En-WP: Act III -- The Sagecandor Incident

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Cirt / Smee / Smeelgova

In July 2017 a note was published at Wikipediocracy indicating that a group of people had decided to investigate Sagecandor and had identified the user's previous accounts, most notably a guy named Cirt, who had a difficult time gaining the admin tools back on 15 Sept. 2008 (RFA) because they had been blocked 7 times for edit-warring, 4 times with their previous account Smeelgova and 3 times with the account Smee.

During Cirt's three years as an administrator he blocked an average of 9 accounts per day (9770 accounts in total), and was accused of COI and potential paid editing. He was desysopped on Sept 10, 2011 by decision of the Arbitration Committee for NPOV and BLP violations.

Study of Cirt's edits has allowed us to confirm that this identification is quite plausible on the basis of unmistakable patterns in their behavior (word choice, formatting style, editing style, etc.)

He self-identifies as a badger-thrower, whatever that might be. (archive)

A synthetic view of the evidence that the same person is behind the two accounts.

The fact that a CIRT is defined via google as a Computer Incident Response Team is amusing.

Background

I am fascinated by the morality play actor by the name of Sagecandor and as such have dug up his participation at AE.  In the process, I think it's worth noting that the prosecutor's name is never mentioned in the archived cases at AE...

Neutrality v. Anonywiki 17-27 Nov 2016, 1-year GMO topic ban (Ed Johnston), statements by Neutrality & Tryptofish
During this dubious trial, a new account was created (Sagecandor), and the new user's talk page was created by mimicking Neutrality's (diff).
(weirdly the user mirrored their user page from meta after having their en.wikipedia user page deleted twice)

Sagecandor on AE

Sagecandor v. Solntsa90, 7-9 Dec 2016, 3 month block (Ed Johnston), involved: Neutrality, Drmies, Peacemaker67, Ed Johnston
Sagecandor v. Ag97, 9-12 Dec 2016, topic banned at ANI, involved: JzG, Beyond my Ken, John Carter, Ian.thomson, MrX, Eggishorn, Acroterion, Exemplo347, MjolnirPants, A Quest for Knowledge, Timothyjosephwood, Neutrality, NorthbySouthBaranof
Sagecandor v. Tlroche, 15-16 Dec 2016, Tlroche banned indefinitely, SashiRolls banned from commenting at AE (except as prosecutor or defendant, of course), involved: Mr. X, SashiRolls, Volunteer Marek, Neutrality, Timothyhjosephwood, T. Canens (closer)
Sagecandor v. SashiRolls, 19-20 Dec 2016, SashiRolls blocked 6 months, involved: Snooganssnoogans, Tryptofish, My very best wishes, Timothyjosephwood, LaserBrain, Dennis Brown, T. Canens, Peacemaker67

Other cases on which Sagecandor commented during their initial one-month editorship:

EtienneDolet v. Abbatai, 10-19 Nov 2016
TheTimesAreAChanging v. SPECIFICO, 15 Dec 2016
MikeV v. The Rambling Man, 16 Dec 2016
Volunteer Marek v. SaintAviator, 21-24 Dec 2016
Volunteer Marek v. Doc9871, 23 Nov-12 Dec 2016
Nableezy v. Kamel Tebaast, 28 Nov-14 Dec 2016

Sagecandor on ANI

Crossswords v. Sagecandor: mostly concerned the NPOV noticeboard where Sagecandor claimed Crossswords & SashiRolls were Russian propaganda Accounts

Edits

  • Fake news
  • Fake news (website)
  • Russian Interference in the 2016 US election
  • Prop or Not
  • And You are Lynching Negroes
  • Whataboutism

TP Warnings to other editors

  • Implied Threat of Imminent Smackdown by Serioux Adminz here
  • Specifico (All caps)
  • The Times Are a Changing
  • Snooganssnoogans?
  • à completer

GA

Sagecandor

  • declines The Fountainhead for GA...[1].
  • idem for Jack of Fables... [2]
  • nominates his rewrite of "And you are lynching Negroes?". (Anonywiki had previously edited Whataboutism.)

