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Latest revision as of 17:21, 20 January 2025

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re: irtapil admission

Taking this off the Icewhiz SPI. That one seems to have its own fresh chaos right now.

Regarding Irtapil's retaliatory and frivolous filings, if it had just been the BilledMammal filing, maybe you could argue that it wasn't retaliatory, though to my eyes it's pretty much a meritless filing, though apparently it was already checked and deemed possi-unlikely? Since it was filed by a 6-time sockpuppet I don't see why it's still open, that part, not to mention BM hasn't edited since November so there isn't any emergent disruption emanating thenceforth. The comment on Dclemens1971 makes it obviously sour grapes, as well as the mens rea aspect. It's not a coincidence that the individuals being chosen were previous filers of Irtapil SPIs. Again, maybe just the BM, but not the Dclemens1971 accusation. And, I don't see that the statement about the sock-loop or reasons or desire to be honest is so insightful. A self-admission with one cornered back against the wall is better than no self-admission but still different from one when you haven't been caught. Her claim that she was forced to edit doesn't hold up. The way out of the loop is to avoid the behavior and then come back after a lengthy break and beg the community for another chance. Nobody is forcing you to edit, just don't. Being honest means respecting the community's ban and the way that the community prescribes redemption. Her statement that she was stressed out and she wanted to be honest but she would just be blocked again so she socked doesn't hold up to scrutiny as you well know. That isn't how any of this works. Plenty of other repeat socks also make good edits sometimes.

Regarding your idea of sockpuppeteers helping find socks, what is that like the Catch Me If You Can plot where Tom Hanks gets Leonardo DiCaprio to work for the FBI to catch counterfeiters and check forgers? Which I guess the real Frank Abagnale did if you believe him. Anyway, we seem to do just fine catching socks without the help of Yaniv/AHJ - as I said, his filings weren't at all helpful though they turned out to be correct, but there wasn't anything usable from them, and I do not have a way of getting in touch with them other than presumably contacting one of their sock accounts the next time one comes up. Also I'm not convinced if a serial sockpuppeteer actually avoided the behavior for 6 months or a year and appealed to the community that they would be unbanned, at least not one as prolific as AHJ.

Personally I still think improving the technical solutions is going to be a way forward. While there might be a slight psychological advantage to actually having socked to finding socks, I think this is a problem that a computer could solve much more easily than a human. I'm not sure why that doesn't get more traction because there's clearly a number of repeat offenders on all sides and in many other disputes too. Andre🚐 04:56, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

I will read this carefully and try to reply at some point. I have a young dog who likes to limit my ability to focus on anything to less than a few minutes at a time, so it might take a while... Sean.hoyland (talk) 05:23, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

The first thing I can say is that my interest is in what ban evading actors think they are doing and why, not what I or anyone else think they are doing. When it comes to ban evasion, I'm not really interested in what is objectively the case, I'm more interested in what is subjectively the case for the people who do it. Editors overestimate their ability to model the minds of other editors. People see patterns and draw conclusions. In the topic area these conclusions are very often wrong and intentionally or unintentionally self-serving for both editors in good standing and ban evading actors as far as I can tell.

On the SPI report itself, for me it is an example of confirmation bias/wishful thinking, which is endemic in the topic area. People see what they want to see. I don't see the same things as SPI filers see in many cases, so this report wasn't very unusual for me.

The community clearly doesn't have the power to stop ban evasion on their own and the current approaches don't appear to work very well. There might be different approaches that could help people who have chosen a life of wiki-crime back into the community, or into certain delimited parts of the topic area etc. A common theme from ban evading actors is that Misplaced Pages is losing something of value by excluding them. Apparently, the community agrees or else they would delete everything they do rather than preserve it. Another theme is that penalties are too harsh to the extent that they end up making the ban evasion option more attractive. There might be better solutions, but we won't know without input from the people who evade bans. Expecting them to just do what the community thinks is the correct thing to do is unrealistic. It has not and probably never will reduce ban evasion.

A technical solution that removed ban evasion as an option available to people would be ideal. I think the revision statistics and registration to block statistics show we are quite bad at catching socks, and that data obviously only includes the successful detections, a subset of larger set of unknown size. I'm skeptical that Misplaced Pages will ever be able to make much progress on stopping determined people from socking, regardless of the technology available, because of a perceived cost to privacy. There is really very little that can be done to stop a person who wants to contribute to the topic area from doing so, at least for a while, often with thousands of edits, most of them good or at least innocuous edits. And the community will preserve most of the work for a variety of reasons. So, for me, it is bit like trying to identify and reduce systemic corruption in a society where the benefits of corruption are widely distributed. It is very difficult.

On sock vs sock, I was thinking more along the lines of GANs than Frank Abagnale. Giving socks a way to contribute positively seems better than total exclusion to me. A downside could be that a process like that would generate an army of super-socks over time (although they may already exist...how would we know). Sean.hoyland (talk) 05:12, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

I found a connected chain of dozens and dozens of IPs and a sock or two from a sockpuppeteer whom I've nicknamed the "Brazilian stalinist "years" vandal", could you help me in making an SPI related to him. I would like to talk to you or contact you in an informal way if it was possible. Theofunny (talk) 21:41, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

• My time for wiki-stuff is a bit limited. I would say only file a report if you are confident that the clerks will find the evidence persuasive.
• Also, finding socks is not very interesting for me. How to find socks is quite interesting.
• I don't prepare and file SPIs anymore. The cost of preparing a report exceeds the benefit of a block that is easily evaded as far as I can tell. If someone files an SPI and I have something to say about it, I'll say it.
• I only look at socks active in the PIA topic area, and that activity level has to exceed a threshold and be disruptive for me to care. Sock activity outside topic area is only interesting to me for technical sanity checks. So, if your "Brazilian stalinist "years" vandal" sock suspect is not active in the PIA topic area it is probably best to ask someone else.

I saw this. I don't know why they suddenly retired soon after that message. It's an interesting turn of events but since I'll probably never know, there's no point thinking about it. The message itself was a routine thing related to how to deal with non-EC editors when the requests don't comply with WP:EDITXY stemming from this comment. Sean.hoyland (talk) 11:21, 16 January 2025 (UTC)