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Unomi

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

For archived investigations, see Misplaced Pages:Sockpuppet investigations/Unomi/Archive.

– This SPI case is open.

16 January 2012

Suspected sockpuppets

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

• User compare report Auto-generated every hour.

The evidence below will endeavor to establish that BothHandsBlack (talk · contribs) is an undeclared successor account of Unomi (talk · contribs).

Background

1. User:Unomi last contributed to Misplaced Pages on 26 December 2011. User:BothHandsBlack made his first contribution about two days later on 28 December 2011. User:Unomi has made no indication that he's retired his account, despite the counsel offered at WP:CLEANSTART. Meanwhile, User:BothHandsBlack is refusing to acknowledge that he's an alternate account of User:Unomi.
2. Prior to abruptly discontinuing the use of his account, User:Unomi was extensively and passionately invested (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here) in the defense of User:YehudaTelAviv64's right to edit from an undeclared alternate account. User:YehudaTelAviv64 is a blocked sockpuppet of Dimension31 (talk · contribs).

Behavioral evidence linking BHB to Unomi

1. Single quotation marks. Unomi: e.g. , ; BHB: , .
2. Smileys. Unomi: e.g. , , ; BHB: , .
3. Penchant for DR. Will elaborate in a separate comment.
4. Exclamation marks. Unomi: e.g. , ; BHB: , .

Further cause for suspicion

1. User:BothHandsBlack's second edit (31 December) was at the article USCGC Polar Star (WAGB-10), in a lead paragraph with WP:Markup#Text_formatting that included bold text. His second edit (same day) was at Solar maximum, also to a lead paragraph with bold text. Dozens of edits later, as late as 14 January, User:BothHandsBlack was still claiming he didn't know how to make text bold. BHB has described himself as "a research academic working in an area that requires precise research and referencing." It's inconceivable that these two narratives could be consistent and is further evidence that BHB is engaging in deceit.
2. BHB's second and third edits were to articles relating to astronomy. Since then, he's been making dozens of edits per day in the I/P topic area with apparently no interest in any other areas of the project. This, together with his curious introductory comment, also suggests an attempt to deceive onlookers into believing BHB's sudden preoccupation with the I/P topic area so soon after the creation of his account is merely arbitrary.
3. The peculiar patterns of BHB's editing behavior leave little room for doubt that he's a reincarnation of someone who's edited extensively in the Israel-Palestine topic area before. The question is therefore not so much one of if as of who: of all the familiar editors in the I/P topic area, who does BHB's behavior resemble the most? The answer is no one, except Unomi. There's no one else that edits I/P whose behavior overlaps BHB's as much as Unomi. I'm not requesting a checkuser be performed in this case. It's too fallible a method, and BHB has established off-wiki that he's a frequent flyer. Rather, given the nature of BHB's edits, the evidence should be solid enough for invoking WP:DUCK. —Biosketch (talk) 14:07, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Additional comments

• I started drafting this report yesterday. It looked more or less like it does now in my User space, with the exception of the diffs mostly. Interesting to note is that between starting this draft and the report's actual filing, User:Unomi has suddenly returned to make one edit.—Biosketch (talk) 14:11, 16 January 2012 (UTC)
• It's likely that the BHB account's purpose is to bait several editors with whom the Unomi account had negative interactions, most notably User:Brewcrewer. See: Unomi, BHB.—Biosketch (talk) 14:20, 16 January 2012 (UTC)
• Another aspect to consider is the shared interest in philosophy between the two accounts. In the case of the Unomi account, this is readily established by skimming through his edit history. For the BHB account we can rely on his own comments on his User page and at AN/I prior to my starting the SPI draft in my User space linking the BHB account with Unomi. Presumably, the professed interest in philosophy on the part of the BHB account was to be able to transition naturally into one of the Unomi account's favorite topic areas and continue editing where the Unomi account had left off.—Biosketch (talk) 14:27, 16 January 2012 (UTC) Comment edited by—Biosketch (talk) 14:41, 16 January 2012 (UTC).
• And lastly, there is the business of inviting people to participate in dispute resolution. The Unomi account had invited a handful of editors to DRN over an atheism-related issue shortly before discontinuing the use of his account: , , , , etc. The BHB account launched into a remarkably similar pattern shortly after its creation, inviting a host of editors to WP:IPCOLL to resolve an issue involving Jerusalem: , , , , etc.—Biosketch (talk) 14:33, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

