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Almost definitely a bad idea, but…

Regarding your comments in the Arb discussion, which is already giving me a headache, and from which I hope to stay away as much as humanly possible, despite my temptation to do otherwise. This is slightly inspired but some of the debates in and around the discussion, so credit goes to whoever wrote the ideas first :) Maybe this is both overcomplicated and a bad idea, but what about a “content board”, with elected 5 editors, 2 from each ‘faction’ and one uninvolved administrator, which can be involved to litigate complicated content decisions (as in, writing sentences for the article). The board would require a 4/1 majority for the content they create, and the solution would be subject to a yes/no RfC, with the special alteration that consensus against is required to prevent implementation. The voting requirements might help remedy this real-world problem, the fixed balance would make sock-puppets significantly less effective, the bickering about RfC options might be lower than it is now, and it gets additional legitimacy in case of media scrutiny. In addition, this sort of process is almost impossible to disrupt, because much of the “outrage”-based issues are harder to apply against a panel, the benefit to impacting voting for members of the panel does very little because the desired balance is already set, and trying to sock-puppet your way into consensus against a solution (instead of a no-consensus or normal talk page disruption/edit warring) requires a lot more effort. The only problem I still have is how to figure out who can vote for and be a member of each “faction”, particularly with those editors (to be fair, pretty rare in this area) without at least a mild POV. The main draw-back is speed, but many of those edit wars are months or years in the making, so I’m less concerned about that. What do you think? FortunateSons (talk) 16:42, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

I have a bad ideas machine in my head that never shuts up, a constant intrusive stream of 'what if...' nonsense, with a good original idea that actually works about once a decade. I look forward to age quietening it down. So, it's always a relief to look at someone else's bad ideas. However, on first read, I think this might be a good idea. I'll have a proper look tomorrow. Sean.hoyland (talk) 17:53, 26 August 2024 (UTC)
Oh, you got one too? Always nice to meet members of the club.
Thank you very much, I’m looking forward to it! FortunateSons (talk) 17:59, 26 August 2024 (UTC)
Looks like I'll need to let this marinate for a while. Sean.hoyland (talk) 09:13, 27 August 2024 (UTC)
Don’t worry, I’ll be spending the next days running through multiple cities, no problem at all if it takes a while :) FortunateSons (talk) 09:19, 27 August 2024 (UTC)
No pressure at all, but do you have any new thoughts? Or are we taking more about a Dry aging-timeline? ;) FortunateSons (talk) 13:43, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
My mind is very slow. I got stuck on the '2 from each ‘faction’'. This started me thinking about the potential effects of skewed editing being both allowed and common. Then I got stuck on thinking of editors with opposite valence in PIA as conjugate pairs, and the set of conjugate pairs making PIA into a kind of autocatalytic set where the fixing someone else's bias involves creating a disposable account and it never ends. None of this is helpful at all. I like the idea of a content board to decide complicated content decisions when discussion start to strongly resemble an ant mill. But I don't like the idea of elevating Wikipedia's apparent acceptance of bias, and 'factions', to even higher levels. This is because it's probably one of the main drivers of instability in the topic area. I get stuck on what seems like an inconsistency to me. On the one hand we have the code of conduct that doesn't allow "systematically manipulating content to favour specific interpretations of facts or points of view", and on the other we have reality where "systematically manipulating content to favour specific interpretations of facts or points of view", whether intentional or unintentional, is pretty much standard operating procedure for many editors, especially socks, in the topic area. If there were a content board, I think it might be better if the members were disinterested, and only focused on policy compliance, if that's even possible. And media scrutiny isn't a factor for me because it's not part of the content decision procedures. Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Sean.hoyland (talk) 15:06, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
You: “my mind is very slow”
Also you: provides high-level analysis based on a variety of risks, factors and ethical evaluations ;)
Memes aside, I understand what you mean (after reading about the Autocatalytic sets). I’m glad you like the idea for the envisioned use case in general. Based on the Zionist boards/subreddits/discussion spaces I occasionally read, the common sentiment seems to be that en.wiki is hopeless pro-Palestinian, and that joining is either hopeless or to be considered the sort of partisan work where deception is acceptable or even desirable. That perception may or may not be true, but as long as it exists, it’s likely that we’ll get many pre-jaded editors from the pro-I side, and to the best of my knowledge, the same dynamic exists in pro-P spaces as well. Anything to point towards for the benefit of “proving lack of bias” might be a good way of avoiding that flavour of disruption, with the same applying to media scrutiny, where I consider a negative perception of wiki to be harmful to its encyclopaedic purpose (and to our ability to attracting skilled and motivated volunteers).
The unfortunate issue with creating a “disinterested” board is that they may not understand some of the more complicated nuances of any specific decision, and why certain phrasings are basically a provocation for one or the other group of editors. That is an issue that can be remedied through excellent knowledge of the underlying material, but I haven’t encountered anyone who has thought and read in depth about the topic and remained unbiased, but perhaps that’s just the size of my sample.
Regarding in effect rewarding factions, yes, that’s an unfortunate consequence, and one I wish we could avoid. I must admit to somewhat liking the “TNT-esque” idea about the topic area, but that’s of course easy to say as an alleged member of the faction with a current numerical disadvantage among the more active editors. Part of the issue is that people feel like they are not creating bias, but counteracting it, as well as the collective inability to agree on the same set of basic facts. In addition, actually sanctioning severely biased editors would rid us of many of the WP:Unblockables, which also happen to produce a significant percentage of the content. An argument can be made for a sort of Decimation targeted at the worst contributors on one or both sides, but that’s unjust, ineffective, or arguably both, if imposed as a meta-level punishment.
Not to add complexity to an already complex idea, but perhaps having a “binational” board (split 2/2) (Pun very much intended) and a neutral board with 3 editors, with majorities required in both, might alleviate the concerns about basically endorsing the bias? You have my gratitude for the detailed response!FortunateSons (talk) 16:03, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
Oh, the other thing that always confuses me is whether the so-called wisdom of crowds is a) real and b) whether it ever applies to PIA content (perhaps over long timescales). Sean.hoyland (talk) 15:46, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
That’s a fascinating question. Unfortunately, I seem to be unable to come up with an answer that would be of any use. FortunateSons (talk) 16:04, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
@FortunateSons I'm not Sean, but as someone stopping by with a different matter - if ARBCOM won't opt for my preferred solution, I actually think the above idea is one of the better alternatives I've heard. If Wikipedia can't get rid of the factions entirely and start from scratch, it might as well regulate them to its advantage. The Kip (contribs) 03:53, 2 September 2024 (UTC)
Thank you very much! I’m glad you like it! FortunateSons (talk) 07:51, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Input on potential sleeper/sock

