> The more organized and professional they are about shilling, the better they do.
This is incorrect.
Shills do well when they contribute outside of the topic area, memorize wiki-law, and only coordinate to !vote in contentious high-impact discussions. e.g. requested moves, reliable sources noticeboard discussions, and RfCs. They are seen as "normal" Wikipedia editors.
Professionally organized shills are unable to do this since they must ensure most of their time is "on-task" meeting a comment/karma/etc qutoa and find it difficult to justify doing non-shilling work. This works well on sites like Reddit or HackerNews. It does not work on Wikipedia.
For starters, discussion outcomes are moderated and closers do not count votes. Closers look at your history and assign lower weight to editors that appear only to be interested in a particular area.
Other mechanisms include a 500 edit minimum for certain areas + a "balanced editing restriction" (maintained by Tamzin, the same person starting the strike) which tracks %age of edits by subject area and can impose a maximum of 30% in the contentious subject.
Trying to skate under these bare minimums is similar to avoiding money-laundering by making many cash deposits of $9999. You'll be taken to Arbitration Enforcement and look even more suspicious.
You need someone who'll can non-professionally shoot-the-shit at random hours to maintain the cover story despite it not being a clear requirement.
Currently, the best shill-farm is run by the /r/Palestine subreddit. If you join their Discord, you can participate yourself! https://discord.com/invite/hhsG4QTf9n
Essentially, you're given free rein to edit as you see fit with an encouragement to make many uncontroversial edits & befriend normal editors. You do not know who else is part of the project and do not interact with them on Discord. It is very antisocial in that sense.
You are only "activated" by the Discord mod through direct messages to !vote in high-impact RfCs/discussions, e.g. officially recognizing the Gaza Genocide.
This avoids creating a clear paper trail of collusion and means it's difficult for someone to infiltrate/burn the network. It's also incompatible with the micromanagement typical of traditional influence operations.
It's been going on for a few years now as a continuation of other farms. It's one of the main reasons there's been such a slant towards Palestine onwiki lately.
Yes, it's been reported many times by many people. It is an open secret at this point and Arbitration has failed at actioning this.
So far, the only people who have been banned were the ones dumb enough to re-use the same username on Discord as Wikipedia, so now you get a warning not to do that during onboarding. Otherwise, it's too difficult to prove participation.