188 So-called Sleepers: "Kill them in their sleep! ...Oops."

[Demonology]

Bishonen (T-C-L) was out hunting for socks and thought she found the mother lode: 188 sleeper socks! She identified them because a known IP Vandal had used a sock to give them all the Welcome template. She figured that was too many for her to handle, so she went to AN to get a posse together and hang the varmints.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... e_house.3F

All the accounts welcomed here by User:Can you please provide me with a username. Thank you. are socks of the "Not a massive fan" IP vandal, all created on 21 June 2015 (I assume; I only checked the creation log date for a few, but of course they were) and ready to be autoconfirmed by ten back-and-forth edits the moment the vandal wants to edit a semiprotected page, such as this and this today. Does somebody have access to a script or tool that would simplify blocking all these sleepers, please? Also, presumably there may be more, from another date and welcomed by "somebody else". Might a CU look for them, please? Bishonen | talk 22:51, 26 July 2015 (UTC).

Well, I have to go to bed, and I don't know how to take this further. I just called for a CU on IRC, to no avail. But note also that there's no CU needed to identify that long list as socks of a single individual: — follow my links and you'll see what I mean. Follow this fellow to Acroterion's page for instance, and look at the history of User talk:The Caledonian Sleeper. I'm hoping any script-savvy person (where are you, Writ Keeper?) can do the blocking. There are so many socks that I at least, am not up for blocking them by hand. Maybe a few admins want to pitch in as a collaborative effort? Bishonen | talk 02:04, 27 July 2015 (UTC).

For whatever reason, no one batted an eye about the huge number of accounts Bishonen wanted blocked and they began going down the list and snuffing out the so-called sleepers, some of which were actually sleeper socks (which gave humurous unblock requests). One of the 188 was Jo-Jo Eumerus (T-C-L), and clearly was not a sleeper sock (Doug Weller, who was assisting in the blocks, thankfully made sure everyone knew not to block Jo-Jo so he didn't get collateral'd with the rest), but the others were given no quarter.

Eventually some people showed up that had doubts that all 188 accounts were socks.

Wait, people, how do we actually know these are all sleepers? Comparing this list with the user creation log from that day 5, it seems the sockmaster was just going through the recent creations log mechanically and welcoming all new users (probably to trick us into doing exactly this, block a lot of innocent new accounts together with his real sleepers). The creations log entries for all these accounts are unlikely to have been done all by a single master (some are automatic creations for accounts previously created on other wikis, etc.; a few seem to have made regular, innocent-looking edits. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:12, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Doug Weller wasn't so sure, using the fact that there had been a handful of the sleepers (which made the unblock requests) and the fact that only around 10 of the 188 had even made an edit since their creation as evidence that they were probably all sleepers. Others weren't so sure about that assessment.

Yeah, no doubt at all there were some socks in that bunch, but what about the rest? Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:55, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Maybe an attempt at confusion/manipulation? Welcoming one's own socks as well as other accounts created coincidentally at the same time to get these other accounts blocked, or creating doubt about whether these accounts are sleepers. May be a case for CU. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:30, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

I've gone through the accounts looking for those who have edited. Out of more than 180 accounts, only maybe 10 or slightly more have edited since being created almost 5 weeks ago. How likely is it that they are genuine new accounts and not sleepers? Doug Weller (talk) 16:38, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Just look at any other random time window of the account creation log and see how many of those have edited [6]. It seems to be entirely normal for the majority of new accounts to remain inactive. Fut.Perf. ☼ 16:47, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

I agree with FPaS that this sockmaster is probably trying to talk us into blocking the innocent. I also get the impression that they're familiar with CU practice. As for their interest in "a useful dialog" on my talkpage, sorry, I have a lot to do in Real Life this week and the next, and a nice chinwag with a malicious editor isn't on the agenda. Acroterion (talk) 16:54, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Someone claiming to be the owner of the sleepers wanted to "help" and identified six of his sleeper accounts since they got blocked anyway, and said it was just a coincidence the other vandal had accidentally involved the sleeper squad.

