Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets/Eric Shalov

The following discussion is an archived debate of the case of suspected sockpuppetry. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page. All edits should go to the talk page of this case. If you are seeing this page as a result of an attempt to open a new case of sockpuppetry of the same user, read this for detailed instructions.

User:Eric Shalov

Suspected sockpuppeteer

Eric Shalov (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log)

Suspected sockpuppets

Hackel (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log)

Report submission by

John J. Bulten 21:46, 29 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Evidence

I wouldn't ordinarily post two SSP reports the same day except the second is so clear-cut. As a Ron Paul follower and now editor for 1-2 months, I have never seen any serious allegations that Paul or his supporters are sending illegal spam emails. Suddenly today Eric Shalov and Hackel have the same interest, where Hackel is an apparent single-purpose account created today. All this evidence is within the last day.
Eric made 2 edits and Hackel 1 to "Ron Paul" which brought in the same spam issue in graduatedly moderated approaches: [1], [2], [3]. See [4] for Eric's defense. Eric has been here for years so this level of coordination with a new account is surprising. I believe the first edit was clearly vandalism.
Eric: "his spamming campaigns violate federal law", "a campaign of unsolicited e-mail advertising, done in violation of 15 U.S.C. 7701", "supporters spammed a multitude of political blogs", "the e-mail spam, which is most certainly a federal offense", "massive political blog spam campaign".
Hackel: "unsollicted spam messages advertising Ron Paul's presidential campaign .... the campaign has not released an official response"; "Describe email spam controversy"; and I think the deleted page has more similarity of writing style, as follows:
Hackel also created a page "Ron Paul Spam" and its talk page, which stated that it was for the purpose of airing this same controversy and mentioned the CAN-SPAM Act. It was rapidly deleted by NawlinWiki (thank you!) before I could get a diff. See [5].
Same understated, innocent tone along lines of "I just want to get the information out there" (Hackel), "I would like to defend my edits in which I mention the Ron Paul spam" (Eric), "Welcome to Wikipedia! I posted a comment about your Ron Paul contributions" (Eric), which is unwarranted given the vandalistic strength of the edits.
User:Life, Liberty, Property helpfully flagged Eric as a troll here, and may have more evidence. The consensus at Talk:Ron Paul has been unequivocally against these two editors' contributions. John J. Bulten 21:46, 29 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

The enterprising admin will also observe other questionable behavior, such as Eric's treatment of me personally. I don't have evidence that this is more than a first offense of sockpuppetry, vandalism, and incivility, but I believe Hackel should be blocked indefinitely (even if not a sock), and Eric given due warnings or timeouts. I considered WP:RCU, but there is serious backlog there and WP:SSP seems more appropriate due to the sudden identical outbreaks of the issue. I am not filing any other complaints on this incident at this time.

To Eric: It's strange that you have been here so long and still think it's appropriate to make two (or three) wholesale controversial and accusatory edits, get knocked down by five editors, and then submit that your hope is for consensus-building. I see that you're trying to back out of the hole now, but I don't think you've yet learned the difference between substantiated claims (like my latest) and unsubstantiated claims (like your latest).