17 January 2012

• The exchange below is astonishing in its own right – including the puzzling loss of temper by User:Sean.hoyland – but there's one detail in particular that invites closer scrutiny. In a previous SPI involving Unomi, he apologized for his broken English and stated that English was not his native language. At the same time, he offered up a novel explanation for why he capitalizes "I" on some occasions but not on others, indicating that it's a component of a more intricate linguistic philosophy. BHB's use of "consists in!" below, which User:Beyond My Ken sensitively picked up on as nonstandard, also suggests a non-native speaker of English. That, together with BHB's subsequent linguistically detailed explanation for the expression, is still more evidence for associating these two accounts with each other.—Biosketch (talk) 09:05, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Comments by other users

Accused parties may also comment/discuss in this section below. See Defending yourself against claims. In defending myself against these claims I would like to submit documentary evidence that I was a) on a flight with no internet connection on at least some of the occassions (I have only sought to identify one flight so far but will find others if needed) when Unomi has been editing, making it impossible that we could be the same person; b) that I was in a job interview at other such times; and c) that I can document at least one other meeting that I was in when supposedly editing as Unomi. I will also provide incontrovertible evidence that my claim to be a research academic is not deceitful (work email address plus link to university webpage on which that address is displayed) and should, rather, be accepted as an explanation for why I seem to 'know too much' to be a credible newcomer. I will also provide links to anonymous IP edits I made before I had an account, one of which (a talk page submission) I wrote in the form of a letter, signed with my real name. These show that I was very occasionally editing without an account during the time Unomi's account has been active and will also allow the administrator to confirm that I was editing from the same place as my recent edits and that this location corresponds with that stated publicly on my university webpage. Please let me know who I should mail this evidence to (I wish the precise details to remain private).

In response to the behavioural 'evidence' there is obviously nothing I can say regarding the use of smileys, single quotation marks or exclamation marks other than that this behaviour probably applies to at least 25% of all people posting on the internet in the English language. As to my 'penchant' for Dispute Resolution, I have made use of that notice board once, so it can hardly be claimed that a pattern has been established there. I thought that this was the appropriate place to take a minor dispute that had been going on for three days and which had entered a deadlock (both myself and the other editor involved had not added anything new in our last posts on the subject and were at the stage of repeating our positions rather than moving forward). I should note that use of the noticeboard immediately led to the dispute being amicably resolved.

Regarding the Further Causes for Suspicion: 1) The claim that I cannot both be a research academic and also have failed to learn to format text is an odd one. Neither of the edits indicated by Biosketch made use of formatting. One simply involved correcting the plural of maximum, replacing the last two letters with an 'a'. In order to make this edit there was obviously no need to come to an understanding of all the formatting in the lead. The 'Polar Star' edit is not even in the lead (contrary to Biosketch's statement) and involved nothing more than highlighting two sentences and pressing backspace. Again, just because formatting was used elsewhere in the article provides no reasonable grounds for concluding that I must be telling a lie when I claimed some weeks later that I did not yet know how to format. Learning this skill was by no means a priority, although a number of admins have, in the last two days, provided me with the basic information needed.

2) The point made here rather calls into question whether Biosketch has actually read the edits I have made or is simply grasping at anything he can. Whilst he describes my first two edits as on astronomy, the first is actually in an article on a ship belong to the US Coastguard, called the 'Polar Star'. I arrived at this page having spent the morning looking into the fascinating subject of nuclear powered icebreakers (a class of ship that I had no idea existed). I ended up reading about astronomy a few hours later having been looking into supermassive blackholes and various types of solar objects. I suspect the link between the two subjects was nuclear reactions but can't remember the precise route I took to the page on solar maxima. With regard to the claim that since then I have been making dozens of edits a day in the IP area, I would note that the period referred to is only 7 days long and the number of days on which my edits exceeded two dozen is only 4. In addition, almost every single one of those edits has been made on, or is directly related to, a single article (NGO Monitor) that I have been working to improve in collaboration with two other editors. Once I started on this minor article I decided to work through it top to tail in order to cut my teeth on wikipedia editing. I have not been diving in to contentious articles with heavy handed edits but have, rather, been working slowly to sort out a single article first before moving onto another one. In addition, I should note that no one has actually complaimed about my editing: no one has labelled it as disruptive, NPOV, uncivil or identified any similar problem with it.