Account created in 2009, had just three total edits in that 15-year span (including an ECR violation from March), and, as of today, has suddenly taken a great interest in making some rather POV edit requests on the talk page of Kidnapping and killing of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. My alarm bells are ringing - as something of the sock czar, what do you think? The Kip (contribs) 03:49, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

The Kip, I have no idea really with so few edits, but if I had to pick a potential sockmaster, I would probably pick this guy for the following reasons
I'm not sure if I agree with that sockmaster - the POV in question appears to be the opposite, given that from NoCal's LTA page, they appear(ed) to be aggressively pro-Israeli and/or islamophobic, while the possible sleeper here is complaining of pro-IDF/anti-Hamas bias in the article (unless NoCal ever tried false-flagging). Appreciate the insight, however - I'll keep you in the loop if anything further pops up. The Kip (contribs) 05:25, 2 September 2024 (UTC)
Sure, opposite valence, but that could be just be kabuki theater. I'm skeptical of the dance with The Mountain of Eden, an account that I believe for technical reasons could possibly be a sock of Plot Spoiler (that registered the same day as their last sock Loksmythe was blocked). Sean.hoyland (talk) 05:37, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

<- Nableezy is the NoCal expert so might be able to shed some light on the matter. Sean.hoyland (talk) 09:56, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Your SPI tool

I'd love to know more about the tool you used to do that analysis on Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Irtapil. RoySmith (talk) 01:33, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