This is out of line. I am not Hackal, and I stand by my edits. I have never edited on Wikipedia with other than my ONE account that I have set up on 12 Wikipedias language sites. If my initial comments on the article's Talk page were rough, it's because I was genuinely bothered to see the article's opening blatantly slanted towards making Ron Paul out to be a top candidate, without caveats. In fact, all over the web, people are complaining about this campaign-related spamming activity (a Google search for "Ron Paul" +spam returned over 300,000 pages). I never even noticed Hackal's edits until he responded to my pro-consensus discussion on the Talk page. If he complained about the spam on the same day, perhaps it's because we were both victims of today's spam campaign. Overall, this is a ridiculous accusation— and it's especially egregious to be wasting the time and energy of users and admins when this is a debate that should be decided by consensus. John J. Bulten's weak attempt at political infiltration- trying to spin his pro-Ron-Paul censoring edits back at me, will not stand. Googling for his name reveals that he is a highly biased, dogmatic Ron Paul advocate, and an investigation of why he is taking a position of such authority on this page may bear value. I invite others to judge me by the over 1,800 edits I've made over the last 3 1/2 years, and by the over 250 articles that I've initiated or translated from other languages. Wikipedia is about furthering knowledge, not censoring it. - Eric 23:54, 29 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If what you say is true, then why don't you out Hackel instead of me, as an obvious vandal and/or puppet of another? And why is it not a caveat to note Paul has "significantly lower support" than "top tier"? And when did "Hackal" respond to your discussion on the talk page? And why do you say the spam campaign was today-based rather than 10/21-based? And can you point me to two of my censoring edits that I tried to spin back at you? And why do you distinguish my edit from those of the other 4 editors who all "censored" you similarly in the article or my talk page, one of whom thinks you're a troll?

Admins, please let me know if this information was appropriate here, or if it would have been better for WP:RCU or the Vandalism page. John J. Bulten 01:04, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

How am I to believe that this is not a case of biased political infiltration, and that Bulten‎'s efforts to censor or silence anything negative about Ron Paul are in my imagination, when, in the 38 days he's had a Wikipedia account, 72 of John J. Bulten‎'s 106 article edits (that excludes Talk:, Wikipedia:, User:, and Template: namespaces) (or 68%) are in Ron Paul articles, and of the remaining 34 edits, 100% are related to Paul and the 2008 election? And if Bulten is not a biased political operative that should recuse himself from editing the Paul article, then why do I find his name on this and this and this? - Eric 03:46, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent, so I note you have no answers. To answer yours, operatives are paid, I'm not. But thanks for running the numbers and the Googling. "Welcome to Wikipedia!" John J. Bulten 12:33, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A few things first. First, Mr. Shalov's initial edits were not "vandalism" - vandalism is replacing article contents with "poop" in big letters, etc. The insertion was very poorly sourced, as was discussed elsewhere. Second, any issues with Mr. Bulten's editing and his (presumably volunteer) work with the campaign may be taken to WP:COIN. I think there may be a case there - money needn't change hands for a conflict of interest to exist.
As to the suspected sockpuppetry claim. I see some similarities in the "understated, innocent tone" referenced above, suspicious timing, and similar opinions about what constitutes a valid source (blog comments and emails). I'm not sure this is conclusive enough, so I'll let another admin weigh in.--chaser - t 19:15, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Chaser. Believe I was confusing vandalism with libel. Have read WP:COI and though I've adverted my biases generally, I may not have done so strongly enough. Appreciate the headsup. John J. Bulten 20:54, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not an admin or anything, but Eric pointed me to this dispute to see what I thought of it. Firstly, I know Eric in person and that he'd not use a sockpuppet. Beyond issues of reputation and personality, it doesn't make any sense—no vote was going on, and it isn't like the numbers of people pushing a perspective should decide anything anyway. On controversial pages especially, decisions should be made based on reason and consensus (see WP:CON), because there will always be a disproportionate number of fanatics devoting attention to a page about a political figure...full of both sockpuppets and meatpuppets alike.

Whether John likes it or not, this is a major issue getting press with Ron Paul's campaign. When Paul wins online polls he has been disqualified (justly or unjustly) because the hosts of the polls believe that his tech-savvy supporters are skewing the results through sockpuppet/meatpuppet tactics of their own. And Eric has noted that though we don't use blogs as primary sources, the very sentence he was reacting to was one which was touting Ron Paul's internet popularity by some of the same measures—as if this is a worthy metric to emphasize in the lead. There's a contradiction there, and though I think Ron Paul's internet popularity is newsworthy I think the challenges to that are on equal footing.

