User talk:Audrey Woolf

Capitalization

Speaking about MOS:CAPS, what made you think an unsubstantiated footnote could supersede anything written in the guideline itself? — Est. 2021 (talk · contribs) 09:04, 4 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Firstly, I'm not aware of how the notes on that guideline are any less substantiated than its other content. I cannot find any suggestion that the information in explanatory notes is less valuable — only that it would be too long or awkward if that information was in the main text. Therefore I did not think anything about supersession, as I understand note (a) to be part of the guideline itself, especially as there is no other specifically relevant advice in the guideline.

Secondly, a brief check shows that similar articles (a couple random examples being Kristin Chenoweth, Miranda Cosgrove and Ali Stroker) use sentence case in their infobox entries. This suggests that it is accepted practice, and that if the guideline asked for lowercase, a conversation would need to begin about this guideline being changed to reflect consensus. Audrey Woolf (talk) 10:40, 4 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Citation templates

Hello, and thank you for your edits on Elizabeth George. I notice you have added several citation templates to text that is already referenced under the author's bibliography. Could I please link you to this helpful article, which clarifies where it's appropriate to add citation templates, and when they can be omitted? [1] ArthurTheGardener (talk) 10:59, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi again, thanks for the link. I think I have missed the part which applies here though, as I did not apply the templates to any information that is common sense.

When you talk about references under the author's bibliography, are you referring to the ISBNs? I suppose you are saying that e.g. if the bibliography lists four books in a series, it is not necessary to cite text that states the series has four books. My concern there is that the author is still writing, so if the article goes un-edited for a while, the facts may change; I feel there is reasonable expectation that a bibliography may be incomplete but not that text in the article will be inaccurate. For this reason my preference would be for the sentence to not list numbers, but I won't make that edit as I am happy with your reasoning.

Regarding the Entertainment Weekly article that I marked as 'verification failed': this of course cannot be the source for there being "four young adult novels in the Whidbey Island series" as it discusses the author's debut. What did you intend this be citing? I can only see this as a citation for something like, "George's first young adult novel was published in 2012", but then we seem to have already settled on this not being necessary. Audrey Woolf (talk) 16:40, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Xenionyx8 SPI

Looks like we're both hunting the same puppets, I'd like to ask how you surfaced the ones you did here, particularly User:Xenonixyl21. fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 16:33, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You appear to have a sophisticated hunting method, whereas I just come across them and find myself driven insane, so forgive me if I don't explain very well. I initially became aware of possible sockpuppetry with the disruption to Khal Nayak which I noted here under 'Repeating reverted edits'. While waiting for a response to my message on their talk page, I went through Xylaraeus' edits to fix errors they had left. This meant that I became familiar with their style at the same time as adding many of the articles they haunt to my watchlist.

I don't remember exactly what alerted me to there being more than two, but once I started noticing X and Z-filled usernames, I started looking at the revision histories of articles one of them had edited, and essentially randomly checking accounts I found there that looked suspicious due to similarity in edit, edit summary, or username. I have to admit it all got overwhelming very quickly (especially before I knew about the Editor Interaction Analyser and was trying to gather information manually); I don't know at which point exactly I became aware of Xenonixyl21, but I think it might have been through the revision history of Mandoki Soulmates. Audrey Woolf (talk) 18:07, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I am well aware that this is beyond my expertise; I just pulled on a thread. I'm very relieved that you validated my concern, because I was worried I was going to be filing SPIs constantly and watching it spiral across Wikipedia, especially as some accounts which are clearly linked (quack quack) were marked as Unrelated by CheckUser. How did you create this list? Audrey Woolf (talk) 18:27, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

thanks for letting me know, i started revision checking too then switched to searching, which makes those accounts without any userpage presence like Xenonixyl21 harder for me to find.

"How did you create this list?" - if you mean how i found those, then by searching.[2] im slightly reluctant to give more details per WP:BEANS if the farmer finds this discussion.

"were marked as Unrelated by CheckUser" - yeah, i dont know if you saw but i edited my report to address Faizen now that Saleidoscope9 has surfaced and was created within an hour of them (and i've since found another sock from that group). i think this is clearly a bot-driven farm that is taking mild care to avoid detection, so i would not be surprised if they are rotating ips and user agents to throw off detection efforts.

