Wikipedia: Long-Term Abuse

500 is too many but the Simpsons at it's prime really was that good

I'll share my story with a long-term abuse case.

It started on the Simone Biles article. An editor kept trying to question whether or not she had attended University of the People. There were numerous media accounts where she reported or was reported as doing such, but he would dismiss these all on the claim that they were "promotional."

Over the ensuing weeks, I engaged him in discussion on the talk page along with the article and talk page of the university. He eventually shared a website to bolster his claims. The website was called "UoPeople review" which is literally a website attacking the school.

This led me to dig deeper and what I found was fascinating.

This person has been using Wikipedia to promote himself and attack his targets for at least a decade. He's been blocked for sockpuppetry numerous times. He's adept enough to switch between accounts and IPs. He'll change his IP address often to stay ahead of the CheckUser tools. He knows Wikipedia pretty well, so that's why he's still active today despite being blocked.

The abuse started, as far as I could find, with the IP editor who created the ACM ICPC article on Italian Wikipedia (itwiki). He used the article to promote himself and his achievements in the competition.

He continued use itwiki Wikipedia to promote his book and two academic articles on Second Life. The academic articles may well be fraudulent. They only appear on Wikicommons and one has a claimed author who is unlikely to have worked on it. Both articles have been cited in real academic research.

He started to promote himself on English Wikipedia (enwiki) and other Wikimedia properties in 2014-2015. He attempted several times to create articles about himself and his Second Life institute.

He wrote several articles through LinkedIn Pulse and worked to integrate them as sources on articles like Dating (enwiki) and Ripoff Report (enwiki).

He secured a volunteer instructor position at University of the People in 2015. You see this appear on the Simple English Wikipedia article for the university where one of his socks created the page and later added himself as faculty.

Per online reports, he lasted about a month before he was let go for fake academic credentials. You see a marked change in his behavior on Wikipedia following that. He started edited the university's article on enwiki. He got a previous version on itwiki deleted. And he works to slant the existing articles in a negative light. He wants the university to be seen as an "Israeli diploma mill".

He started promoting his Italian NGO/political party on Wikipedia at the end of 2015/2016. He attempted to create several articles over two years. When these failed, he tried to integrate the website in other articles. This is an attempt to boost the SEO of the site. My personal favorite in the "memorial service" for TWA Flight 891 (enwiki).

He finally utilized his political party to run for office in 2018. His campaign was questioned by several in the Italian media like Selvaggia Lucarelli and La Voce di New York. For this, Ms. Lucarelli earn on-going attack site called "Selvaggia Lucarelli blog." (She is aware of it.) He also managed to trim out enough of the sources from the itwiki and enwiki La Voce di New York articles to get the articles deleted. Of course, they reported on this as well.

More recently, he has taken to shoring up articles on suspect higher ed institutions like Supdi, Yorker International University, and Università Popolare degli Studi di Milano. I've spoken to one which took legal action against him.

He runs an attack website for the latter which he tried to incorporate into the list of Wikipedia forks and mirrors articles. This is the third known website setup for attacking that university.

While he was connected to University of the People and for a while after, he ran an academic cheating service which offered to help students circumvent anti-plagiarism tools. You can find evidence of this in the history of both Turnitin (enwiki) and Rogeting (enwiki).

I've been currently watching the articles for LUMSA. It seems he was attending the university and had some issues. Thus, he's turned to attacking the academics and school as frauds. He setup an attack website for them. He has some past activity on the articles, but nothing extreme yet. I'm sure he'll attempt to integrate his website in the future.

And this is just a taste of everything I've uncovered. I attempted to report the behavior to the administrators via email, but it fell on deaf ears. I finally settled with satisfaction of getting one of his socks blocked a few months ago and called out another which tried to integrate the "UoPeople review" website into the UoPeople itwiki article. He's since abandoned that account.

I am specifically using a throwaway account because this guy is relentless. He seeks to destroy lives of those who are seen to have crossed him.

That is intentional. At some point the sense grew that abusers liked the attention they were getting through the page. So their antics mostly stopped being recorded there. In princple only a small group of editors (the arbitration committee, and the checkusers, totalling a few dozen people) are allowed to maintain and share info about wikipedia stuff with each other confidentially. If you have some issue that you don't want to discuss in public, you are supposed to email it to one of those groups. So I suspect that a fair amount of LTA tracking happens on the arbcom wiki (yes they have a special one) or on the checkuser mailing list.

In practice I suspect a lot of regular wiki admins do similar on the quiet.

My favorite is when editors don't get their way and use things like "better source needed" or "dubious" as passive aggressive tactics.

The user was replacing the term "mountain lion" with "lion."