Talk:Wikiproject:Antispam/2021
Olga Vaganova edit
Olga Vaganova [stalktoy] – [cross-wiki edits] (Ольга Ваганова in Russian) is a founder of ukrainian PR agency (article in russian about starting agency). Edits in uk, ru, en concern clients mainly, ignoring paid editing template. --Anntinomy (talk) 08:36, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
- Thanks for the information, @Anntinomy. On fr-wp, I only found one old (2011) creation: fr:PrivatBank. It used a promotional style, but it has been edited by an experienced user since. — Jules* Talk 20:38, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- She has disclosure on English Wikipedia. So there is no issue here so far. MarioGom (talk) 07:48, 29 October 2021 (UTC)
Polli Cannabis edit
- en:Polli Cannabis
- ru:Полли Каннабис
- Tovpenec15 (CA · xwiki · COIBot report)
- Volha 1991 (CA · xwiki · COIBot report)
- DmitryH89 (CA · xwiki · COIBot report)
- Gavrush89 (CA · xwiki · COIBot report)
- AnuFree (CA · xwiki · COIBot report)
Four accounts blocked on en.wp, cleanup required on ru and Commons. @Oleg Yunakov and DarwIn: MER-C (talk) 16:29, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
Done Copyvios deleted on Commons.--- Darwin Ahoy! 17:02, 4 September 2021 (UTC)- MER-C: Done. All four socks are blocked. Article was nominated for deletion. Thank you. Oleg Yunakov (talk) 01:23, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
One more account: AnuFree (CA · xwiki · COIBot report). MER-C 08:59, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
- Accounts locked. Archiving. MER-C 18:51, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
Benutzer:مسافرت در ایران edit
ejarekhodrosorena.com
Spam to push a car rental --Itti (talk) 18:10, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
- This is مسافرت در ایران (CA · xwiki · COIBot report). Google translate delivers “Travel in Iran” for the username. Contributions so far:
- dewiki: link to car rental added: [1]
- fawiki: fa:کاربر:مسافرت در ایران/صفحه تمرین draft about Tehran in user space, created on 16 August 2021
- ruwiki: link to the same car rental added: [2]
- trwiki: same here: [3]
- --AFBorchert (talk) 18:33, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
- I've asked for a global lock: SRG#Global lock for مسافرت در ایران. --AFBorchert (talk) 18:47, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
- This account is now globally locked. --AFBorchert (talk) 08:35, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
- I've asked for a global lock: SRG#Global lock for مسافرت در ایران. --AFBorchert (talk) 18:47, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
They've been seen before at a low level. If it happens again, please report to the spam blacklist. MER-C 10:06, 18 September 2021 (UTC)
Photospam edit
After noticing this [4] at deWP spam blacklist I realized that this was connected to spam reported in March by @SCP-2000 [5][6][7]. Now there are different URLs involved:
Accounts & IPs I've discovered so far spamming photoaid.com:
- Konwar00 (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (plWP, blocked in frWP)
- Lemonmuffin8 (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (blocked in deWP)
- Stefania Passarello (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (itWP)
- 192.166.202.48 xwiki-contribs • xwiki-date (alt) • ST • IP info • WHOIS • robtex • gblock • glist • abuselog • bullseye (enWP, esWP, itWP, ruWP)
- 93.105.142.186 xwiki-contribs • xwiki-date (alt) • ST • IP info • WHOIS • robtex • gblock • glist • abuselog • bullseye (trWP)
- 193.29.207.189 xwiki-contribs • xwiki-date (alt) • ST • IP info • WHOIS • robtex • gblock • glist • abuselog • bullseye (trWP)
Accounts & IPs I've discovered so far spamming dvlottery.me:
- Loise.tranchant (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (frWP)
- Poprostupostek (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (plWP)
- Catcher-13 (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (ukWP)
- Koenig3Stelle (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (enWP, ruWP, blocked in deWP)
- Silvina.cupayolo (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (esWP)
Accounts & IPs I've discovered so far spamming mybritishpassport.com and ukabroad.net:
- 41.13.238.142 xwiki-contribs • xwiki-date (alt) • ST • IP info • WHOIS • robtex • gblock • glist • abuselog • bullseye (srWP)
- 160.119.40.34 xwiki-contribs • xwiki-date (alt) • ST • IP info • WHOIS • robtex • gblock • glist • abuselog • bullseye (deWP, enWP, frWP, huWP, itWP, trWP, ukWP)
I guess there might be even more, so a CU might be useful + of course include the new URLs at the global spam blacklist. @Billinghurst: fyi as you added the previous urls to the spam blacklist.
