Wikipedia:Sockpuppetry

Please see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations for how to request CheckUser intervention. You may also be looking for Wikipedia:WikiProject Sociology.

The default position on Wikipedia is that editors who register should edit using one account only. The purpose of this policy is to forbid deceptive or misleading use of multiple accounts and to explain where editors may legitimately use a second (alternate) account. A second account used deceptively in violation of this policy is known as a sock puppet.

Examples of prohibited uses include to avoid scrutiny; mislead or deceive other editors; edit project discussions (eg policy debates and Arbitration proceedings); make disruptive edits with one account and normal edits with another; distort consensus; stir up controversy; or circumvent sanctions or policy. These same principles apply to editors who decide to cease editing under one account and restart under another (see WP:CLEANSTART).

• Do not sock.
• Do not bias discussions by asking for supporters from other places (meatpuppetry).
• Do not act as a meat puppet for somebody else.

Warning: The misuse of a second account is considered a serious breach of community trust, and is likely to lead to a block or a ban, the public linking of any other accounts or IPs you have used on Wikipedia and its sister projects, and (potentially) "public record" discussion by other editors of your "real-world" activities and other personal information relevant to your editing. Abuse of multiple accounts can seriously affect what employers, friends, peers, and journalists may see when they look up your name or nickname online in future. Do not sock.

Editors who use more than one account are advised to provide links between them on the user pages (see below). Do not use undisclosed alternative accounts without very good reason. If you must, do so only with care. Note that if you are found to be behaving abusively and action is taken, privacy policy's data release criteria releases other Wikipedians from their obligation to protect your anonymity when addressing abuse. It is likely that all of your accounts will be blocked and publicly linked.

Inappropriate uses of alternate accounts

Editors must not use alternate accounts to mislead, deceive, disrupt, or undermine consensus. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Creating an illusion of support: Alternate accounts must not be used to give the impression of more support for a position than actually exists.

• Editing project space: Undisclosed alternative accounts should not edit policies, guidelines, or their talk pages; comment in Arbitration proceedings; or vote in requests for adminship, deletion debates, or elections. (cf )

• Circumventing policies or sanctions: Policies apply per person, not per account. Policies such as the three-revert rule are for each person's edits. Using a second account to violate policy will cause any penalties to be applied to your main account, and in the case of sanctions, bans, or blocks, evasion causes the timer to restart.

• Contributing to the same page with multiple accounts: Editors may not use more than one account to contribute to the same page or discussion in a way to suggest that they are multiple people. Contributions to the same page with legitimate alternate accounts is not forbidden (e.g. editing the same page with your main and public computer account or editing a page using your main account that your bot account edited).

• Avoiding scrutiny: Using alternate accounts that are not fully and openly disclosed to split your editing history means that other editors cannot detect patterns in your contributions. While this is permitted in certain circumstances (see legitimate uses), it is a violation of this policy to create alternate accounts to confuse or deceive editors who may have a legitimate interest in reviewing your contributions.

• "Good hand, bad hand" accounts: Keeping one account "clean" while using another to engage in disruption.

• Role accounts: Because an account represents your edits as an individual, "role accounts" — accounts shared by multiple people—are as a rule forbidden and blocked. If you edit for an organization please see username policy guidance. The sole exceptions are non-editing accounts providing email access to major internal mailing lists and accounts approved by the Wikimedia Foundation (list below), and approved bots with multiple managers. See Username policy#Sharing accounts.

• Deceptively seeking positions of community trust. You may not run for positions of community trust without disclosing the fact that you have previously edited under another account. When applying for adminship, it is expected that you will disclose past accounts openly, or to the bureaucrats if the accounts must be kept private.

• Administrators with multiple accounts: Editors may not have more than one administrator account (excluding bots with administrator privileges). If an administrator leaves, comes back under a new name and is nominated for adminship, he or she must give up the admin access of their old account.

  Foundation staff may operate more than one admin account, though they must make known who they are. For example, Bastique uses the account Cary Bass for Foundation purposes.

