Wikipedia:Long-term abuse/German reference desk troll
Appearance
Known IPs | 84.61*, 88.77*, 88.78*, 84.153* |
---|---|
Physical location | Essen or Bochum, Germany |
Instructions | Suspected socks should be tagged and reported to sockpuppet investigations for confirmation. When reporting, please link to this long-term abuse report and note that the user is community banned. When the active abuse has been taken care of, please update this report with the latest information. |
Status | Active |
Please report all ongoing incidents of abuse to AIV or ANI |
Basic information
[edit]The "German reference desk troll" operates chiefly in three areas on English Wikipedia: Reference desks, Redirects for creation and talk page redirect creation.
- They operate cross-wiki, mostly in English and German Wikipedia, but also on French and other wikis.
- Creating almost 300 unnecessary, irrelevant and sometimes vulgar article talk page redirects on en.wikipedia. Some were re-created many times.[1]
- Asking numerous, often interesting, open-ended questions at reference desks on this and other projects.[1] However, when one sees the pattern, it is obvious that he's asking just to make people search for an answer, which is practically always a piece of trivia, without a valid use. For example, one of typical on Language desk was "Why is there no [X] combination of letters in the [XXXXX] language?"[2]
- This person seems well-informed and educated, especially in mathematics.[1]
- This person seems multilingual and fluent in English; he or she just as easily might be German or one of the millions of foreigners in Germany.[1]
- This user has been Community Banned as of May 17, 2012 per discussion [1]
Targeted areas, pages, themes
[edit]Sample Reference desk themes, out of hundreds:
- Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Mathematics/2009 November 15#Free Burnside group B(2,4)
- Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2010 March 11#Chemical compounds with many elements
- Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 March 13#PIGS
- Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2010 March 16#Double-ace straight
- Talk:North Germanic languages/Archive 1#No voiced sibilants?
- [2] on Vietnamese
- [3] on Proto-Slavic
- [4] on Polish
- [5] ambiguity of "Mitsubishi car"
- [6] on Turkish
- [7] similar style on RD/S
Pages
[edit]Deleted redirects including number of times deleted:
Total: 281 deletions
Similar request on
IPs
[edit]- Important caveats
- Not every IP listed here has been used by the cross-wiki vandal.
- Those IPs actually used for vandalism may have also been used by innocent contributors.
Suspect IPs identified by User:A. B. through October 2010:
[edit]in chronological order from oldest to newest
some have edited on other projects but not this one
Suspect IPs identified by User:A. B. in October-December 2010
[edit]Suspect IPs identified by others in October-November 2010:
[edit]Cases
[edit]- Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive646#Cross-wiki vandal flying under the radar 22 months: 280+ bogus page creations, 40+ IPs
- w:de:Wikipedia Diskussion:Botschaft#Odd cross-wiki behaviour by someone in Germany; sometimes includes edit-warring and disruptive page creation (permanent link)
- meta:Talk:Steward requests/Global#Cross-wiki vandal flying under the radar 22 months: 280+ bogus page creations, 40+ IPs (permanent link)
- Wikipedia talk:Reference desk#Cross-wiki vandal also very active on our reference desk pages (permanent link)
- Wikipedia_talk:Reference_desk/Archive_82#84.61.155.241_troll?