Beyond My Ken told everyone to stop worrying and just nuke all 188:

We should stop worrying about this. Just block them all and leave a note on their user and talk page explaining the circumstance and telling them to contact an admin if they are legitimate and want to edit. BMK (talk) 19:45, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Peter James was highly skeptical that the 188 were all guilty, and was pretty sure of it after he had looked into some of the accounts' history.

What this looks like is administrators have overreacted and blocked a number of new users with a potentially defamatory message as explanation. Peter James (talk) 21:27, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Doug Weller had copied the incident to ANI to get more hands on deck, where Mike V (T-C-L) ended up involved, answering a request for CheckUser attention. Out of the 188 accounts, only 8 were confirmed to be socks. Mike asked the embarrassed admins to help him unblock the innocent accounts and they eventually got them all sorted out.

Nyttend sheepishly admitted they had blocked since they thought Bishonen knew for sure that all 188 were sleeper socks and Doug Weller said "Ditto".

I'm sorry; I misunderstood what was going on. From the original request at WP:AN, I thought that [whoever the identifier was] had conclusively identified them all as socks, and that he would have blocked them all if their sheer number weren't rather overwhelming. Feel free to unblock any or all of them if you deem it wise. I can't myself; it's midnight here, and I've been up since 4AM and driven several hundred miles...I should have gone to bed quite a while ago :-) Nyttend (talk) 05:03, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Ditto. User:Nawlinwiki, you unblocked one I blocked but left the block template. Looking at my block log, a number of the accounts I've blocked no longer show up, which seems wrong to me. Is there really no way to find out who I blocked even if they've been unblocked? I unblocked one and both the block and the unblock show up, so I assume it isn't because they've been unblocked that they don't show up. Doug Weller (talk) 07:31, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

WilliamJE was not impressed by what happened:

This is appalling. In addition to welcoming new editors by blocking them wrongly for something they didn't do, that wrong is now a permanent mark on that editor's history. Which can be used against that editor at some future point. Somebody out there will say that won't happen, but I can point to at least one case [197] of a blocking administrator counting unblocks and a wrong sockpuppet block when determining how long to block an editor. That was disgraceful and so were all the wrong blocks done above....William 11:50, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

With the blocks undone and the incident resolved, Beyond My Ken was really confused at the notion of so many accounts without edits and began to "float a trial balloon" while wondering why accounts with no edits should even be allowed to exist, fantasizing about an auto-blocker for accounts with no contributions after a certain period.

[Triptych]

Keystone cops that don't care about stepping on editors. And an arbitrator among them.

[Vigilant]

Confirming, once again, that Yakety Sax is the unofficial anthem of en.wp

Now, with more future dystopian themes.

[Kelly Martin]

It seems to be entirely normal for the majority of new accounts to remain inactive.

This, for me, is the showstopper.

How could they not already know this? Don't they do any metrics at all on editor acquisition or have any demographic or experiential data on the behavior of newly registered editors? Editor recruitment and retention is supposed to be a top priority, and yet they don't even know what percentage of newly-registered editors make ten or more edits within a month's time.

I realize that there's a lot of ways to develop models for volunteer recruitment and retention, but I think we can all agree that in any reasonable system some statistics about the percentage of editors that remain active after registering would be routinely calculated and broadly disseminated, at least within the administrative corps.

Oh, wait, silly me. I was thinking that this was actually an organization being run on reasonable principles. Never mind. Carry on.

[SB_Johnny]

[Awesome post]

Are you up to turning this into a blog post? A good title might be "How witch-hunts help Wikipedia suck".

[Triptych]

I'm sorry; I misunderstood what was going on. From the original request at WP:AN, I thought that [whoever the identifier was] had conclusively identified them all as socks, and that he would have blocked them all if their sheer number weren't rather overwhelming. Feel free to unblock any or all of them if you deem it wise. I can't myself; it's midnight here, and I've been up since 4AM and driven several hundred miles...I should have gone to bed quite a while ago :-) Nyttend (talk) 05:03, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

I like bit from Isaac there, "oh I stayed up so late doing all these wrongful blocks, the fun part. But I feel so sleepy now, so please somebody sort out whatever the right thing to do is, and fix things."