors seem to match the kind of language/interpretation errors and close paraphrasing issues previously discussed for Mishae.

An example: in a recent article creation about Emmanuel Farber, the cited source said that his first wife died in 1993 and that he remarried seven years later, which Biografer put in the article as "He was married to Ruth, but because he was Jewish, and she was Canadian divorced her and married Henrietta Keller Schleider instead". That interpretation is both factually wrong (divorce vs. death, timing of remarriage) and misleading ("because he was Jewish"). It also did not take long to find recent examples of close paraphrasing from Biografer: Frank Keller Walter, which is a lightly reworded version of the single cited source, and Amit Landau, in which the close paraphrasing of the single source introduces at least one error (that he studied under those people at a foundation...the foundation is actually a granting institution, and the sentence about his teachers is a separate sentence in the source). Looking at talk page history, this is an ongoing issue for Biografer, see e.g. the history of Petar Hristoskov and the warning for removing a copyvio tag on that article [23], or the speedy deletion of Mohamed Trebak and warning for removing a copyvio tag on that article [24]. The dismissive reactions to these warnings (e.g. [25]) are consistent with Mishae's previous behavior described at ANI.

There are other minor similarities: the similar leaving of (thousands of) welcome messages to new users, similar time cards, and the similar list format of their user pages. Maybe those could be dismissed in isolation. It is, of course, possible that two separate people with similar linguistic backgrounds, cognitive tendencies, and topic area interests make the same kinds of edits to the same articles and topics entirely coincidentally, and that one user just happened to started editing shortly after the other was banned by the community. Also, Biografer has not written a large number of stubs about beetles, while Mishae most certainly did. I also note that both Mishae and Biografer have made many good edits. But respecting community consensus is important, and putting accurate, non-copyvio information into the encyclopedia is important, so I bring this here for your attention. Indignant Flamingo (talk) 21:05, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

Comments by other users

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

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