Articles for Deletion

Mr. X, Sagecandor, Neutrality, jytdog, Volunteer Marek-MVBW, they're all at this party. What's funniest about this is that by creating the category "Foreign influence on national elections", and adding it to this article on the 2009 Honduran elections, I ended up creating a fun situation when this page was deleted, since another Wikipediant was quick to add "Russian intervention (yes at one point it was 'intervention') in the 2016 US election" to the category. As it stands now, the US 2016 election appears to be the only election that been influenced from abroad and has a whole, entire, page about it. NB: Since that time, BlueSalix has added a new page to the category based on a Politico article about Ukrainians shilling for Hillary... ^^

Denouement

In the two days after SashiRolls was banned, Sagecandor (whose passage on wikipedia was noted by the folks at WikiInAction) continued editing pages like Asshole, Douchebag, Butthead and Dick before disappearing on the 22nd of December.

Anonywiki reappears on the 29th of December with an edit concerning a murder. (ar) User:Coffee reappeared on the 23rd of December, the day after Sagecandor disappeared.

Discretionary Sanctions / User:Coffee

A discussion for Talk:Jimbo Wales reproduced here, based on the share-alike CC-BY-SA creative commons licence. The original is in Archive 215.

  • Alright, now we have a problem!!! Apparently, according to something just posted on that talk page, the Arbcom has just imposed a censorship regime on all "highly visible" American politics articles. The way it works is that anyone who wants to patrol the article can revert one edit a day, and nothing is allowed to go back in until there is consensus. As anyone who has read a thing or two about American politics in the past decade and a half knows, there is not, and can never be, consensus. So over time any highly visible article is going to lose its facts and we're not going to be allowed to put any of them back in. Someone needs to stop Arbcom, or Wikipedia's coverage of American politics is going to become dominated by patrolling Wikilawyers. Wnt (talk) 21:07, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
    • Neither endorsing nor condemning the Arbcom decision, your statement implies that rampant falsification on the page prior to Arbcom's decision - declaring Russia's intervention in the U.S. to be a known fact - was not a problem. If that's your conclusion you are neither appraised of what reliable sources have reported regarding these allegations, nor editing in a manner consistent with them. -Darouet (talk) 21:25, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
      • @Wnt: Arbcom just made placing page restrictions possible. user:Coffee actually came up with the restriction. See my comment here.- MrX 21:39, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
        • User:Coffee's last visit was on September 9th. Quite a parting gift. (1RR, plus any challenged material must remain out of the article until consensus is achieved on the battlepage talk page). The requesting admin wants to "slow down the battling" after this article was shaped out of nothing by named users (no IPs obviously need apply on the page in question) with the usual intensive editing sprees. Cyroxymandias: "Look on my words, ye doubters, and despair..." SashiRolls (talk) 22:57, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
          • My comment shouldn't be viewed a s criticism of Coffee's action. It's done much more good than harm, and it's better than doing nothing at all.- MrX 23:03, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
            • A maximum number of edits per week (or per hour) per editor (talk + article space) would probably work better for developing consensus, and for getting people like me to use the preview button to make sure their word salads are properly dressed. And I've used mine up here, so... :) SashiRolls (talk) 23:24, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
Note my concern is not just about this page. See the text at top: "The article 2016 United States election interference by Russia, along with other highly visible articles relating to post-1932 politics of the United States and closely related people" -- that's the difference between an infection and an epidemic! Wnt (talk) 00:08, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Yeah, I'm not exactly a suspicious person - and I'm not usually active on U.S. politics articles other than New Mexico state politics to a limited extent - but everywhere I turn lately there is a group of freshly minted accounts doing things one normally doesn't see freshly minted accounts doing, like !voting in AfDs (all the same way), voting in RfCs (all the same way), etc. I literally can't take two steps forward without tripping over a dozen new accounts trying to purge some articles, massage others, and change the titles of others to reflect high-probability Google search terms rather than encyclopedia article titles; like this latest one - 5 !delete votes, three of which are from accounts less than 10 months old (one a month old, and another a freshly minted two weeks). That one isn't even U.S. politics related other than it apparently shows the U.S. in a negative like so gots to go! Maybe I'm being overly suspicious and there just happen to be a lot of new people signing-up to WP this month, which of course would be great. BlueSalix (talk) 00:14, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
    • User:SMcCandlish was interested in this problem. You might consider contacting him about it. -Darouet (talk) 05:00, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Return of Sagecandor

What follows represents the exploits of Agent:Sagecandor after their return to en.wiki in May. (There are 2 lines about earlier edits in the earlier psy-ops subsection)

AE

  • 94 edits as of 20 June 2017 (after 83 days of activity).