RoySmith Me too. It's still a mysterious and confusing work in progress with highly questionable (or let's say unquantified) resolution and reliability for me. Broadly speaking, it looks at vector representations of stuff in the database. There's so much information in there that you can make various metric spaces then look at the relationship between vectors. Since these are quite high dimensional spaces, I have no idea what is going on in them...I can barely cope with 2 dimensions and get lost quite often. The Irtapil socks have interested me for a while because I don't really understand how it's making the connection. And I'm highly skeptical. The test dataset is relatively small, and results can be contradictory and clearly wrong in some cases. Still, it seems to be doing something, sometimes. Sean.hoyland (talk) 04:39, 2 September 2024 (UTC)
I should also mention that it's not just vector representations of data from the database. I also inject a large number of synthetic signal and noise vectors into the spaces, often more than the stuff coming out of the databases. Broadly, you can think of the left side of the plot as information about signal and the right side as information about noise. Sean.hoyland (talk) 07:05, 2 September 2024 (UTC)
I don't really understand what your thingie does beyond that it looks at various metrics and says how similar they are, so forgive me if this is a stupid, obvious, or way off base question: does the thingie work for smaller groups of accounts? Say I got a group of 20 or 30 accounts, and they're all similar but I want to know which are more similar to some than others, like whether they cluster into sub-groups, or which sock goes with which master. Can your tool help with that? Levivich (talk) 06:17, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
Maybe, it depends, but the problem is I don't really understand what it depends on. I do know that sample sizes and dimensionality matter a lot, in both directions, too little and too much. I don't know how much information is needed to produce sensible results. I don't have a clue. For example, I left something out of those ABHammad plots, the fact that some functions linked it to another of the sockmaster's accounts, Jujubird, even though that account only made 66 edits. Seems suspicious/too good to be true/a coincidence. I assume results for low edit count accounts are probably very unreliable. Anyway, I usually just try stuff and see what happens, so feel free to mail the account list and I can have a look. It's not really designed to look at clustering because I decided to focus on comparing a single reference account to all the others in the dataset, although I can probably see info for all accounts to all accounts comparisons if I look. It might help in my quest to discover the ignition temperature of my processors, which seem to get a bit toasty doing this stuff. Sean.hoyland (talk) 06:59, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
Regarding I don't know how much information is needed to produce sensible results, I've looked at a few attempts to do automated sock analysis and it often comes back to this. We've got a few 10's of thousands of known sock accounts. By machine learning standards, that's a small data set. By way of comparison, email spam detection models can train on 100's of billions of emails per day. So while I'm interested in these sorts of tools, and sometimes use them, they're not a magic sock detector wand. RoySmith (talk) 12:35, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
Certainly not a magic wand, but perhaps a guide when the search space is already relatively small, contentious topic area small. On machine learning in general to detect socks in Wikipedia, I was actually very surprised at how well one system performed. I would have expected noise to swamp signal. Years ago, I read a paper, I think it was this one, and it got stuck in my mind, because the system is clearly detecting features. 'What are they' is the question that got stuck. Maybe you can find them in lower dimensional spaces is what I thought. It is one of those annoying unresolved puzzles. Sean.hoyland (talk) 13:18, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
RoySmith, actually I should mention this, because this is the most important point of all. My preferred solution to sockpuppetry is to lower the barrier for checkuser tool usage in contentious topic areas to a set of simple triggers - like edit warring, receiving a block, resembling a topic banned/blocked user in any way whatsoever, anything that counts as "disruptive editing", the intriguingly fuzzy phrase used in the checkuser policy. In a perfect world I would like to just request a checkuser and its done, no questions asked. Then I probably wouldn't be looking at the issue at all. Sean.hoyland (talk) 16:27, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

Stating The Obvious

Because some people apparently don't comprehend the obvious. The status of Wikipedia pages is not enforced by editors. It is enforced systematically. Unless you are visually impaired, the status of the Terrorism page is noted by the gray padlock: "Semi-Protected." Nothing else. Please stop mindlessly edit-warring. The result may be than an admin will block your account. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Johnadams11 (talk • contribs) 03:09, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

Johnadams11, people are volunteers here. Don't waste their time with this childish nonsense. You are free to ignore my advice. Perhaps you will learn a valuable lesson about entitlement and listening to advice. Sean.hoyland (talk) 03:18, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
I don't know what circles you travel in, but your assertions are weightless without evidence. One of us is seeking to engage, the other has adopted some mindless high-handedness and name calling. Waste of time indeed. Johnadams11 (talk) 03:21, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
When parts of an article are covered by sanctions you are responsible for following sanctions you have been made aware of. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 03:23, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

Mass creation of sockpuppet user pages in mainspace

Hello. I've noticed that you've created numerous sock userpages in mainspace, but shouldn't they all be moved to userspace instead? I honestly don't get why they were created in mainspace. CycloneYoris talk! 07:43, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

I have blocked your account to stop the mass creation spree, which is suggestive of a possible compromise. If there's another explanation, you can request an unblock with {{unblock|Your reason here ~~~~}}. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 07:56, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
This user's unblock request has been reviewed by an administrator, who accepted the request.

