Wikipedia talk:Sockpuppet investigations

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Bogus SPIs to harass an editor?

Can I use an SPI to harass another editor? Can I do this by attaching an editor's name to a plausibly valid SPI, as a harassment technique?

If not, why not? Can anyone please point me to the specific piece of SPI policy (i.e. not just civility) which is against that. There's a claim ongoing at ANI that fatuous SPIs are not harassment, and I'd like to refute that more solidly. Thanks. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:05, 9 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Andy Dingley, you need to include the context; Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Andy Dingley/Archive is what you are referring to. Filing an SPI against longtime editors without good reason should be harassment, but I don't think this is a good example of SPI being filed out of bad faith, and I don't think that's what is being "claimed" at ANI. I am going to write another post at your talk page. Alex Shih (talk) 11:20, 9 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

No, I'm trying to find the (context independent) policy which states "Fatuous SPIs are harassment", especially when filed on an editor you have an ongoing dispute with. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:26, 9 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You won't find that direct quote. Independent of context then, this can fall under NPA: "Serious accusations require serious evidence". "Fatuous" does not sound serious, and "plausibly valid" does not particularly sound like an attack. See also Wikipedia:Casting aspersions. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 13:05, 9 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sure I've seen it somewhere, as the specific form "SPIs may be considered harassment". I'm also distinguishing here between a purely fatuous SPI, and an SPI which might involve real sockpuppets, but is unsupportably (and arguably, harassinglu) linked to a non-socking editor. Andy Dingley (talk) 13:18, 9 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Someone will probably correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure it's mentioned in a few essays as a logical interpretation of the aforementioned policy. Again, "unsupported" does not sounds like serious evidence. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 13:25, 9 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This is why I'm looking for the policy behind this, not looking for comments in a single specific case. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:14, 9 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

In my opinion, filing a bogus SPI per se does not necessarily constitute harassment. Personally, I'd probably classify filing an SPI in bad faith as a form of disruptive editing. That said, filing a bogus SPI can be used as evidence of harassment, if the filing happens within the context of repeated annoying and unwanted contact or attention.

Salvio

^{Let's talk about it!} 14:40, 9 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Salvio, just filing a clearly bogus SPI on its own is not likely to constitute harassment, but as a pattern of hounding it's a different story. I'm not familiar with the mentioned case. I would recommend if you're feeling like some user is abusing administrative processes to try to get you in trouble, contact one of these admins privately, or follow the instructions on that page. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 16:51, 10 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This page is a mess

I started looking at a range of IPs that are supporting each others arguments on talk pages, looked at histories and saw them reverting legit users back to the same preferred versions using the same language in the edit summary, and then saw a user mention that one IP is a sockpuppet of a specific user.

I came to SPI, it's been several years since I've been active enough on WP to care to report abuse, and there is NOTHING directing me how to report this nest of sockpuppet IPs. There's no obvious report template, no direct link from a years worth of archives, no linking of the IPs to the username. There is however, a huge ass warning that if I make my report wrong it'll get ignored and I'm the bad guy.

(I found the above template ^^ while writing this. It's not obvious enough, so I'm leaving this paragraph because this process is hostile to users.)

Gee, it's almost like Wikipedia is losing admins and users because of a hostile environment. No, really? Cuz that's exactly what this page presents as: one big hostile impediment to getting things done and shutting down trolls that cause nice people to go away. If the sock puppets can get a new IP address faster than a reporting user can gather diffs, then this process is broken.

Suggestions:

Fix the user hostile language about what not to do! I get it, the admins who work this page are overworked. Don't make it worse by scaring away contributors.
On every cases "umbrella" page, and every archived page, have a big giant button that says "report new instances here" that accepts usernames and IP addresses as input.
- Do not force contributors to enter endless diffs and evidence against whack-a-mole IP addresses.
On the main SPI page, make "How to open an investigation" even bigger and bolder, and put it in the table of contents.
REPEAT THIS LINK "How to open an investigation" on the page "Guide to filing a case".

Sorry for the cranky rant, but... SchmuckyTheCat (talk) 09:42, 10 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The easiest way to file a report is to use WP:Twinkle, which is an easy-to-use extension that will introduce a button on any user page that allows you to report them automatically at a variety of venues. SPI is included. Due to technical limitations, this is really the only way to introduce the type of button you're describing, since it involves executing a script. For security reasons, that's not so easy to do, since otherwise anyone could execute potentially malicious code from a page on-wiki. I appreciate the difficulty in filing a report. It wasn't all that long ago that I was trying to figure out how to file my first report at SPI, and it took me about 30 minutes to figure it out, which is too long. Having said that, there's not really an easy way to make it better. The reason the header is worded a little strongly (though I don't think as strongly as it came across to you) is because we need to prevent editors from casting aspersions. Making clear that hard evidence is needed to launch an investigation is the best way to do this. I'll look into mentioning Twinkle on the header to hopefully same some people some headaches, but the manual way of reporting is likely to remain a bit annoying. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 16:23, 10 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I've now added Twinkle instructions to the page. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 16:30, 10 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Generally speaking, if a person unfamiliar with the process writes up a genuine report in whatever format they're comfortable with, and posts a note to it on this page, a clerk will come along and fix it. The problem is that there is a particular template that must be used in the report or it won't show up in the list at all, so if someone writes a report even in the correct location but omits the template, none of us ever see it. Twinkle is a good tool to navigate a lot of technically-difficult processes on Wikipedia, it's worth getting used to it. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 16:46, 10 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Checkuser LTA is active recently

A note to the clerks and functionaries: there have been reports on ANI that the checkuser troll is back around again. One of their hallmark behaviours is posing as an administrator and closing SPIs inappropriately. Please be on the lookout for cases closed by unfamiliar new accounts. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 01:02, 26 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know who this is, but it sounds like at minimum it could at least be tagged in an edit filter? -- Amanda (aka DQ) 02:13, 26 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]