User talk:Sean.hoyland

Khirbet 'Ein Karzaliyah (Arabic: خربة عين كرزلية), Jordan Valley: December 2013 - January 2014

Id'eis (Arabic: ادعيس), Jordan Valley: May 2014

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Flagging possible sock puppet

Hey there, I've seen you do some great work finding socks and I think I may have found one. This user who does very contentious edits in Israel-Palestine has edited the exact same content as this user on several occasions. Their editing styles and the content in general also overlap, and they're both recently EC-obtained editors who moved to contentious edits in Israel-Palestine. Can you look into this and see if there's anything here? Thank you.

Here are the relevant diffs:

The Axis page talk discussion on the lede that was restored by them had many socks involved, so there may be a connection between them and those. Raskolnikov.Rev (talk) 23:34, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Raskolnikov.Rev, either or both might be socks, but I'm not sure of each other despite the 4 page intersections. user A and user B's timecards look a bit different. These diffs from Dec 23 and Dec 25 have oddly similar phrasing but that probably doesn't mean anything. User A has been checked against one potential sockmaster, so that (maybe) rules that particular South America based source out, but user A looks Israel based to me. They both seem to have engaged in gaming-like behavior to obtain EC prior to leaping into the topic area, which from a statistical perspective significantly increases the chance that there is a ban evasion component (see [7][8]). Maybe have a word with Levivich. They may be preparing another case that includes these accounts, or file and SPI and see what happens. I have sort of given up on filing SPIs to be honest. The cost vs benefit doesn't work for me. Sean.hoyland (talk) 10:00, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That's helpful, thank you. I'll also forward it to Levivich to see if there's enough material for a case. Raskolnikov.Rev (talk) 15:50, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

We are in for a hard time

The Israeli government has announced a 20-fold increase in the 'hasbara' budget, to USD 150 million, "to influence sentiment in the foreign press and on social media".[9] Zero^talk 02:59, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"consciousness warfare" is not a term I have seen before. Seems like a waste of money. They could probably buy 10,000 2,000lb bombs for that amount... Sean.hoyland (talk) 10:14, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A lie by any other name.... Selfstudier (talk) 10:52, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

לוחמת התודעה = cognitive warfare

Incidentally, note the Wikipedia reference here: [10] The date isn't clear. Zero^talk 11:58, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I guess that is another argument for EC enforcement for articles in the topic area being carried out by machines rather than editors. I've wondered for a while what would happen if the contentious topic area notification included a requirement to explicitly agree to comply with WP:NOTADVOCATE and the part of the Wikimedia Universal Code of Conduct that prohibits "Systematically manipulating content to favour specific interpretations of facts or points of view". Sean.hoyland (talk) 13:08, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I also wonder what would happen in a system that included a kind of attention dependent resistance e.g. where the requirements to edit an article had a real-time automatic dependency on the pageview count for the last 30 days for that article, a sort of proxy for page temperature. So, the more attention an article receives, the more editing experience is required to change it. Sean.hoyland (talk) 15:16, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Exploitation of (fake) personal suffering

You wrote in the Sockpuppet investigation that Rajoub made such claims which made me remember that even HaOfa had made similar claims regarding his family in northern israel or Golan heights when he was late to reply in an ArbCom case. Theofunny (talk) 05:01, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I remember, but many people were displaced, so maybe there was some truth in it, who knows. Sean.hoyland (talk) 05:13, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If an editor makes all edits related to Jewish topics, doesn't leave descriptions but sometimes leaves detailed ones and uses deprecated sources like JNS and Jerusalem post. Is this a Icewhiz trait? Theofunny (talk) 05:32, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not really. There are thousands of different accounts/IPs active in the topic area, so the risk of confirmation bias is pretty high. Sean.hoyland (talk) 05:42, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]