Talk:Vandalism reports/Archives/2014

Massive addition of pages

Is this a vandalism report? I've been studying this incident for the last few days, see wikiversity:User:Abd/Augusto De Luca and subpages for the study in progress (warning: this is complex). I have come to no conclusions as yet, other than there are a lot of claims being made that don't stand up to careful examination, but this is definitely not "vandalism" and it is certainly not ordinary spam. It may be "promotion," but promotion, per se, is not contrary to policy. Many issues are raised here. Vituzzu has not pointed to the five accounts, but "single purpose account" is not contrary to any policy. Fans of someone or something may edit the projects.

Uploads to Commons have not only been done by the five accounts Vituzzu has locked without discussion. One of the five accounts is the daughter of the photographer, only ever edited one wiki, it.wikipedia, was warned about conflict of interest editing, and cooperatively stopped doing it but continued, for a short time, making normal nonrelated edits. No edits for 2.5 years, and then globally locked by Vituzzu. Many policy issues are raised, and this is not going to be resolved on the "vandalism report page." This is just a heads-up.

Another globally locked account, the one with the most edits, is [1]. 443 edits globally. Most active on Commons (102 edits) No sign of warnings or problems. Last edit 16 October 2013.

Is creation of a user page as the first action of an account contrary to policy? It looks to me that on most wikis, the individual user pages may have been accepted, had they been the only global edit. Deletion has almost always been because it was allegedly "cross-wiki spam." When does what is individually okay become "spam"? The user pages contained nothing contrary to user page policies that I've seen, especially the most developed one, w:Wikipedia:User pages. It invites pages like what were created.

How many user pages may a user create? Is there a limit as to number and rate? It's claimed that the editing must have been by bot, but I've tested this. (I could create 557 accounts in about 90 minutes, manually, if I needed to). Summary: this was probably not a bot, but if it was, it probably did not violate bot policy. Only bots running faster than 1 edit per minute need to be approved. (There are ways to tell bot editing from repetitive manual editing; I don't see that the examination was done.)

Is creation of articles cross-wiki by google translation contrary to policy? If policy was violated here, what policy? If there is harm that was done to the wikis, perhaps it should be against policy, so we should clarify the policy. Even where actions are against policy, normally we warn people before locally blocking them, much less globally banning them, which is what Vituzzu has done.

There is no evidence that SEOs are involved here, and SEO is not contrary to policy, if the SEO actions are not contrary to policy. So what policy was violated?

(The daughter was warned of COI editing and apparently stopped continuing to edit normally for a time.) We do not know if the other accounts had a conflict of interest ("paid") or were simply fans.

Since seeing this and looking at every one of the 188 photos on Commons for my research, I'm a fan, and so I created wikiversity:Photography as art/Augusto De Luca, as a start. Enjoy. --Abd (talk) 02:04, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I missed that before now. I moved your harangue here because the page is for reports, not for discussions nor wikilawyering. Above all this is not the place to ask for unlocks. --Vituzzu (talk) 16:18, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

@Vituzzu: do you think that at least Giulia was different from the other pattern? She stopped editing years ago after being warned... I would like to see if Augusto could be contacted about this, he may have created userpages because he thought that was the normal way to start out on Wikimedia (or maybe it was even someone else using his name, who knows). PiRSquared17 (talk) 16:35, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Dealing with G. I'll ask a second thought about pattern at it.wiki. About the account ADL I'm pretty sure it's not the actual "owner" but the person who has started the campaign (do try comparing its edits with the one from the two preceding accounts, it's simply a way to create more google hits). From the OTRS I can say the relevant people have been knowing Wiki* (then how to edit it) since late 2009. The results are nothing than a promotional aim. --Vituzzu (talk) 16:49, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Vituzzu, I did not ask for unlocks. Rather, I commented on your out-of-place post here. I won't ask for unlock or policy review until I know, as thoroughly as possible, what happened, and only if these would serve a useful purpose. There is no rush, and what I wonder is why another account was locked three days ago.

Deleting something like 500 user pages, not merely locking the account, locking six users with edits that, individually considered, would not even raise eyebrows, including one with no apparent cross-wiki edits at all, (Augusto's self-acknowledged daughter, PiRSquared17 mentioned her), and deleting hundreds of wikipedia articles with no notice or discussion with creators, is not exactly ordinary steward behavior. Do you believe that you should take drastic action like that without prior discussion?

Even though I don't necessarily agree with it, I understand the global lock for Augusto De Luca, at least as a temporary measure. Action should have been taken the day before, however. You locked the barn door after the horse was gone and Augusto had stopped editing, very likely. Nevertheless, setting a title blacklist that was properly functional would have stopped the questionable behavior, and then discussion with the user would have been possible.

While I also understand the rest, I understand it as anti-spam gone wild, becoming anti-promotion, as if self-promotion itself is always strongly prohibited. Is it? If so, we need policy saying so, informing users what they can and cannot do. If not, then we need policy or guidelines for sysops. This is not the first case. I hope it's the last. --Abd (talk) 23:00, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

• This just gets weirder.

• Then TeleComNasSprVen informs the global community that Abd has "started a cross-wiki campaign to remove the speedy deletion tags from the userpages." He doesn't give a link, so here it is: wikiversity:en:User:Abd/Augusto De Luca#Action. It's not exactly a "campaign," unlike the antispam campaign to delete these pages. Without any on-wiki discussion, it appears that antispammers decided to delete without warning or discussion everything they could relating to Augusto De Luca, and to lock every editor who worked on the articles, or most of those who uploaded his images, which, by the way, are all still hosted on Commons, except for one just deleted on a license technicality, out of over 200 images. Tagging or deleting 555 user pages, plus about 75 wikipedia articles, now "that" was a campaign!

• There are a few pages where the speedy deletion tags are still standing, about a month later. Having studied the case that period, I know that some think the pages are spam and some think they are not. This is an ordinary disagreement. Users are allowed to tag pages for speedy deletion, and users are -- ordinarily -- allowed to remove the tag if they disagree. The wikis all have process to follow if that happens. It's totally normal; however, TeleComNasSprVen has the opinion that only administrators may remove speedy deletion tags, which is a radical misunderstanding of basic wiki process, and so, on betawikiversity, he revert warred with me over the removal of a deletion tag,history Then he tried to change the speedy deletion template to require an admin to remove, and revert warred over that.[2] Again, finally, an administrator reverted him and, again, he stopped. I've been hoping someone will explain this one to him, because he is certainly not listening to me.

• Involved here are a handful of pages, I haven't counted them. So far, I have removed the tag from eight pages. One of these pages was promptly deleted, likely from the attention raised. (I had accidentally not logged in, so the removal looked suspicious. The page was then deleted by a global sysop.) That was part of my intention, that the deletions would be handled, one way or another. I've been a WMF sysop, handling deletions, and long-standing tags represent a problem. Removing them if deletion is not necessary is a service to the community. If someone disagrees, there will be local process to handle it. Most communities don't allow replacement of a speedy deletion tag if it is removed by a regular user.

• I certainly don't recommend it, but the list of links I'm compiling would make it trivial to undo what I'm doing. This is simply the easiest and least disruptive way to assert that the pages should not be deleted. I am not merely removing the tags, I'm linking to the study of the case. And, of course, I can be asked about my action. --Abd (talk) 03:13, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

  TCNSV and Abd: why do you continue to fight? PiRSquared17 (talk) 03:52, 25 April 2014 (UTC)