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Wikipedia:Long-term abuse/Belteshazzar

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Belteshazzar
Shortcut: WP:LTA/BTSZ
WikilifespanSeptember 2021 - present
Sockpuppet investigationsWikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Belteshazzar
InstructionsSuspected sockpuppet accounts should be reported to sockpuppet investigations for confirmation. When reporting, please link to this long-term abuse report. When the active abuse has been taken care of, please update this report with the latest information. All edits should be reverted, even if not obviously bad, in order to discourage further attempts to probe what we will allow. Belteshazzar is banned by the Wikimedia Foundation and should not make edits without the explicit permission of the WMF, so socks should be reported to SRG for global locks and blocks.
StatusActive

Basic information

Belteshazzar (talk · contribs · block log · arb · SPI confirmed suspected)
Comprehensive edits analysis
XTools Timecard

Belteshazzar was first reported for sockpuppetry in September 2021 and was blocked for it in October 2021. As of August 2024 there have been 90 sock-puppet reports. This has led to the blocking of many accounts and IP addresses. Several of their preferred target pages have had to be semi-protected. As of September 4, 2023, Belteshazzar has been banned by the Wikimedia Foundation from editing any Wikimedia project.

Targeted areas, pages, themes

Medical themes

Ophthalmology related:

Opioid related:

Diet related:

They like to edit pages in the Wikipedia space, sometimes in seemingly innocuous ways, sometimes to try to make our policies more tolerant of their types of bad behaviour. A non-exhaustive list:

Stalking

A few examples of articles which they stalked other people to and then used multiple socks to edit:

They also like to edit some personal essays within specific editors' user space:

Self-referential

Arguing the toss and attempts at self-justification:

Seemingly random

Habitual behaviour

Belteshazzar initially used sockpuppet accounts but has since mostly shifted over to anonymous editing using proxy IPs instead with only occasional forays back into registering accounts. Their most recent registered account (as of October 2023) was blocked in September 2023.

They will often make a few uncontroversial small edits to seemingly random articles before starting on their usual targets. This might be to cover their tracks or just to check that whichever IP address they are using that day is not already blocked. Edit summaries often contain plausibly innocuous descriptions. "Subject-verb agreement" seems to be a favourite.

One pattern that is often seen is editing articles about baseball and baseball players with small updates. Seems to reflect a genuine interest in baseball, in addition to the foregoing reason of testing the waters with a few less obviously bad edits. Some such edits have actually been reinstated by other editors as minor improvements. (Doing this is fine but please try to avoid doing so in a way that Belteshazzar could misinterpret as supportive of their continued ban evasion.)

After this, they will return to their previous main targets to reinstate their preferred changes (often with minor variations) and sometimes (but not always) try to justify their edits in their edit summaries. When trying to justify their behaviour they completely ignore the fact that the sockpuppetry is the main problem and are quite indignant that they are not treated with the same grace as an editor in good standing.

When their preferred targets get semi-protected do they will sometimes take to the Talk pages to argue the toss there.

They sometimes return to previously used proxy IP addresses once blocks on them expire suggesting that they have a fairly limited pool of proxy IPs at their disposal. Such IPs can probably be blocked for long periods without risk of disrupting legitimate editors.

Stalking, harassment and retaliation

Belteshazzar sometimes becomes annoyed with people who repeatedly report or revert their edits and will stalk their recent contribution histories and make small edits to articles they find there. Such edits are not normally particularly bad but, as they are editing articles about subjects that they know little or nothing about, they are very rarely improvements. This might be done to try to assert a degree of ownership over the articles that their imagined nemesis has edited or just to be annoying. This is disruptive even when the edits themselves are innocuous. The two users most frequently targeted in this way are Psychologist Guy and DanielRigal. In September 2023, Belteshazzar created a sock-puppet INeverEmailedPG referring to Psychologist Guy, who had received harassing emails seemingly sent by Belteshazzar. In November 2023 they escalated this behaviour by making a bogus report to WP:BLPN, seemingly in retaliation for being reverted, demanding that their preferred versions be reinstated.

Canvassing

When reverted they will occasionally try to canvass another editor who has edited the article in question for assistance. They do this by approaching editors on User Talk pages in a way that carefully avoids explaining why they are being reverted. As of December 2023, nobody has fallen for these approaches. If an editor in good standing is ever seen to be assisting them then we should consider the possibility that that editor has been tricked, and is acting in mistaken good faith, before reacting too harshly towards them.

In addition to canvassing individual editors they sometimes complain about being reverted at Wikipedia:Help desk, Wikipedia:Teahouse and other places where they hope to find a new audience, unfamiliar with their disruptive antics, who might be tricked into taking their side and assisting them.

Canvassing on other WMF projects

Belteshazzar has also been active on the Wikimedia Commons where they have contacted other banned Wikipedia users including Chamaemelum in an attempt to get other disruptive users to support their edits. They claim to have a "list of users to contact". It is not clear whether Chamaemelum, or anybody else, actually became involved.

Use of reminders/timers

Sometimes Belteshazzar will edit a previously attacked article within minutes of page protection expiring. This most likely indicates that they set set a timer to remind them when pages expire so that they can get back in and attack the articles again as quickly as possible. This may argue for longer periods of semi-protection in cases where the risk of impact on legitimate anonymous editors is not too high.

Cases

SPI:

Before the socking started there was all this drama about the Bates Method:

There was a topic ban:

And, of course, it was violated:

Other notes

Confirmed and suspected accounts

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