By the way looking at passport-photo.online and passportphotocodeuk.com I noticed several accounts that were not globally blocked:
- Cikkkiegeszito (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (esWP, huWP, blocked in deWP)
- ToFromm (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (esWP, blocked in deWP)
- Silvi999 (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (csWP, skWP)
- Benedykt.vocapp (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (plWP)
- Mahammad.ahmadov (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (azWP)
- Adgrg (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (enWP)
- Ledjan24 (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) (frWP, sqWP, blocked in enWP)
I checked all weblinks using this tool [8] and followed each account's edits, now all links should be removed from the mainspace in all projects. -- Johannnes89 (talk) 00:18, 23 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Johannnes89: I've added to the blacklist? Yeah maybe one or two. If a domain needs to be blacklisted, if it is unequivocally horrid, then just add it to Talk:Spam blacklist. If it needs a consensus reach one here, and add it to that page and cite and link to the consensus. I am less active in the UPE space for the wikis where I concentrate my efforts, and more eradicating the mass of spambot-targeted urls. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:08, 23 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Billinghurst: maybe we should adapt the script so we can directly blacklist from here? After all I also make COIBot monitor this page, and the script is to make our life easy (for a lot of spam it is like a game of Monopoly - don't go through start, don't collect 20k$). -- Dirk Beetstra T C (en: U, T) 15:36, 23 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Beetstra is it possible to get COIBot LinkReports for the other domains listed as well? As there are multiple Accounts involved over a long period of time, there will likely be more attempts. -- Johannnes89 (talk) 15:29, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
- @Billinghurst: maybe we should adapt the script so we can directly blacklist from here? After all I also make COIBot monitor this page, and the script is to make our life easy (for a lot of spam it is like a game of Monopoly - don't go through start, don't collect 20k$). -- Dirk Beetstra T C (en: U, T) 15:36, 23 November 2021 (UTC)
passport-photo.online
passportphotocodeuk.com
photoaid.com
dvlottery.me
mybritishpassport.com
ukabroad.net
visafoto.com
vocapp.com
- @Johannnes89: ^^ that should have summoned the bot to save/refresh reports. Dirk Beetstra T C (en: U, T) 20:17, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
FYI: I requested global lock for 100+ sockpuppets related to this crosswiki spam [9]. There are local checkuser actions against some of these accounts [10][11][12]. It appears that at least some of them are freelancers hired via Upwork [13]. --Johannnes89 (talk) 22:38, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
COIBot edit
I have enabled COIBot's tracking capabilities to this page (diff). That means that COIBot will create reports for link additions for links reported in {{LinkSummary}}/{{XWikiSummary}} templates and users reported in {{UserSummary}}/{{IPSummary}} templates, and that COIBot will track the diffs where the links/users were reported here. Overall that makes it easier to trace back evidence to blacklistings if every they get challenged, or future requests to earlier observations. Dirk Beetstra T C (en: U, T) 13:23, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
- Awesome, thank you Beetstra! I was just thinking about that this morning when I queued a bunch of reports via IRC for domains listed on this page. GeneralNotability (talk) 15:04, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
Improving tools for monitoring and response edit
I commented on wikimedia-l that it seemed there's much more that could be done to support this work. Including:
- Monitoring the market for UPE
- Work with groups that are in the market and completely transparent about their work to maintain a sense of rates and volume
- Search general contracting sites, general search engines, and specific reputation brokers for new options; maintain a catalog
- Spot-check and commission work. last week Jan Böhmermann spent under 500 Euros and identified two German UPE networks
- Building better tools for tracking and countering UPE
- Tracking: automated scoring (seems like some of this exists but not everyone uses it?)
- Countering: tools to coordinate work, making it more satisfying + collaborative to tackle organized UPE networks. Especially for often-targeted categories (politicians + companies)
- Both: Focus on tools for detecting large farms/networks over time, and cleaning up the mess they leave. (how automated is this now?)
Thanks @MarioGom: for pointing me here. I am curious how much of this tooling and automation exists already, and how to make it ore visible to editors on individual projects (who might not know about cross-wiki antispam efforts).