Sean.hoyland (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

Request reason:

Hi, I'm trying to make sure the category graph for a particularly prolific sockmaster is complete...apparently in the wrong namespace. Not sure how I managed that major error. Sorry about that. Maybe I can move the pages. Sock detection machine learning projects appear to rely on the completeness of category graphs so I was trying to have a look at what would be involved in completing a graph for one sockmaster. Sean.hoyland (talk) 08:03, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

Accept reason:

Unblocked, and I'll delete the mainspace pages. I would suggest discussing this somewhere (maybe WT:SPI) before continuing in AWB; the choice not to tag is often deliberate, and mass editing needs consensus. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 08:09, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. Yes, good advice, I'll hold off, maybe reread WP:NOTLAB, and raise the issue for discussion somewhere. Sean.hoyland (talk) 08:14, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Hezbollah

Hezbollah has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. It is a wonderful world (talk) 20:52, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Suspend WP:SOCK?

Can you explain what you meant here? VR (Please ping on reply) 19:50, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

I mean remedies and rules should reflect reality rather than be merely aspirational. I think there is little point having rules that either can't be enforced for technical reasons or that people are unwilling to enforce for wiki-cultural reasons (mostly to do with privacy concerns as far as I can tell). My thinking on this issue has changed a lot over the years because I see the same ban evading individuals over and over again and the amount of energy that goes into preparing and processing SPI reports. I still think that in an ideal system, PIA should be run like a surveillance state with checkusers being carried out routinely, but that's never going to happen. My views are mostly described in the Being realistic/know your limits section of Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Clarification_and_Amendment#Statement_by_Sean.hoyland, together with the section responding to The Kip below that. My main concern is that ban evasion produces 2 classes of actor with asymmetries in the payoffs and penalties for socks vs non-socks, and in this kind of system deceptive actors have a fitness advantage because sanctions have zero cost for disposable accounts. Suspending WP:SOCK for a subset of articles would flatten these 2 classes into a single class. Sean.hoyland (talk) 04:18, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Graph of edits by socks

Is it possible to compare that with total edits to the same pages over the same time periods in order to determine what portion of edits are by socks? Levivich (talk) 19:38, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