(struck 11:09, 5 May 2025 (UTC), careful review returned no good evidence for this that cannot be explained by simple coincidence) btw i'm willing to bet that you've seen Sfbrtukggg appearing a lot in your watchlist and otherwise, but their edit summaries and mo look different; however i'm 99% certain they are a sock also, their account creation time is 05:04, 29 October 2024, about an hour and a half before Owen.Evans.03195202 (06:25), Mia Parker 19480502 (06:39), Lucy.Davis.11196915 (06:49), Charlie Hall 01111922 (06:56), etc.. were generated on that day. With no accounts generated prior to theirs on the 29th. fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 18:44, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi again, interested to know what you think of User:Vdimitris. Why would an account be created in 2016 and then the only edit be that one in 2024? Completely speculating but maybe this has something to do with the source/beginning of all this mess? Audrey Woolf (talk) 13:03, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Account doesn't have any other correlating features as far as I can tell, and that edit date of Feb 2024 is far outside the expected range. The only account with a lowercase "todo" is the aberrant Henry, their todo was added 1 March 2025 and that account is one of the earliest found from Oct 2024. I don't see Vdimitris matching.

I'm starting to check edit histories and it's hard not to chase shadows. Like what of ElectricOtter64? They have 4 edits[3][4][5][6] in 2025, all to different pages, each one preceding a sock a few edits later. What does this mean?

There does appear to be some kind of criteria, something that draws them to a page. I suspect it has to do with how and when an article has been tagged or categorized on it's talk page. fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 13:48, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Completely agree re: chasing shadows, ultimately I can appreciate that anyone's history on Wikipedia can be read as suspicious in some way. Henry caught my attention too, see my new comment on the SPI. Those newer contribs in particular surely can't be bots. I only wish that was the oldest account so it was more of a 'smoking gun' and we could be done here; have you found any other activity around controversial topics on your puppet-hunting journey?

Re: criteria, yes I think the reason I got involved is I am a fairly new editor myself, so had edited and am watching a lot of the articles in the suggested newcomer edits module. Lots of the articles involved in this investigation are those, or otherwise tagged with templates, but some are not. Often edit summaries will say they've removed the template, but the edit doesn't seem to have done so (but I might be missing something – again, I'm fairly new). Audrey Woolf (talk) 14:00, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Haven't noticed much in the way of contentious topic area edits so far, no. Henry's recent edits are a departure as far as I can tell, even the edit summaries are pattern-breaking[7][8][9] etc... It just seems that they've found something that has personally engaged them. Bonus pattern-breaking Henry edit summary.[10]

"suggested newcomer edits module" - Something like that being where they source from would make a lot of sense.

"the edit doesn't seem to have done so" - I've found a lot of diffs can be misleading, a one line change can induce a sea of red and green. fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 14:48, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks again. I'll say the "bonus" is not as pattern-breaking as you might think, I've noticed a number of "No changes made"/"No changes requested"/etc. summaries across the puppets, very suspicious Audrey Woolf (talk) 15:11, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also, to be clear, I don't disagree that it could just be that "they've found something that has personally engaged them," but I think regardless if the controversial topic explains the mess ^{(I may be too hopeful there ever will be an explanation)}, it is especially crucial to stop puppetry that has ties to such topics. Audrey Woolf (talk) 15:23, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed.

Concerning the "no changes" you're more observant than me, and this is the most interesting diff I've seen so far. Really makes me wonder what kind of setup they're using. (added 16:19, 5 May 2025 (UTC)) Actually this is the most interesting diff so far. fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 15:54, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Great shout on the proxy thing. I found a new user page style for you to look for if you're interested; I've tried searching but you seem much more efficient at it. Not sure if I'm supposed to add a whole new request to the SPI for one account which is already blocked... Audrey Woolf (talk) 18:23, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Good find, I was going to process them more in-depth next, already searched for and found other identical userpages, but none of the users fit the profile at all. fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 18:31, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Not sure if I'm supposed to add a whole new request to the SPI for one account which is already blocked" - I'd hold off for a bit, might find more in the interim and can add them in a batch. How'd you find that acc? fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 18:33, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Waiting for a batch was my thinking too; I'd hoped I'd find more than just this one by searching "footballer player" (classic error these accounts introduce because of their inability to handle wikilinks). Is there a way to search for edits that have already been corrected/overwritten? Audrey Woolf (talk) 18:38, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Never read anything to indicate that would be possible, and my intuition also says no. Same for edit summaries, can't search them (in aggregate, per individual user there are tools to do so). Let me know if there's any other weirdness like "footballer" I may not know about, especially any edits involving bespoke broken formatting. fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 18:45, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Audrey Woolf, made a staging page in my userspace here that has all the latest found accounts. Please feel free to edit to add, remove, change, or whatever, anything on there. If you make a change you think I should see right away just ping me on the talk page there. fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 17:50, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]