And I recognize that we don't have a uniform definition for the heart of the challenge -- Spam, COI, UPE (constituting a kind of hidden COI), and sock- and meat-puppet networks: all are slightly different contexts + scopes. How do you think about those in relation to one another? –SJ talk 20:52, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
- Hi SJ: thank you for bringing this up here. Here's some thoughts:
- Monitoring the market for UPE
- Work with groups that are in the market and completely transparent about their work to maintain a sense of rates and volume
- Disclosed paid editors (DPE) are a tiny fraction of paid editing. Both in terms of number of accounts and edit volume. Some may be collaborative, like Beutler Ink (ping WWB Too), but I'm not sure that would be very useful for tackling UPE. If you refer to groups who are transparent about their work and rates off-wiki but don't disclose on-wiki, that probably only covers some Upwork freelancers, who are also just a small part of the market. Large actors rarely disclose rates, clients, and often not even the fact they offer Wikipedia services.
- Search general contracting sites, general search engines, and specific reputation brokers for new options; maintain a catalog
- We currently do some monitoring on English Wikipedia (see en:Wikipedia:List of paid editing companies), I think French Wikipedia does something similar (ping Jules*). Some editors also monitor sites like Upwork, and some results can be seen at en:WP:COIN. However, public disclosure can be in conflict with harassment policies (en:WP:OUTING), functionaries and some admins have access to more information on evidence discovered this way. A Volunteer Response Team queue exists at paid-en-wp@wikipedia.org, but only functionaries have access, and as far as I know, it is severely understaffed.
- Spot-check and commission work. last week Jan Böhmermann spent under 500 Euros and identified two German UPE networks
- Some people did this on French Wikipedia too, also uncovering some cross-wiki UPE operation in France (see en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-05-31/News and notes). There seems to be some disputes about how mystery shopping and our policies interact, especially on English Wikipedia. If we want more of this, we'd need a framework to ensure that mystery shoppers who are members of our community know the do's and dont's to avoid policy issues.
- Work with groups that are in the market and completely transparent about their work to maintain a sense of rates and volume
- Building better tools for tracking and countering UPE
- Unlike ORES, it is usually easier to detect UPE editors than isolated UPE edits. A (insufficient) number of tools exist, for example. MER-C's suspcious new articles report (see en:Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam#Suspicious new articles). We usually conceal operational details of such tools (en:WP:BEANS). Publicly disclosing all detection heuristics would be like publishing a manual on how to do UPE and get away with it. Anyway, I'll list here some categories of tooling I'm aware of:
- General discovery: Tools that help finding UPE editors in general (not a specific sockfarm). MER-C's report fall into this category. I use some heuristics that yield around a 20%-35% verifiable true positive rate among the discovered accounts. I don't publish the results of this tool to avoid harm to innocent users, but a number of accounts I report come from these results after manual research.
- Specific discovery: Tools to discover new accounts of known sockfarms. These include things as simple as watching recent changes on articles heavily targeted by specific sockfarms (e.g. en:User:MarioGom/TOPCOI/Bx), as well as more targeted heuristics to detect a known behavioral fingerprint. This works for some big UPE operations (e.g. Yoodaba SPI).
- Attribution/Verification: Tools to check a suspicious account and attribute it to a known sockmaster. This is also quite feasible for some large operations (e.g. Yoodaba SPI, CharmenderDeol SPI, Jaktheladz SPI).
- Investigation: Tools for behavioral sockpuppetry investigation, such as toolforge:spi-tools, toolforge:sigma, toolforge:xtools. Tooling is particularly lacking when it comes to research of cross-wiki UPE operations.
- Unlike ORES, it is usually easier to detect UPE editors than isolated UPE edits. A (insufficient) number of tools exist, for example. MER-C's suspcious new articles report (see en:Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam#Suspicious new articles). We usually conceal operational details of such tools (en:WP:BEANS). Publicly disclosing all detection heuristics would be like publishing a manual on how to do UPE and get away with it. Anyway, I'll list here some categories of tooling I'm aware of:
- Other than that, the recent creation of Wikiproject:Antispam has been a good step in terms of cross-wiki coordination.
- About cleaning up the mess, it's a quite lacking area. We have organized some ad hoc clean ups on enwiki (en:User:Blablubbs/Wolfram, en:User:MarioGom/LoboReview, en:User:MarioGom/KazakhReview), but there is still nothing formal or systematic.