  RFA candidates should normally disclose all past significant accounts. Adminship reflects the community's trust in an individual, not just in an account. Administrators who fail to disclose their past accounts risk being desysopped, particularly if knowledge of the past accounts would have influenced the outcome of past discussions about their adminship.

While real-life sockpuppets are humorous, in Wikipedia they can cause disruption, and are not encouraged.

• Posing as a neutral commentator: Using an alternate account in a discussion about another account operated by the same person.

• Voting more than once in polls.

• Misusing new pages patrol: Creating an article with one account, then marking it as patrolled with another.

• Strawman socks: Creating a separate account to argue one side of an issue in a deliberately irrational or offensive fashion, to sway opinion to another side.

• Misusing a clean start: Making a clean start with a new account, but then engaging in disputes with editors your old account was in dispute with; or turning up at pages you used to edit with the old account, while denying any connection to it—this is particularly inappropriate if the article or edits are contentious. Repeatedly switching accounts is seen as a way of avoiding scrutiny and is considered a breach of this policy.

Note that editing under multiple IP addresses, without registering, can be treated the same as editing under multiple accounts where it is done deceptively or otherwise violates the above principles. Registered users who edit without logging in are treated the same as if the IP was an alternate account. (Where editors log out by mistake, they may wish to contact an administrator or an editor with oversight access in order to ensure that there is not a misunderstanding.)

Legitimate uses of alternate accounts

Alternate accounts have legitimate uses. For example, long-term contributors using their real names may wish to use a pseudonymous account for contributions they do not want their real name to be associated with, or longterm users might create a new account to experience how the community functions for new users. If you use an alternate account, it is your responsibility to ensure that you do not violate this policy.

• Security: Since public computers can have password-stealing trojans or keyloggers installed, users may register an alternate account to prevent the hijacking of their main accounts. Such accounts should be publicly connected to the main account or use an easily identified name. For example, User:Mickey might use User:Mickey (alt) or User:Mouse, and redirect that account's user and talk pages to their main account.
• Privacy: A person editing an article which is highly controversial within his/her family, social or professional circle, and whose Wikipedia identity is known within that circle, or traceable to their real-world identity, may wish to use an alternative account to avoid real-world consequences from their editing or other Wikipedia actions in that area.
• Maintenance: An editor might use an alternate account to carry out maintenance tasks. The second account should be clearly linked to the main account.
• Bots: A common special case of maintenance involves bots, or programs that edit automatically or semi-automatically. Editors who use bots are encouraged to create separate accounts, and ask that they be marked as bot accounts via Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval), so that the automated edits can be filtered out of recent changes; see Wikipedia:Bot policy.
• Doppelgänger accounts: Doppelgänger is a German word for a ghostly double of a living person. A doppelgänger account is a second account created with a username similar to one's main account to prevent impersonation. Such accounts should not be used for editing. Doppelgänger accounts may be marked with the {{doppelganger}} or {{doppelganger-other}} tag (or simply redirected to the main account's userpage).

• Compromised accounts: If you have lost the password to an existing Wikipedia account, or you know or fear that someone else has obtained or guessed the password, you may well want to create a new account with a clean password. In such a case, you should post a note on the user page of each account indicating that they are alternate accounts for the same person, and you may well wish to ask an admin to block the old compromised account. You may want to consider using WP:Committed identity in advance to help deal with this rare situation should it arise later.
• Clean start under a new name: If you decide to make a fresh start, and do not wish to be connected to a previous account, you can simply discontinue using the old account(s), and create a new one that becomes the only account you use. This is permitted only if there are no bans, blocks or active sanctions in place against your old account, and so long as no active deception is involved, particularly on pages that the old account used to edit.

  That is, you should not turn up on a page you edited, as User:A, to continue the same editing pattern, but this time as User:B—particularly while denying any connection to User:A, or if the edits or subject matter are contentious. You should also not, as User:B, engage in disputes you engaged in as User:A—whether about articles, project-space issues, or other editors—without making clear that you are the same person.

  Discontinuing the old account means that it will not be used again. When an account is discontinued, it should note on its user page that it is inactive—for example, with the {{retired}} tag—to prevent the switch being seen as an attempt to sock puppet.