Supplementary Data on my Editing Profile It is also worth considering that the vast majority of my edits are on talk pages discussing what edits should be made to the actual articles. For instance, on the NGO Monitor article I have made roughly 32 edits, of which less than 20 are non-minor edits concerned with the actual content (and even this figure includes a couple of self reverts). By comparison, I have edited the talk page 53 times, with all my edits to the article grounded in the discussions there. Outside this article I have less than 10 non-minor edits to my name. The statement, then, that I have made dozens of edits each day in the IP area needs to be glossed to make clear that the vast majority of these edits are discursive and not meaningful alterations to the content of articles. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BothHandsBlack (talk • contribs) 18:18, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

The claim that my, apparently curious, introductory comment indicates an attempt to deceive seems to be clearly based on a confirmation bias. I stated openly that my initial interest was in the IP area (a topic I had been reading about over Christmas). There is absolutely no suggestion there that I stumbled across the topic by accident and picked it arbitrarily. I picked it for the reason I state: it is a fascinating topic about which I would like to know more.

In addition, I would add that the narrative suggested by Biosketch simply doesn't correspond to the recorded data. It cannot be the case that I intended to use my first two edits as a 'beard' to allow me to claim I had stumbled across the IP area for the simple reason that my statement about my interest in editing in this area was made three days before either of those two edits. I didn't initially dive into editing on IP because I was trying to learn a bit more about the editing issues before starting, although I now find that it is precisely because I took what I considered to be a responsible step that I am under suspicion.

3) As noted above, I will provide documentary evidence to show that the link between myself and Unomi is an impossible one. Having looked over some of Unomi's posts I do understand why someone might think our writing styles are similar but I think that once this idea got lodged in a number of editors' heads they have sought to cast everything I do in such a way as to confirm this fact. Very fortunately for me, it is possible to refute it conclusively but I pity the editor who is put in such a position and doesn't happen to have the documentation to back up his claims.

Finally, regarding the claim that my intent is to bait other editors, the link Biosketch provides clearly shows that my comments there are a response to accusations that had already been made against me on that page and not the original source for such accusations. Two of the editors involved in the discussion there had already turned up at my talk page to make implied accusations and ask odd questions, all of which I addressed politely. It was only upon finding out that I had been convicted in my absence by a kangaroo court led by Brewcrewer that I posted on his page. By no means can it be claimed that I initiated any interaction.

Lastly, I note that I was not informed that this investigation about me had been opened here. BothHandsBlack (talk) 15:30, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Comment - BHB, to save time and space, here is your editing profile. See the Frequently edited pages link for detailed counts for each page you have edited. Sean.hoyland - talk 18:25, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I won't have to count manually next time :-) BothHandsBlack (talk) 18:30, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

The un☯mi account comments

Shenanigans! aganigans! :) un☯mi 19:30, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Now I understand what being concise consists in!BothHandsBlack (talk) 19:58, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

"Consists in"? Academic? Beyond My Ken (talk) 00:24, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Whilst I'm tempted to say that your insistence on continuing to grasp at my writing style in order to imply that I'm a liar, when you have ignored my offer to provide you with documentary proof to the contrary, is uncivil, cowardly and shows a distinct lack of reasoning skills, I will instead simply note that if your problem is that I ended a sentence with a preposition then you need to get with the times, realise that English is a prescriptive rather than descriptive language, and move beyond categorising people on the basis of a high-school grasp of the principles of writing. If, on the other hand, you think 'consists in' is not, itself, a legitimate phrase then I will note that you really shouldn't be judging people on their written English and will direct you to the 11.3 million results that Google Books turns up. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BothHandsBlack (talk • contribs) 07:50, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Troll. Shame! Beyond My Ken (talk) 07:53, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

And you're an admin? Congratulations on defending wikipedias principles so staunchly! BothHandsBlack (talk) 07:55, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

It doesn't take the admin bit to tell when one is being trolled, it simply takes an awareness of general behaviorial patterns, and a nose for bullshit -- and you have failed every test, sir. Let's please have the CU on this user, no one whose record as a supposed "newbie" is this is here to improve the encyclopedia. He's either a sock, or someone who will be a millstone around our necks for years to come. Beyond My Ken (talk) 08:08, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