- Nosebagbear has a collaborative sandbox for UPE proposals (see en:User:Nosebagbear/UPE Proposals), which is worth the attention of anyone interested in moving some proposal forward. --MarioGom (talk) 10:45, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
- @MarioGom: on fr-wp, we have information on paid editing companies, but disseminated. I took the initiative to create fr:Projet:Antipub/Agences de communication today (we still have to complete it); it will help us to centralize the information. We also intend to trap again some agencies in the future, in order to find socks they use, as we did in May 2020. Best, — Jules* Talk 16:56, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
- Interesting, thanks to you both. @MarioGom: I think the number of larger orgs involved in en:WP:CREWE is enough that we could get a rough estimate of market rates and volume. Even one or two active PR agencies will have a better sense of it than most editors, and comparisons over time will be useful even if they see a biased subset. –SJ talk 16:29, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
- @MarioGom: on fr-wp, we have information on paid editing companies, but disseminated. I took the initiative to create fr:Projet:Antipub/Agences de communication today (we still have to complete it); it will help us to centralize the information. We also intend to trap again some agencies in the future, in order to find socks they use, as we did in May 2020. Best, — Jules* Talk 16:56, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
- Our anti-abuse tools are a pile of garbage and the API is actually worse by virtue of having random missing functionality. Once we have a working CAPTCHA, all anti-abuse tools in MediaWiki and extensions used on WMF sites have dedicated maintainers, the technical debt in the anti-abuse tools is gone, the API has been audited for missing functionality (phab:T192023, phab:T20104, phab:T188672, phab:T261752 are all material impediments) and that functionality provided, the spam blacklist is still public and infinitely scalable, PageTriage is available for all wikis and in a much improved way, ..., then we can discuss improvements. I want to focus on finding spam, not fighting the WMF's bad software and bad management decisions.
- That said, if someone wants to put together a training set that would be great. I know what I am looking for, it's just a matter of weeding out the false positives. The better I can do this, the less I can rely on behavior. MER-C 17:42, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
- MER-C Helpful ideas and links, thank you. I'm not sure what the right way is to bundle these up and push for prioritization; is it helpful to have an umbrella ticket for this that we can all add our +1's to? –SJ talk 16:29, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
- The state of the admin tools is so bad that any improvement to anti-abuse tools in MediaWiki is welcome. Anti-spam is not the only problem we face - a general improvement in anti-abuse tools will make progress against several problems. If I were to pick one for quick wins, it would be the deleted title search in the API and UI improvements for the deleted title search so that they are available in new page patrol and other scripts. There's no escaping the massive pile of work that is phab:T20493 though. MER-C 18:25, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
- MER-C Helpful ideas and links, thank you. I'm not sure what the right way is to bundle these up and push for prioritization; is it helpful to have an umbrella ticket for this that we can all add our +1's to? –SJ talk 16:29, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
- SJ: I have surveyed data from various major UPE companies and they charge $500-$2,500, with median probably around $1,500. With respect to volume, after some back-of-the-envelope estimates, I would say that UPE page creations on English Wikipedia are in the hundreds per year (conservative), possibly in the thousands. It's hard to know for sure, since there's a long tail of UPE editors beyond the few major UPE companies. MarioGom (talk) 12:54, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
- Thank you for looking into it. That's substantive, and good context for improving related tools. –SJ talk 21:01, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
Reduction + diversion of misapplied energy edit
Another thought: have we looked into ways to reduce or divert demand for paid editing into constructive channels? The demand for run-of-the-mill publicity helps hide malicious manipulation. To limit this, we might create an (off-WP) space for freely-licensed intermediate steps along the path towards an on-WP proposed edit. And make the above even clearer by having all commercial paid editing start in this space instead, w/ its own tools and assumptions and expectations:
- Define (or create) a preferred site for sharing free knowledge about the 80% of this that is non-deceptive but still out of scope: self-curated statements by subjects, possibly-NN summaries, related media (less of an issue, given Commons' policies)
- Build tools to make it easy to create + transfer drafts there, streamlining deletion + migration processes.
- Observe activity there -- likely w/ meaningful correlation to UPE on Wikipedia.
As an example: sharing freely licensed media intended? proposed? for use in a paid article is easy, b/c Commons has fewer steps to follow, and is set up in a way that it doesn't suggest reputation or notability by associationn -- so its pages aren't very good targets for astroturfing; but are a mechanic for releasing media w/ metadata under a free license. An equivalent for nominally-factual statements (or self-reported statements) about verifiable entities could similarly narrow the subset of such edits that hit RC. –SJ talk 16:24, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
- Hammering UPE operations does divert some demand into constructive channels. I have observed a few companies switching to in-house, policy-compliant, disclosed paid editors after the agency they hired was banned, exposed, and their customers appeared connected to it.
