By Sidney Ulps
Wikipediocracy sports and legal specialist

We might have to work on our “Photoshopping skills.”

You may have read in the latest edition of The Signpost that Wikipedia lost a French court case in December. The case involved a French businessman who wanted to determine the identity of a particular Wikipedia editor, so that he could sue that editor for things they wrote about him on Wikipedia. (You can read more about the case here and here.)

What you won’t read in any of those reports is that the person responsible for those offending edits is a well-known and prolific sockpuppeteer. And that person is still on Wikipedia right now, doing the exact same thing.

The Laurent de Gourcuff Case

Laurent de Gourcuff, the French businessman, was the subject of an article created in 2021 on the French-language Wikipedia by a user named Sulpyensid. According to the court report, this article stated that de Gourcuff “cheats at his baccalaureate, with earphones and a cheat sheet” and that “he is a cousin of the anti-Semitic director Pierre Ramelot,” as well as “a cousin of the pedophile writer Henry de Montherlant.” (Translation by Google – ed.) De Gourcuff took legal action, and demanded that Wikipedia provide information which might allow him to determine Sulpyensid’s identity.

The WMF lost the case, and was ordered to provide “all the data it holds such as to allow the identification of the person” to de Gourcuff’s company, including name, birth-date, postal address, email address, and phone number — nearly all of which is information Wikipedia does not collect. (Sulpyensid may have added an email address to their account.) IP addresses are not specified in the ruling, though they were requested. Perhaps this is because the Sulpyensid account was blocked in May 2022 and the WMF claims that it only retains IP information for 90 days.

Sulpyensid aka Albion aka AlexLevyOne

Sulpyensid was blocked on the French Wikipedia on March 14, 2022. The administrator identified Sulyensid as “very probably” being an extremely prolific sockpuppeteer named Albion. The sockpuppetry case page for that user is stunning. There are hundreds of sockpuppets listed, going back to 2008. Albion was formally banned from French Wikipedia in 2019.

Of course, Wikipedias in different languages don’t have a formal mechanism for sharing information about problem users with each other, so on the English-language Wikipedia, Albion is known as AlexLevyOne. The sockpuppet page there isn’t as impressive, but it clearly shows that this user has been a long-term and persistent problem. It also shows that even if the WMF doesn’t know AlexLevyOne’s identity, Wikipedia editors apparently have identified him nevertheless.

Nothing demonstrates this better than looking at the history of the de Gourcuff article. There was a 2011 deletion discussion about an earlier version. Only one person wanted to keep the article — that user was Steven Rogers, who was later blocked as a sockpuppet of Albion. So the same person seems to have been using Wikipedia to pursue some sort of grudge with de Gourcuff for over a decade.

…And Still At It

Although Sulpyensid’s edits spurred a court case in France, their account is not banned by the WMF. They aren’t even blocked on English WIkipedia, where they created such articles as this biography of a minor French television personality which unnecessarily mentions his hair transplant and quotes someone calling him “a bit violent and misogynistic,” among other things.

On English Wikipedia, someone has suggested that the users Qatarina and MRCLD are also sockpuppets of Sulpyensid. And that seems extremely likely, especially since Qatarina has already been identified as a sockpuppet of Albion on the French Wikipedia and the two accounts share a surprising number of interests. Naturally, Qatarina and MRCLD have both edited the French-language Laurent de Gourcuff article too. One might think that Wikipedia admins would be on the lookout for such things after this court case, but… apparently not.

MRCLD also recently created an article for a French lawyer named Alain Bensoussan. By strange coincidence, one of the lawyers in the recent court case used to work for Bensoussan’s firm (although they haven’t updated their Twitter profile, so some people may believe that they still do). In the Wikipedia article, Bensoussan’s management style is described as a “climate of terror.”

Who is the WMF Protecting?

The WMF may not be able to provide any of the information that the court has requested, but what will they do to stop this from happening again and again? The Sulpyensid/Albion/AlexLevyOne/etc. sock-master is clearly able to create and recreate Wikipedia articles that go against Wikipedia policies but are not fixed or even noticed. Despite a years-long record of sockpuppetry and bad behaviour on at least two Wikipedias, they appear to be able to create new socks at will. Even after a court case, they are able to keep editing the very same article that prompted it.

Biographies of living people have long been a issue on Wikipedia. What led to this court case should have been a wake-up call for the WMF, and their “Trust & Safety” department in particular. Instead, they seem to be leaving these violations to the same volunteers who were unable to prevent them in the first place. The WMF needs to do more to help those volunteers detect when Wikipedia is being used as a way to attack people, and prevent it.