As Prosecutor

  • Sagecandor v. JGabbard (27-31 May 2017)
  • Sagecandor v. DHeyward (4 Jun 2017): Sage's first loss at AE; there was even some limited talk of a boomerang, though such a course of action was not taken.
  • Sagecandor v. SashiRolls: Sage objected to SashiRolls (the author of this page) posting the table below showing their book review review contributions to Wikipedia on the Bibliography of Donald Trump talk page in a cordial fashion. The usual cabal (compare to TParis v. Snooganssnoogans below) showed up for the trial: (in order of appearance), TimothyJosephWood, Neutrality, Volunteer Marek, Objective3000, Tryptofish. Result: it is considered sanctionable to make Wikipedian readers aware that a single account has provided the majority of the content related to a subject and is actively engaged in astro-turfing. No mention was made of any RW data about the Sagecandor team, only publicly available information was used to prove that this team had a particular interest in matters dear to the DNC's political agenda (blaming Russia for the election loss and writing as much as possible about {Works critical | Books critical | Music critical | Films critical | Parodies || of Donald Trump}.

While I am far from a fan of Donald Trump, I am much more concerned about the protection afforded to communications agents involved in astro-turfing on Wikipedia. None of this is particularly new. See further this op-ed from October 2015 which first drew attention to the Minassian COI (before the evidence appeared in their 2015-2016 990 form) at the WMF: Hillary and Wikipedia Slam Russia

As "Expert" Witness

  • TParis v. Snooganssnoogans (20-24 May 2017): involved Neutrality, Mr. X, TimothyJosephWood, Objective 3000, Volunteer Marek, my very best wishes, Bullrangifer, Lord Roem, Dennis Brown, among others (I have only listed those who systematically gravitate to cases of the same nature.)
  • Politrukki v. ArchwayH (2 Jun 2017)
  • Debresser v. El C (13 Jun 2017)

BLP Entries Created

  • Roy Godson: 3 June 2017 | history | 3K | 6K
  • Clint Watts: 3 June 2017 | history | 6K | 31K | self-nominated for GA (awaiting review)
  • Michael R. Caputo: 8 June 2017 | history | 18K | 18K | self-nominated for GA (awaiting review)

Miscellaneous politics articles

  • Memorandum of Conversation: 17 May 2017 | history | 1K | 4K
  • Great America Committee: 19 May 2017 | history | 11K | 11K
  • 2016 Trump Campaign Leaks: 30 May 2017 | history [ 36K | redirected | AFD nomination (for redirected article), content originally from another en.wiki page Sagecandor has worked extensively on
  • TrumpiLeaks (website): 7 June 2017 | history | 19K | 19K

Book Review Entries Created

During their time on en.wiki, Sagecandor has contributed an extraordinary number of book reviews. The sizes for each article are based on a survey on 20 June 2017.