- As for other venues, you can look at Wikitia and Everipedia. BLP and companies there are often correlated with UPE on Wikipedia. These are wikis they can use to freely dump all the promotional garbage they want.
- On English Wikipedia we do have drafts, which is where commercial paid editing is supposed to go. For simple, hard facts, Wikidata is friendly to COI and paid editing, disclosed or undisclosed. Commons is also a relatively safe place unless they incur in copyvio (which is often the case). I'm not sure I fully grasp the kind of solution you're proposing here. MarioGom (talk) 16:43, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
- Widely publicise examples of paid editing backfiring.
- Unfortunately I've seen some diversion towards the Simple English Wikipedia. MER-C 18:29, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
- Thanks, good examples.
Wikitiaand Everipedia could perhaps be such a place. [Update: it seems not.] They both still claim to be curated third-party encyclopedic content... even though they have neutrality and balance problems that far exceed our own. What I mean is - 1. identifying a specifically recommended autobio-index -- a channel for a) freely-licensed, b) sourced + verifiable, self- or pr-descriptions of possibly non-notable entities, which explicitly states that it makes no claims of independence, balance, or neutrality, and does not present itself as an "encyclopedia".
- 2. sending commercial-PE (paid or otherwise) to such a channel to update a page there. away from the RC or on-wiki process here.
- 3. while all editors can use Drafts here to develop articles, commercial-PE should just post a link to this other site; from which a page or section could be imported if appropriate.
- 4. building tools to easily transfer pages to that channel and remove them from WP. self-promotions or articles by sock farms (that might one day be WP-suitable, if cleaned up) could be more readily deleted + migrated; and we might impose a higher standard of balance + notability for CPE, or a policy of bulk deletion/migration of articles created by UPE. All of this might be easier / less controversial if we know this isn't removing free knowledge from the web, but rather removing it from the search-engine-visibility and implicit curatorial approval of being on WP.
- Do you think we could do the above w/ a pointer to
Wikitia? Do you see value in trying to move CPE away from using drafts, and adding specific "delete and migrate" tools? @MarioGom: I haven't thought through the implications in detail, but that's roughly what I meant. –SJ talk 17:07, 15 September 2021 (UTC)
- Thanks, good examples.
- Do not ever consider Wikitia (but Everipedia is OK). Wikitia is a shady site documented in the MediaWiki spam blacklist. It is operated by Avoof [14], an Indian SEO company in Udaipur, Rajasthan that is well documented on en:WP:PAIDLIST. Avoof employees are the only users who are allowed to edit Wikitia. The main operators are Himank Seth [15] and Sonali Kavdia, who are highly active spammers on LinkedIn and Upwork and actively spam their own profiles all over the Internet to promote themselves. They regularly scrape articles off Wikipedia and charge clients a few hundred dollars to publish on Wikitia. Probably only 5% of the pages showing up on Wikitia are Avoof's clients.
- They evidently have poor English skills as this confusing jumble of words on Wikitia's main page shows.
The community at Wikitia is limited to only specialized editors who are experts in their fields and can helping in building verified content by the continuous efforts. All articles and pages on Wikitia are protected to provide verified encyclopedic content by controlling the substandard edits by all users, who dont have knowledge in that industry or field.
Unlike Wikipedia, we believe that just negativity or controversial content are not a qualification for a page, which has garnered a lot of attention and mostly hate crime content is highlighted and not the positive work.