That said, I don't think Eric's edit should have stood. I criticized his over-reaction to receiving a spam email from who-knows-where and then being twice reverted for griping about it. His choice of words was poor, but really you can't please everyone the first time around so good faith gets you far (after all, I've been called pompous for as little as using the phrase "to mention in passing") But what I'm most troubled by as I survey history is how John—a 1.5 month Wikipedia editor whose account pretty much only edits Ron Paul articles and makes sockpuppet accusations—is getting away with so much "guns blazing" in administrative space without apparent reprimand. I note Starkrm's comment after being similarly accused of being a sockpuppet: You've only been editing here for a month? What sort of experience could you have? If you had done this to other people who aren't so interested in defending themselves as I am, then your actions might just drive them away.

I concur, and when this behavior isn't kept in check on Wikipedia, it fosters the precise cases for creating an alternate account merely to keep heated issues in one small area. Hackel may just be someone who watches the recent changes log, saw some keywords that interested him (ron+paul+spam), and wanted to put in his 2 cents while avoiding having his primary account getting ensnared in something like this. Honestly I'm leery of adding my thoughts because the Ron Paul page isn't that important to me—and suspect this is going to cause John to start poring over my edit history to try and find something I need to be administrativized for. But I'm speaking up to say: this is not the spirit of what Wikipedia editing should be like. It takes patience to build an encyclopedia, and that means not launching sweeping campaigns against long-term editors a couple of hours after your first encounter with them.

As for conflict of interest, I don't know if it's against wiki etiquette for Eric to have searched out John J. Bulten's affiliation with the Ron Paul campaign on the Internet. It seems like John is knowingly using his full name, initial and all, so one would reasonably guess he considers his support to be a matter of personal pride and would have no motive to deny his involvement. Yet he's said ("Nor do I want to know why you're googling and republishing details about other website accounts named "John J. Bulten" [6]) instead of owning up to any affiliation. That strikes me as disingenuous and I think it would be more appropriate to disclose his bias on his user page (currently blank), especially if Ron Paul and supporting articles are the only pages he plans to edit. The people on WP:COIN can then take a balanced look at his work and whether the his edits, discussion, and vigilante administration should be challenged. Metaeducation 22:18, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I just wanted to (hopefully) clear something up. I am most definitely not a "sock puppet". It's true I just created a wikipedia account to talk about the Ron Paul spam issue, as I certainly don't spend any amount of time on Wikipedia (hence my not responding until this morning). I was upset that the Ron Paul campaign wasn't saying anything about the emails on their website, so I wanted to get the info out here. I intentionally tried to do it in a neutral, non-disparaging way, but apparently that wasn't good enough. Incidentally the information I included in my edits was from my call to the campaign, where they claimed they were not responsible and were considering releasing an official statement. The extra Ron Paul Spam page I created simply contained the full text and headers of one of the many spams I received, which I wanted to use as the source for my edit. Of course I was not claiming that the -content- of the email was a reliable source, but the fact that the emails were sent should be reliable. I'm not sure how to prove this here, though. Regardless, I'm not really interested anymore. I take offence to your assertion that I should "be blocked indefinitely (even if not a sock)". There are absolutely no grounds for this. Also, I must add that I never responded to any "pro-consensus discussion" on any talk page. I do think that this is an important issue that should not be ignored and *something* about it should be posted to the Ron Paul page. I've never seen this kind of political spam before and it is definitely noteworthy. Hackel 08:27, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I notice three things that stand out here to me:

Hackel's editing pattern is unusual for a new user, but that alone doesn't prove a sock case
John's interest in and ability to detect sock cases for a user that's only been on wiki for a month or so is also unusual (he's active in other SSP cases and RFCU cases), but these alone don't prove anything wrong is going on either
Agree there are likely COI issues going on here and suggest reporting to that noticeboard — Rlevse • Talk • 12:56, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I respect the input of Rlevse, Chaser, and Metaeducation. Please see my response. John J. Bulten 15:41, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Conclusions

The evidence is inconclusive and the alleged violations of WP:SOCK are limited, making a checkuser unlikely. Taking Mr. Shalov and Hackel at their words, my conclusion is no evident sockpuppetry.--chaser - t 16:54, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]