  • Disinformation: 2 June 2017 | history | 16K | 27K | (DYK nomination), self-nominated it for GA (awaiting review)
  • The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: 3 June 2017 | history | 18K | 18K
  • Dezinformatsia: 3 June 2017 | history | 21K | 23K | self-nominated for GA (review pending)
  • The Case for Impeachment: 5 June 2017 | history | 28K | 31K | Sage nominated this entry for GA, which it failed.
  • The Plot to Hack America: 7 June 2017 | history | 26K | 31K | Sage nominated this entry for GA (review not yet undertaken), discussed below (see Malcolm Nance, below)
  • Defeating ISIS: 8 June 2017 | history | 25K | 24K | AFD nomination, failed/withdrawn from GA, discussed below (see Malcolm Nance, below)
  • Final Report of the Task Force on Combating Terrorist and Foreign Fighter Travel: 10 Jun 2017 | history | 28K | 29K |
  • The Terrorists of Iraq: 9 June 2017 | history | 21K | 23K | self-nominated for GA (awaiting review), (see Malcolm Nance, below)
  • An End to al-Qaeda: 9 June 2017 | history | 20K | 20K | self-nominated for GA (awaiting review), (see Malcolm Nance, below)
  • Terrorist Recognition Handbook: 10 June 2017| history | 22K | 22K | self-nominated for GA (awaiting review), (see Malcolm Nance, below)
  • Trump: The Kremlin Connection: 11 June 2017 | history | 20K | 20K
  • Think Big and Kick Ass: 13 June 2017 | history | 38K | 38K | self-nomination for GA (awaiting review)
  • Why You Want to be Rich: 14 June 2017 | history | 20K | 22K | self-nomination for GA (awaiting review)
  • Midas Touch: 15 June 2017 | history | 23K | 24K | self-nomination for GA (awaiting review)
  • Insane Clown President: 16 June 2017 | history | 30K | 30K | DYK nomination
  • Time to Get Tough: 17 June 2017 | history | 31K | 30K | self-nominated for GA (awaiting review)
  • Trump Tower: A Novel: 20 June 2017 | history | 18K | 21K | DYK nomination, indefinite full move protect request
  • Trump 101: 22 June 2017 | history | 23K | 23K | self-nominated for GA (awaiting review), DYK nomination

Total new book review text (as revised): 427K (counts only reviews themselves, this does not include talk pages, GA self-nominations, GA QPQ, DYK, DYK QPQ, noticeboards, talk pages of those who challenge their edits, author pages, book review outlets, book publishers, etc.)

Malcolm Nance

  • The Plot to Hack America: AfD initiated by DHeyward. Notable keep votes from friendly cabalistas (Moboshgu, MrX, myverybestwishes), and from JeffFive (an account created 6 days after Sagecandor's account was created).
  • Defeating ISIS: Another Malcom Nance book. AfD intiated by DHeyward failed. This 25K review was produced in 7 minutes (See SC's contribution history (dates listed here), which suggests the possibility that SC is a role account). Captain Raju as later caught linking to this book anywhere he found the string "defeating ISIS" on Wikipedia (more astro-turfing)
    • New York Journal of Books -- not to be confused with the NY Review of Books. Sagecandor rewrote the Wikipedia entry (post rewrite), quintupling its size (original) because it was the only entity that had reviewed The Plot to Hack America. The result is hilarious: the same information is presented over and over in slightly varying form. After pushback from E. M. Gregory which made it fairly obvious what was going on, Sagecandor wrote NYJoB an email asking, "Do you just let book reviewers post live whatever they want, or do all book reviews go through an editor first ?" and mailed their response to WP:Contact.
  • Terrorist Recognition Handbook
  • An End to al-Qaeda

Malcolm Nance's BLP page was also significantly "cleaned up", deleting RS (NY Times, Politico, Washington Post) noting some of his sillier claims as a Fox News "expert". (This led to Sagecandor being taken to ANI by an old-time Wikipedian; Black Kite (a powerful admin) ended that call for attention to Sage's snotty behavior towards power~enwiki just as he had previously ended the call for attention be paid to Sagecandor's libellous claim that his "opponents" were Russian propagandists.)

Categories created

  • Music critical of Donald Trump (history)
  • Works critical of Donald Trump (history)
  • Films critical of Donald Trump (history)
  • Books critical of Donald Trump (history)
  • Parodies of Donald Trump (history)
Categories for Discussion 19 Jan 2018.

Behavioural

  • removal of Talk Page comments, personal attacks here
  • See AE & ANI above.
  • Creates page Sources and Methods with redirect to "Clandestine Human Intelligence"

Some older psy-ops

Significant contributions

These edit-counts were as of 20 June 2017, they may well be higher now.

Auto-patroller

  • On 22 June 2017, Sagecandor was made an auto-patroller giving them the "right" for their page creations not to need patrolling. review

Page Mover

  • They got the last non-admin tool in a rather roundabout way (§) on the 28 June 2017, by which time people really should have known better.
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