- Dealing with this requires close monitoring of anything related to Wikitia that shows up on the Internet, such as job ads relating to Wikitia pages. Jwindleberg (talk) 02:28, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
- Thanks @Jwindleberg:, so it sounds like that one is not a good option. Again suggesting we might want to set up our own venue, which rejects spam and abuse, but supports permanent rough drafts and not-yet-notable material. –SJ talk 12:51, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
- Everipedia is a very good venue for "permanent rough drafts and not-yet-notable material." Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, was active in founding and managing Everipedia. The site looks well managed and has a very supportive community. On the other hand, there is no way that Wikitia can be viable option since it's completely controlled by shady Indian spammers. Jwindleberg (talk) 17:34, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
Obviously the top priority is to first hunt down the big-time harassers and extortionists. They are the ones causing the biggest damage to WMF projects. All the other small-time spammers who don't do extortion or blackmailing are just annoying but not diabolic. We should get rid of those online gopnik gangs like Wikibusiness.ua first. Jwindleberg (talk) 17:45, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
- ++ That makes sense to me. –SJ talk 16:03, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
Sophisticated (Eastern) European paid editing rings edit
At Wikiproject:Antispam we see highly sophisticated paid editing syndicates operating mainly from Europe, especially Ukraine and Russia but with a smattering of US, French and German operators. On en-wp, the main actors are low-skilled spammers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh who usually do not display much sophistication and largely confine their activities to en-wp. Starting off with a list of known sockfarms and their countries of origin listed at meta,
- Çelebicihan - Ukraine
- Wikibusiness - Ukraine
- Serghiy Hrabarook - Ukraine
- Olga Vaganova - Ukraine
- Pierre Malinowski - Russia and France
- Wiki PR, Status Labs - US
- Ross kramerov - US, of Russophone origin
- Olaf Kosinsky - Germany
- Prix Versailles - France
- KapitalBrand - Morocco
- UA85 - Pakistan
- Xenen1970 - Nigeria
Quite a different situation from en-wp which gets overwhelmed with clueless unsophiscated spammers from developing Anglophone countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Ghana and the likes, as observed at en:WP:SPI. See this observation by Bri on en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-05-31/Recent research,
I've been working in this arena for a while, and in fact have a credit in the paper for contributing labeled data that was used to train the model. We aren't sure how sophisticated some of these operations are but my feeling is there's a distinct break between the activities of the outfits catering to well-funded Global North entities (in particular corporations and their executives, entertainers/entertainment companies, and politicians and political groups) – probably what you mean by the "professionals" – and the rest. I wouldn't be surprised if the former are highly aware of the investigative techniques used on-Wiki, and adapt to whatever metrics and techniques we apply, but the latter are unable to, at least quickly. But the greatest volume of stuff that has to be dealt with is due to the less sophisticated group, and it would still be useful to have tools that willow that away so human effort can be focused on the remainder.
This means we may need different strategies and tools to deal with, for instance, sophiscated Ukrainian paid editing rings vs. noob-type Indian freelancers. A pattern emerging now is that sophisticated x-wiki spam tends to come out of Ukraine, Russia and to some extent Western Europe, but the mostly monolingual Americans and British are typically occupied only with en-wp. Jwindleberg (talk) 02:28, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
- For what it's worth, fairly sophisticated UPE operations are run from the US, UK, and Israel too. At least on English Wikipedia. Also some bigger operations are internationalized, e.g. primarily run from the US with additional teams in Philippines or Hong Kong. MarioGom (talk) 21:06, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
USA/India spammers edit
Here is a link to a portfolio of a Wikipedia PR company: https://www.wikipedialegendsllc.com/portfolio.php. List of articles they claim to be theirs:
- en:Rachel Dratch
- en:Keith Powers
- en:Gentiane Lupi
- en:Graham Little
- en:Feng Timo
- en:James Roe (rower)
- en:Laidback Luke
- en:Rafa Esparza
- en:John Randall Nelson
- en:John Hayden (ice hockey)
--212.91.160.53 10:11, 25 November 2021 (UTC)
- Many of the companies offering paid editing services have false client lists, and this appears to be another one of those. Giraffer (talk) 20:54, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
PR Olaf Kosinsky edit
Olaf_Kosinsky (CA · xwiki · COIBot report) Subteno (CA · xwiki · COIBot report)
A German TV show showed a PE connection between user Olaf Kosinsky and Subteno a disposable sock. This was confirmed by CU. Olaf Kosinsky was involved in many projects. It is reasonable to assume that he also enriched many articles there with advertising. --Itti (talk) 12:28, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
- en:Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation notified. MER-C (talk) 16:35, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
- Filed en:Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Olaf Kosinsky. MER-C 08:53, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- frwiki: @Jules*: frwiki is also involved, for example: fr:Bianca Arndt, fr:Günter Henle, fr:Patrick Sensburg and more