Yes, it's possible, but I've been trying to avoid getting hate mail from the wikimedia cloud people. It's on my to-do list. I can probably do it in bite sized chunks that aren't too annoying for the servers. Sean.hoyland (talk) 06:59, 23 September 2024 (UTC)
I should add a couple of things
  • Presenting the ban evading data separately was a deliberate choice because, for me,
    • the absolute numbers matter regardless of the relative numbers - just one ban evading actor on a talk page or edit warring is often enough to start a fire as they have nothing to lose by being blocked
    • the total edit counts will obviously include lots of unblocked hard working ban evading actors
  • I'm pulling data at a per actor per month resolution and staging it in a local DB so there's quite a lot of data.
  • The ban evasion data used for the plot (including sockmaster info from the woefully incomplete sock category graph) is available here. Sean.hoyland (talk) 07:25, 23 September 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for putting that together! Another question: Is it easy to run the analysis for a small subset? I wonder what's it look like just for one article, or "top" articles, like Israel-Hamas war, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian conflict? BTW, I agree with you that absolute numbers matter, and also that edit count is a pretty poor metric anyway in terms of influence or disruption. (One well-placed revert or RFC vote can influence NPOV way more than 1,000 typo fixes, as I'm sure you already well realize.) But this is interesting data anyway, at least to check my own assumptions about how "widespread" socking is. (Less than I thought!) Levivich (talk) 17:08, 24 September 2024 (UTC)
Yes, it should be easy to run it at the article level. I'll have a look. It's hard to say how widespread socking is. Socks tend to only make a relatively small percentage of their edits in the topic area compared to outside. Whatever it is, it's presumably much less than the honest folk, I would hope anyway. It's not encouraging when you read the literature and see ban evasion detection rates in other systems as low as 10%. Sean.hoyland (talk) 17:44, 24 September 2024 (UTC)
I think it was Georgia Tech that noticed that ban evading accounts are statistically much less likely to swear than normal editors. So, it might be worth suspending the WP:NPA policy in PIA temporarily to help identify all the suspiciously polite ban evaders. Sean.hoyland (talk) 17:53, 24 September 2024 (UTC)
Great idea. Maybe we could trial run it for a day or a week or something. At the very least, it would be cathartic for all of us. Levivich (talk) 17:58, 24 September 2024 (UTC)
@Sean.hoyland can you cite me the research that socks are less likely to swear than non-socks? VR (Please ping on reply) 19:09, 25 September 2024 (UTC)
Vice regent, I think it was https://doi.org/10.1145/3485447.3512133 from a couple of years ago. Sean.hoyland (talk) 04:07, 26 September 2024 (UTC)
Levivich, finally got around to looking at this.
  • Some plots at the article level.
  • I wasn't sure which articles to pick, so these are articles in the Top-importance and High-importance categories for both the Israel and Palestine projects i.e. the intersection of the list of Top and High-importance articles for those projects.
  • There seems to be some weirdness and randomness in there as far as which articles have been designated as Top and High importance and some of them seem to have been merged into other articles at some point (leaving a talk page behind).
  • I've included pageview data for interest (including views from redirects as the direct pageview counts can be a bit of an undercount at times).
  • To keep the plots roughly the same width and make it easy to scroll through them, they all start from the year 2000 regardless of when the article was created. I also included a few vertically oriented plots for the newer articles e.g. here.
  • If the article is extended confirmed protected, the padlock is plotted to show when...in theory anyway...although I've just noticed that there is no padlock on the Arab–Israeli conflict plot despite it apparently being EC protected. No idea what's going on there...
Sean.hoyland (talk) 03:23, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
Apparently, there are multiple ways to log extended confirmed protection, so I missed a couple. Plots replaced. Sean.hoyland (talk) 05:11, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
Since the intersection between the 2 projects misses so much (e.g. Nakba) I'll probably generate plots for the remaining 53 Top-importance Palestine project articles and maybe some or all of the 92 Top-importance Israel project article that the intersection misses, just out of curiosity. Sean.hoyland (talk) 09:23, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
Hi Sean -- sorry, I just remembered that I never replied to this. Thanks, again, for putting it together. Looks like you were right, it's not a huge proportion of all edits, but that tells me that the edits are quite targetted. A few socks, a few well-placed reverts or votes, is all it takes? Levivich (talk) 21:06, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Administrator Noticeboard Notice (October 2024)

Information icon There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.The Weather Event Writer (Talk Page) 04:28, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Has this image appeared earlier on Wikipedia? Also, are those numbers real? Many of them look impossibly high. Zerotalk 08:35, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Zero0000, not as far as I'm aware. Actually, that is one of the few interesting things in the article for me because it says something about the stupidity and/or dishonesty of the source or the author or both. Getting things right does not appear to be something the author cares for. I think the stats are accurate, and fairly recent, but the description is misleading. The numbers are page intersection counts, any kind of page, article, talk, user talk etc. So, for example, 'Surtsicna' and 'Dimadick' currently have 8134 page intersections, a couple more than when that crosstab was generated. Here's 5 examples; 3rd_Spanish_Armada, 10th_century, 10_Downing_Street, 1269_Cilicia_earthquake, 1002_German_royal_election. It goes on like that for thousands and thousands of articles nothing to do with pro-Hamas editors hijacking Wikipedia. Trying to tell that kind of story using raw page intersection data like that seems unusually stupid and/or dishonest to me. Sean.hoyland (talk) 09:49, 27 October 2024 (UTC)
Honesty is not the intention, of course. Now that Elon Musk has tweeted it, millions have seen it. Zerotalk 11:10, 27 October 2024 (UTC)
That's great news for the author. Only the engagement matters. Sean.hoyland (talk) 11:36, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Off meds

Hi Sean, in this comment, are you calling David someone off their meds with paranoid dreams of anti-editor pogroms? ꧁Zanahary꧂ 16:47, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Zanahary, I guess you are referring to this comment. No, not David, I'm referring to the author of the article who made defamatory (and profoundly dumb and dishonest) claims about me and many other editors. Sean.hoyland (talk) 17:02, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
Got it, thanks! ꧁Zanahary꧂ 17:04, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
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