So, this goes beyond your claims that I'm a sock-puppet now? I'll reiterate that I offered to prove my identity to you and you did not take me up on that offer (someone else did but unfortunately they were not an admin). To continue to make accusations when you have refused to look at the relevant evidence, preferring your wonderful intuition over real facts, clearly indicates the value of what you flatter yourself to call your 'tests'. But of course, when actual evidence would demonstrate that your intuitions can't be relied on, why risk the knock to the ego by testing your analysis against reality when you can just continue to make your ungrounded claims. I would be happy to have a CU (indeed, I asked for one myself some days ago) but, unfortunately, Biosketch has not asked for one. Perhaps you can put in the request? BothHandsBlack (talk) 08:29, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

BTW, BHB, your "tell" wasn't ending a sentence with a preposition, it was ending it with the wrong preposition. You did a pretty good job of reaching past your actual abilities in your masquerade, but in the end, you just couldn't carry it off. Sorry. Beyond My Ken (talk) 08:18, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Consider shutting the fuck up and leaving things to the admins. Sean.hoyland - talk 08:55, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Exactly, Sean, since you have nothing of an evidentiary nature to contribute. Beyond My Ken (talk) 08:31, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Sadly, he is an admin, just one who thinks that his intuitions about my identity are better evidence than my university webpage and email address. There is not really much that can be done when reason fails to this extent.BothHandsBlack (talk) 08:29, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

No, BHB, I am not an admin, and I never held myself out to be one. Beyond My Ken (talk) 08:31, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

My mistake. I made an assumption based on the fact that you first passed comment on me at the Administrators noticeboard.BothHandsBlack (talk) 08:36, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Sigh... Evidence has been provided by Biosketch. Perhaps he will provide more. There has been a response from BHB. Perhaps he will be asked to forward his evidence to an admin. The next step is for admins to look at the report. That's it. Ken/BHB if you want to argue, do it on a talk page somewhere. This page is for the SPI report. If there is one area in Misplaced Pages that has to work properly when it comes to the I-P conflict topic area, it's this SPI noticeboard. Please don't disrupt the process. Sean.hoyland - talk 08:55, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Biosketch, I have no temper and there is nothing puzzling about telling people to shut the fuck up. It's me being as clear as I can be in my native language. I am astonished by the pointless bickering. It must stop. Just carry on submitting evidence for the admin to deal with this. If you have concerns about potential sockpuppetry your concerns must of course be addressed. The topic area is plagued by sockpuppets and this is the place to deal with it. Sean.hoyland - talk 09:18, 17 January 2012 (UTC

Actually, Sean, it is you who is "disrupting the process" here. The colloquy between BHB and I is part of the behavioral evidence which forms an important part of the SPI process - at this point, I consider it determinative. Your intrusions do nothing whatsoever to contribute to that, one way or the other, so I advise you to, in your own words "shut the fuck up" and allow admins to evaluate the evidence (yes, evidence) that is before them, without your irrelvant commentary. Beyond My Ken (talk) 09:28, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

In response to Biosketch's comments about my use of 'consists in', I can only note that neither he nor Ken know nearly as much about current English language usage as they think they do. A quick search of Google and Google Books for "consists in" will show that it is a perfectly acceptable phrase to use in this context. Unfortunately, this is pretty typical of the standard of 'evidence' being presented against me. As to the new claim that I am not a native English speaker, this will also be definitively refuted by the documentary evidence I will submit. BothHandsBlack (talk) 09:30, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Why did you have to search Google to find out whether you were right or wrong? (Academic, uh-huh.)

A note to admins: Since this involves an editor who has made it clear he intends to edit in the I-P area, the checkuser should be as broad as possible. It wil not help the project should it be the case that the filer of this SPI picked the wrong editor to identify mas the puppetmaster of BHB; rather, given the behavioral evidence which indicates striongly that BHB is not the newbie he purports to be, it is incumbent on checkusers to determine exactly whose sock he is, and then to run a sleeper check on that account. Failure to do this will simply guarantee that more and more admin time will be sucked up at AE dealing with the eternal, ongoing IP problems. Beyond My Ken (talk) 09:41, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, it is no surprise that people who have the gift of self-deception to the degree that we often come across with the Pro-Zionist Brigade would be able to dream up this SP accusation, as well as anyone cares to hear their bleating. Let them drone on here, for all I care - certainly better than them spending their time on obfuscating our articles ;) un☯mi 09:44, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Clerk, CheckUser, and/or patrolling admin comments

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