Alternate account notification

Except when doing so would defeat the purpose of having a legitimate alternate account, editors using alternate accounts should provide links between the accounts. To link an alternate account to a main account, tag the secondary accounts with {{User Alternate Acct|main account}}. The main accounts may be marked with {{User Alt Acct Master}}.

Editors who have multiple accounts for privacy reasons should consider notifying a checkuser or member of the arbitration committee if they believe editing will attract scrutiny. Editors who heavily edit controversial material, those who maintain single purpose accounts, as well as editors considering becoming an administrator are among the groups of editors who attract scrutiny even if their editing behavior itself is not problematic or only marginally so. Note that email is generally not considered a secure way of communication. Concerned editors may wish to log into Wikipedia's secure server then email the arbitration committee or any individual with checkuser rights through a secure connection to Wikipedia's computers.

Meatpuppets

Meatpuppetry is the recruitment of editors as proxies to sway consensus. While Wikipedia assumes good faith, especially for new users, the recruitment of new editors for this purpose is a violation of this policy. A new user who engages in the same behavior as another user in the same context, and who appears to be editing Wikipedia solely for that purpose, may be subject to the remedies applied to the user whose behavior they are joining. The term meatpuppet is derogatory and should be used with care. Wikipedia has processes in place to mitigate the disruption caused by meatpuppetry:

• Consensus in many debates and discussions should ideally not be based upon number of votes, but upon policy-related points made by editors.
• In votes or vote-like discussions, new users may be disregarded or given significantly less weight, especially if there are many of them expressing the same opinion.
• For the purposes of dispute resolution, the Arbitration Committee has decided that when there is uncertainty whether a party is one user with sock puppets, or several users acting as meatpuppets, they may be treated as one entity.

Sharing an IP address

If editors live or work together and share a computer or an internet connection, or use a public computer or shared network, their accounts may be linked by CheckUser. To avoid accusations of sock puppetry, users in that position should declare the connection on their user pages.

Closely connected users may be considered a single user for Wikipedia's purposes if they edit with the same objectives. When editing the same articles, participating in the same community discussion, or supporting each other in any sort of dispute, closely related accounts should disclose the connection and observe relevant policies such as edit warring as if they were a single account. If they do not wish to disclose the connection, they should avoid editing in the same areas, particularly on controversial topics. Also, do not encourage one another to vandalise or harass.

Handling suspected sock puppets

Sockpuppet investigations

Wikipedia:Signs of sock puppetry lists some of the signs that an account may be a sock puppet. If you believe someone is using sock puppets, you should create a report at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations.

Checkuser

Further information: Wikipedia:Checkuser

Editors with access to the Checkuser tool may consult the server log to see which IP addresses are linked to which accounts. Checkuser cannot confirm with certainty that two accounts are not connected; it can only show whether there is a technical link at the time of the check. To comply with the Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy, checks are only conducted with reasonable cause, and results are given only in general terms. "Fishing"—the general checking of users without reason to suspect they are violating this policy—is not supported.

Blocking

Main page: Wikipedia:Blocking policy

If a person is found to be using a sock puppet, the sock puppet accounts should be blocked indefinitely. The main account may be blocked at the discretion of any uninvolved administrator. IP addresses used for sock puppetry may be blocked, but are subject to certain restrictions for indefinite blocks.

Tagging

Main page: Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/SPI/Administrators instructions § Blocking and tagging

List of role accounts

• Non-editing accounts that provide an easy way to contact internal email lists:

User:Oversight  · User:Bureaucrats  · User:Arbitration Committee  · User:Mediation Committee  · User:Wikipedia Information Team.

• Accounts approved by the Foundation:

User:Schwartz PR, a public relations firm.

See also

• Sockpuppet (Internet)
• Wikipedia:Don't be quick to assume that someone is a sockpuppet
• Wikipedia:Canvassing
• Wikipedia:Griefing
• Wikipedia:On privacy, confidentiality and discretion
• Wikipedia:Signs of sock puppetry
• Wikipedia:Single-purpose account
• Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations
• Wikipedia:Tag team

External links

• MeatBall:SockPuppet