- Done for fr-wp. I'm sad I don't know german, to understand the TV show and how it revealed the UPE. — Jules* Talk 15:33, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- @Itti: Sorry to bother you with that, but I'm trying to understand the whole case in order to report about it on fr-wp. I'm reading de:Wikipedia Diskussion:WikiProjekt Umgang mit bezahltem Schreiben/Verdachtsfälle/Olaf Kosinsky with machine translation and there is something I don't get: was the de-wp community aware of paid edits of this experienced user? It seems he had a PR website under his own name, but I don't see any disclosure of PE on his de-wp user page. — Jules* Talk 15:57, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- @Jules*: here a short list de:Wikipedia:WikiProjekt Umgang mit bezahltem Schreiben/Verdachtsfälle/Olaf Kosinsky. I did not know. It may be that someone had seen it before, but in principle it was not known. Olaf Kosinsky was active, he organized and carried out the state parliament projects where MPs were photographed. Also in the EU Parliament. He must have used this contact and probably the idea with the PE has grown over time. It became obvious when Jan Böhmermann (quite popular in de), after doing some research, tried to get in touch with the PR agency of Kosinsky and then commissioned three rather stupid additions. They did that, he delivered with the sock and on Friday it was broadcast in the evening program. I hope to have explained it clearly. Many greetings --Itti (talk) 17:04, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- Thank you very much @Itti: Previously, I did not understand that it was the journalist who asked for the three additions made by Subteno; it's very clear now! Best, — Jules* Talk 19:54, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- @Jules*: here a short list de:Wikipedia:WikiProjekt Umgang mit bezahltem Schreiben/Verdachtsfälle/Olaf Kosinsky. I did not know. It may be that someone had seen it before, but in principle it was not known. Olaf Kosinsky was active, he organized and carried out the state parliament projects where MPs were photographed. Also in the EU Parliament. He must have used this contact and probably the idea with the PE has grown over time. It became obvious when Jan Böhmermann (quite popular in de), after doing some research, tried to get in touch with the PR agency of Kosinsky and then commissioned three rather stupid additions. They did that, he delivered with the sock and on Friday it was broadcast in the evening program. I hope to have explained it clearly. Many greetings --Itti (talk) 17:04, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- @Itti: Sorry to bother you with that, but I'm trying to understand the whole case in order to report about it on fr-wp. I'm reading de:Wikipedia Diskussion:WikiProjekt Umgang mit bezahltem Schreiben/Verdachtsfälle/Olaf Kosinsky with machine translation and there is something I don't get: was the de-wp community aware of paid edits of this experienced user? It seems he had a PR website under his own name, but I don't see any disclosure of PE on his de-wp user page. — Jules* Talk 15:57, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- ruwiki: ru:Нордт, Кристина
- cawiki: ca:Patrick Sensburg
- eswiki: @MarioGom: eswiki is also involved, for example: es:Patrick Sensburg
- dawiki: da:HUSUM Wind
Regards --Itti (talk) 09:32, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- @AFBorchert and DarwIn: c:Commons:Volunteer Response Team/Noticeboard#Tickets verified by Olaf Kosinsky. MER-C 10:10, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- Reported to eswiki: es:Wikipedia:Tablón de anuncios de los bibliotecarios/Portal/Archivo/Miscelánea/Actual#Olaf Kosinsky. TaronjaSatsuma: could you look at the cawiki side? MarioGom (talk) 11:13, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- Blocked on Commons: c:Commons:Administrators' noticeboard#Case Olaf Kosinsky. MER-C 13:02, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- Wikidata checkuser request made: d:Wikidata:Requests for checkuser/Case/Olaf Kosinsky. MER-C 13:10, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- blocked on wikisource.org -jkb- 14:39, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- Inevitably there will need to be some sort of cleanup for the UPE here – how do we intend to go about this? Do we treat all of his contributions as UPE, or a select few? If so, how would we determine which? Thanks, Giraffer (talk) 18:08, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
- @Giraffer: Olaf Kosinsky was a very prolific and experienced editor and a significant part of his contributions were apparently not paid for. As far as I can see, Olaf Kosinsky was using sockpuppets for paid editing but used his main account to support these activities by moving articles from draft to main space (at en:wp, example), by reviewing new articles (at de:wp, example), and by processing VRT tickets which were related to his paid activities ([example). The problem is that we just know some of the socks but there are probably more which did not come up in the CU results at de:wp as they weren't used in the last three months. --AFBorchert (talk) 09:49, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
- Nothing extra found in the en.wp sockpuppet investigation. MER-C 17:11, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
- Thanks, AFBorchert. I think I'm just gonna go through the sockpuppets' contributions and then whatever interaction the main account had with them (on enwiki). Thanks for your help. Regards, Giraffer (talk) 21:24, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
- @Giraffer: Olaf Kosinsky was a very prolific and experienced editor and a significant part of his contributions were apparently not paid for. As far as I can see, Olaf Kosinsky was using sockpuppets for paid editing but used his main account to support these activities by moving articles from draft to main space (at en:wp, example), by reviewing new articles (at de:wp, example), and by processing VRT tickets which were related to his paid activities ([example). The problem is that we just know some of the socks but there are probably more which did not come up in the CU results at de:wp as they weren't used in the last three months. --AFBorchert (talk) 09:49, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
Welcome edit
Hi, welcome everyone to the antispam project. Native English speakers, I am guilty for the terrible style. ;) Feel free to rephrase as you see fit. Best, Bédévore (talk) 15:30, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
- For the record, this project is born after this discussion (permalink) on en-wp. Best, — Jules* Talk 15:36, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
- @Bédévore and Jules*: How come all things frwiki-related just look so beautiful? This is great work, thank you so much for taking the time. I've given the landing page a major copyedit. Blablubbs (talk) 17:07, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
- Thank you @Blablubbs (twice)! — Jules* Talk 17:10, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
- Thanks Blablubbs! Bédévore (talk) 21:59, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
- Thank you @Blablubbs (twice)! — Jules* Talk 17:10, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
- @Bédévore and Jules*: How come all things frwiki-related just look so beautiful? This is great work, thank you so much for taking the time. I've given the landing page a major copyedit. Blablubbs (talk) 17:07, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
Looking for contacts on Wikimedia projects edit
Hello,
As discussed before, this wikiproject would be very useful to identify volunteers of other Wikimedia projects willing to help on cross-wiki promotion cases.
