Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-17/Discussion report

Discussion report

A quick way of becoming an admin

Impersonating an admin

Author's note: This might be a violation of WP:BEANS; read at your own risk.

What would you do as a CEO, if a user contacted you claiming they could write an article for you? What would you do if the article was deleted and the user demanded payment for the article to be reinstated? This is what happened to New Net Technologies Ltd. However, that is not the worst about this report. The user claiming to be able to reinstate a deleted article was impersonating another user "with high privileges", in this case an administrator.

Sarahj2107 receives a message on her talk page from a user asking for further information about the user's article. Sarahj2107 has never edited this article, and asks how she can help out. This causes the user to explain that they has received emails from another user, claiming to be Sarah. This causes Sarahj2107 to report this to the Administrators' noticeboard.

On the noticeboard a discussion starts regarding how common something like this might be, where users impersonate other users in order to scam people for money. Multiple OTRS-tickets from past events are mentioned, showing a clear pattern demonstrating that this is a recurring phenomenon.

A Checkuser is conducted, resulting in multiple users being discovered, causing users to get even more concerned about this event.

My guess is this might be just the tip of a WikiPR-like iceberg, and I think there's more than one group of people or companies involved.
— FreeRangeFrog

The user who alerted Sarahj2107 was blocked for not following Wikipedia's policies; however, this block was overturned after consensus on the noticeboard.

But he was approached by what he thought was an admin so he thought that he was complying with WP in his actions. [...] He brought it forward after smelling a rat and did the right thing. He has cooperated by sending information via email for the investigation.
— Berean Hunter

Mailing list, a land without rules...

...as long as you are a moderator. In a recent pipermail to the mailing list Wikimedia-l, Odder writes that he has been on moderation on that list for over ten months, and that because there are no set rules for moderators, nor a way to appeal a moderation, it is failing one of our prime directives, transparency.

However, this being a mailing list, with the moderation team having no accountability to anyone, and abusing their status multiple times in the past year, such decisions come without any discussion -- mostly because they are made behind closed doors in the spirit of Wikimedia transparency.
— Odder

User Fæ, who has also been on moderation on different mailing lists, adds that he shares these views on moderation and the need for some guidelines to be created.

At the moment moderation can happen without warning, without a rationale being given when requested and with no possibility of appeal.
— Fæ

His claim, however, of having been moderated "without a clear explanation or evidence" leads a moderator to admonish this user, stating, "You're off mod now, but please don't start up again."

A message to you

If you find a discussion which you believe could be interesting for others to read or be aware of, please send a message to the discussion report's editor Josve05a, or ping his, immediately.

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Idea for some "ground rules" for the mailing lists. No behavior that violates US law, WP:BLP, or any of the WP:CONDUCT policies (that would apply to a mailing list). Grognard Extraordinaire Chess (talk) Ping when replying 21:05, 19 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This admin [1] may be being impersonated on Elance. I have asked Elance to delete the account their that is claiming to be them and an admin. But have not heard back from them yet.

Yes it is a serious issue. And I have seen it a few times. One much thus be very careful when people bring off wiki evidence that X is Y. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:07, 20 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

There is this code you can ad to a page for yourself that makes all user privileges visible next to their names. I forget what that is....Dennis Brown set it up for me and for the life of me I can't fathom what that was.--Mark Miller (talk) 05:29, 20 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Tomas Kozlowski's username is odder not Tomasz Wachowski... Nathan^T 14:06, 20 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The story on "Impersonating an admin" does not mention that the user who wrote the initial Draft:New Net Technologies and submitted it for Articles for creation review was also indefinitely blocked at the same time as the user who contacted Sarah-Jane, but, unlike the latter one, remains blocked. I do not see that he has given cause for the block in the first place; submitting a draft article for review that fails to adequately establish the subject's notability does not constitute a breach of policy and does not warrant an indefinite block. --Lambiam 19:35, 20 June 2015 (UTC) Update: That user has also been unblocked now. --Lambiam 19:44, 25 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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