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Wikipedia:Long-term abuse/German reference desk troll

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"German reference desk troll" aka "redirect vandal"
Shortcut: WP:RDTROLL
Known IPs84.61*, 88.77*, 88.78*, 84.153*
Physical locationEssen or Bochum, Germany
InstructionsSuspected socks should be tagged and reported to sockpuppet investigations for confirmation. When reporting, please link to this long-term abuse report and note that the user is community banned. When the active abuse has been taken care of, please update this report with the latest information.
StatusActive

Basic information

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The "German reference desk troll" operates chiefly in three areas on English Wikipedia: Reference desks, Redirects for creation and talk page redirect creation.

  • They operate cross-wiki, mostly in English and German Wikipedia, but also on French and other wikis.
  • Creating almost 300 unnecessary, irrelevant and sometimes vulgar article talk page redirects on en.wikipedia. Some were re-created many times.[1]
  • Asking numerous, often interesting, open-ended questions at reference desks on this and other projects.[1] However, when one sees the pattern, it is obvious that he's asking just to make people search for an answer, which is practically always a piece of trivia, without a valid use. For example, one of typical on Language desk was "Why is there no [X] combination of letters in the [XXXXX] language?"[2]
  • This person seems well-informed and educated, especially in mathematics.[1]
  • This person seems multilingual and fluent in English; he or she just as easily might be German or one of the millions of foreigners in Germany.[1]
  • This user has been Community Banned as of May 17, 2012 per discussion [1]

Targeted areas, pages, themes

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Sample Reference desk themes, out of hundreds:

  1. [2] on Vietnamese
  2. [3] on Proto-Slavic
  3. [4] on Polish
  4. [5] ambiguity of "Mitsubishi car"
  5. [6] on Turkish
  6. [7] similar style on RD/S

Pages

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Deleted redirects including number of times deleted:

Total: 281 deletions

Similar request on

IPs

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Important caveats
  • Not every IP listed here has been used by the cross-wiki vandal.
  • Those IPs actually used for vandalism may have also been used by innocent contributors.

Suspect IPs identified by User:A. B. through October 2010:

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in chronological order from oldest to newest
some have edited on other projects but not this one

Suspect IPs identified by User:A. B. in October-December 2010

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Suspect IPs identified by Nil Einne:

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Suspect IPs identified by others in October-November 2010:

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Cases

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References

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  1. ^ a b c d meta:Talk:Steward requests/Global#Cross-wiki vandal flying under the radar 22 months: 280+ bogus page creations, 40+ IPs (permanent link)
  2. ^ Wikipedia talk:Reference desk/Archive 82#84.61.155.241 troll?}}
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