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Category:Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of Young Zaphod

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This category is for proven and suspected sock puppets of the user that has recently been mostly going by the name Young_Zaphod. The Template:SockpuppetProven tag will claim that the user has been indefinitely blocked, but even the proven ones haven't been indef. blocked as of March 10, 2006, so I'm using the Template:Sockpuppet which is intended for suspects instead. Ones that are blocked may be in Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Young Zaphod instead. The IP addresses seem to be those of a computer lab in Philadelphia, a local ISP, and a MUD hosting company (specifically, the machine that handles mugs.net and mudolc.org, where his web sites are hosted). He is commonly known as Locke on NiMUD MUD, m_m on Mudconnect.com, mad_merv/Mad Merv at other places. Because of the significance he assigns to trivial tasks, he seems to be a beginning programmer, and is likely a first year CS student. Google seems to bring up many biographies that he has submitted all over the place.

I (the person who created this category page) am User:Atari2600tim, and I have been changing related articles as things are found. Most of my information is based on readme files and USENET archives available from Google Groups. He has accused me of being other people, but it seems to be intended just to bother me (rather than to report me breaking rules or something), since he never provides any evidence. He does personal attacks against me and many other people, some people I have heard of from elsewhere, and some I don't know anything about.

Pattern

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This user mostly edits Online creation and NiMUD, both articles were originally written by him. He and his dead friend are co-authors of some of NiMUD. The main noteworthy feature of NiMUD is its online creation system. I personally haven't used it, but it sounds fairly basic, and as far as I can tell from reading these articles and usenet postings and such, it sounds like it introduced nothing revolutionary, and has been done many times before. He edits both of the articles to claim various things in favor of himself or his software:

Major problems

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  • Promotes incorrect earlier public release date for his software. Best available evidence suggests a July 29, 1994 release date, but it is claimed to be December 31, 1993, sometime in 1993, and sometime in 1992.
  • Promotes that his software was publicly available before any other related ones, even ones that were very obviously before his (such as ones that were released before Merc, which his is based on). He randomly sets his own release date AHEAD... I haven't noticed him changing dates on OTHER software to set them BACK, but it is something that should be watched for.
  • Claims that unrelated software were based on his software, stole his source code, or were inspired by his work.
    • SMAUG: he claims that this was reverse engineered from his work
    • Sauerbraten (game): claims that its in-game editor was inspired by NiMUD (Sauerbraten is a derivative of Cube, and Cube has an in-game editor, which it is in reality based on)

He also edits other articles to link toward these two articles, and creates some vanity articles which are often speedied or overwhelmingly voted to delete. Most of the AfD's have him doing multiple votes with the socks.

  • A few of his characters have added anti-circumcision stuff against consensus (and without any kind of scientific support) to circumcision and then started revert wars to keep it in.

Minor contradictions

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  • At first, credited his dead friend for programming everything, with himself doing minor planning, then later reversed it.

Puppets proven via CheckUser

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The following ones were proven to be the same in the results given on February 25 [1].

These were proven in the group of results given on February 12 [2] for a request that ironically backfired.

Suspected users

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Warnings

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  • Eggster
    • Eggster's talk page has not been blanked, as of today, all warnings are still there.
  • Young_Zaphod
    • Online creation 3RR 16 Feb 2006 [3]
    • NiMUD 3RR 16 Feb 2006 [4]
    • NPA 18 Feb 2006 [5]
    • Blanked 22 March 2006 [6]
    • YZ also has various clarifications and minor warnings regarding socks, vandalism, removing notices, and nonsense mentioned throughout his talk page.
  • IPs have gotten multiple warnings, some even enough to be blocked on their own contributions alone. I'll update with a list later if I have time to.

Administrative action

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He has been blocked from editing for 24 hours multiple times:

Vandalism blocks:

  • Blocked 67.165.85.111 on 16 March 2006 for 48 hours for vandalism [9] (after multiple warnings for that IP alone). block log

Incivility:

  • 68.162.128.9 on 11 March 2006 for 1 week [10]

Misc.

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He has re-created Paranoia_MUD after it was deleted after a vote was held Feb 16-Mar 4 (votes were 12:1 see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Paranoia MUD), which resulted in the newer one being speedied (delete log).

Created Markus_Greene article which was speedied [11]. Entire content of article was "Markus Greene was a fictional character in a science fiction tale of survival written by Herbert Elwood Gilliland III in 1994."

He's also re-created Vabungula three times now. Vabungula is a made up language that happens to include the name of his software, 'Nimud' as a word. See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Verbungula, delete log for Vabungula, delete log for Verbungula.

Recreated NiMUD article after an AfD vote which supported its deletion.

Miscellaneous vanity articles about himself (Mad merv/Mad Merv [12] [13]) and his friends [14] [15].

As GuruCMU, he put 2 votes in the same edit [16] to keep the Mudder article rather than having it redirect to MUD. These were in addition to the votes he made as Implementor, Implementer (I know, genius to use both spellings of a user name in the same vote, but he did it), moniker, and locke (he doesn't post as Locke on here, but signed with that name anyway).

As Eggster, he put words into another users' mouth [17] in order to keep some unhelpful images.

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It might be good to show a summary of edits here for articles which he is not personally mentioned in, and do not involve NiMUD.

Positive

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67.165.85.111 made one edit [18] on article WPGA, on a day where none of the MUD-related articles had edits from this IP (likely just another person in the computer lab)

Negative

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circumcision

To add a sockpuppet to this category, use {{Sockpuppet|Young Zaphod|blocked}}.

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