Bédévore and I will soon start contacting other wikis (using embassies or other means) to identify such volunteers, so they can join this project and list their names on Wikiproject:Antispam/Contacts. I suggest we list below which projects each of us did contact, in order to avoid any redundancy.
Regards, — Jules* Talk 16:35, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
- Done wp-de: de:Wikipedia_Diskussion:WikiProjekt_Vandalismusbekämpfung#Wiki-übergreifende_Vandalismusbekämpfung_:_Vorschlag by user:Sijysuis + de:Wikipedia_Diskussion:WikiProjekt_Umgang_mit_bezahltem_Schreiben#Meta_Wikiproject:Antispam by me — Jules* Talk 18:22, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
- Done WD in Fr & Eng. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Topic:Wdpwdyaftk490tvl and [16]. I'll also hit one or two Italian-speaking fellow wikipedians (my Italian writing skill is so rusty!). Bédévore (talk) 21:43, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
- @Bédévore: for it-wp, we could send a message on it:Discussioni_progetto:Coordinamento/AntiSpam. (I can do it, but in English, not in Italian!) — Jules* Talk 13:46, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
- Done Message sur la itwiki [[17]], j'ai aussi contacté un admin pour lui demander de faire suivre s'il y a une page plus appropriée.--Msbbb (talk) 18:05, 1 August 2021 (UTC)
- @Bédévore: for it-wp, we could send a message on it:Discussioni_progetto:Coordinamento/AntiSpam. (I can do it, but in English, not in Italian!) — Jules* Talk 13:46, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
- Done eswiki: es:Wikipedia:Café/Archivo/Noticias/Actual#Nuevo proyecto en meta contra el spam. MarioGom (talk) 23:09, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
- Off the top of my head, we have some cross-wiki UPEs working in Ukrainian, Russian and Turkish too. Hopefully we can contact someone on these communities? MarioGom (talk) 23:13, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
- @MarioGom: Yes, it would be nice too (I didn't list all wikis on Wikiproject:Antispam/Contacts, but anyone can ad it's own wiki, obviously), but I don't have much contacts on these communities. Maybe we should use the embassies. — Jules* Talk 08:41, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
- Off the top of my head, we have some cross-wiki UPEs working in Ukrainian, Russian and Turkish too. Hopefully we can contact someone on these communities? MarioGom (talk) 23:13, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
- Done wp-ro: ro:Discuție_Utilizator:Jules*#Undeclared_CdI / ro:Discuție_Wikipedia:Ambasadă#Metawiki_Project:Antispam / ro:Wikipedia:Cafenea#Proiect_antispam. — Jules* Talk 08:24, 2 August 2021 (UTC)
- Done wp-pt: pt:Wikipédia:Esplanada/geral#Meta_Wikiproject:Antispam. — Jules* Talk 08:52, 1 August 2021 (UTC)
- Done tr-wp tr:Vikipedi:Köy_çeşmesi_(ilginize)#Çapraz_viki_spam_ile_mücadele--Jean-Mahmood (talk) 18:48, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
- @Jules, could you also leave the invitation for volunteers among uk.wikipedia admins? Village pump (administration) page. Thanks. --Anntinomy (talk) 16:27, 6 September 2021 (UTC)