Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Cirt

Cirt

Cirt (talk⁺ · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · spi block · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki)

Populated account categories: confirmed · suspected

For archived investigations, see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Cirt/Archive.

07 May 2024[edit]

– This SPI case is closed and will be archived shortly by an SPI clerk or checkuser.

Suspected sockpuppets[edit]

Polygnotus (talk⁺ · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · spi block · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki)
Tools: Editor interaction utility • Interaction Timeline • SPI Tools

This user came to my attention with two posts on September 25th, 2023: [1] and this [2], claiming NPOV violations while demonstrating a clear personal POV on the subjects by describing Landmark as a "weird cult." Having a history of less than 100 days active editing at that point, Polygnotus demonstrated a sophisticated grasp of WP procedures and practices which it is not plausible to have acquired in that time. Also an extensive and very detailed knowledge of the editing on these subjects over the past 20 years, and of the editors involved.

The editing pattern prior to coming to prominence last September looks like an attempt to game the system by artificially building an appearance of significant involvement. Around 3,100 of those edits were done in a six-week period between September 8th and October 22nd, 2022, and are almost all 0, 1 or 2 letter edits, done in bursts of one to five hours per day at a rate of 6 - 10 edits per minute(!). [3] Then the account was largely inactive over the next 10 months, with just 18 edits in that time, followed by about 200 during August and early September 2023.
Since then, I have observed tendentious editing on the Landmark and Werner Erhard articles, including extensive edit-warring. For instance, this deletion was repeated several times without any constructive discussion or explanation: [4] [5] [6]
The phrasing and style are strongly reminiscent of Cirt, especially when aggressively confronting other contributors or resorting to wikilawyering. In any case, the editing pattern is not at all normal for a new editor, regardless of whether the sockmaster is Cirt or any of the other editors who have been editing negatively on these pages over the years. [7] [8] [9] Nwlaw63 (talk) 16:16, 7 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Additional evidence as requested

Cirt (under previous username user:Smee) created the page Outrageous Betrayal - a book critical of Erhard - and asserted effective [[WP:OWN]|ownership]] over it: [10]. They defended the lack of verifiable citations in the book on the Werner Erhard talk page in 2007: [11].

user:Polygnotus edited this page in December 2023 to remove remarks about the lack of references or citations in the book: [12] and [13].

If this is not sufficient, I can provide more examples. Nwlaw63 (talk) 14:42, 9 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by other users[edit]

Accused parties may also comment/discuss in this section below. See Defending yourself against claims.

Facepalm Polygnotus (talk) 14:58, 9 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Landmark is a weird "selfhelp" group started by a guru called John Paul Rosenberg who now uses the name Werner Erhard. Nowadays they are mostly focused on making money but back in the day it was pretty cultish. Various RS and "not-so-R" S-es reported on that and negative information made its way into the Wikipedia article. A group consisting of less than a handful of meatpuppets and a dozen or two sockpuppets have been WP:GAMING the system by WP:CPUSHing and WP:TAGTEAMing for over 2 decades. A bunch of the socks got blocked but not all of them. There was an ARBCOM case back in the day but that didn't solve the problem.

Landmark has been called "Scientology-lite" and they use the same "Attack the Attacker" policy.

https://culteducation.com/group/1020-landmark-education/12303-landmark-education.html

The meat- and sockpuppets have been manipulating Wikipedia for more than 2 decades. They influenced AfD results and voted in Cirt's RfA. They believe that they do not have to follow WP:COI when they refuse to admit that they have a conflict of interest.

Nwlaw63 probably knows that I am not Cirt (e.g. I do not live in the United States) and they know they have no evidence of wrongdoing but they are just attempting to cause enough disruption to achieve their goals.

For instance, this deletion was repeated several times without any constructive discussion or explanation is kinda funny because then they list 3 edits, 2 of which were explained in the editsummary and the other one a repeat of an already explained edit so that didn't really need any further explanation. Note that the third edit is a different piece of text being removed so they are intentionally misleading.

So their claim of extensive edit-warring is pretty funny in the context that they can list 2 edits where the same text was removed.

Me aggressively confronting other contributors is just me posting the {{uw-coi}} template, which is a polite explanation of how conflict of interest stuff works around here.

Gilbertine goldmark (talk · contribs) was also interested in boardgames and defending Landmark.

It is interesting to see the similarities between Ndeavour and Nwlaw63's behaviour, for example.

I am not sure which of the Landmark accounts are socks and which are meatpuppets, but they should probably all be blocked for being NOTHERE. Can we just BOOMERANG this thing or should I open a new one? Polygnotus (talk) 11:29, 10 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments[edit]

Additional information needed. In order to facilitate and expedite your request, please provide diffs to support your case. Please give two or more diffs meeting the following format:

At least one diff is from the sockmaster (or an account already blocked as a confirmed sockpuppet of the sockmaster), showing the behaviour characteristic of the sockmaster.
At least one diff per suspected sockpuppet, showing the suspected sockpuppet emulating the behaviour of the sockmaster given in the first diff.
In situations where it is not immediately obvious from the diffs what the characteristic behaviour is, a short explanation must be provided. Around one sentence is enough for this. MarioGom (talk) 06:21, 8 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No evidence presented. Two accounts disagreeing with someone is not evidence. No compared diffs. Closing. MarioGom (talk) 18:26, 10 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]