Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Archtransit

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
Archtransit desysopped (copied from WP:AN)

Since Archtransit became an administrator on January 10, 2008, a number of issues have been raised concerning his blocks, unblocks, and other administrator actions. His conduct has been the subject of a request for comment at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Archtransit, where the views of Archtransit's conduct have been generally negative and his responses generally deemed unsatisfactory. Substantial community time has been expended in commenting on the disputed actions and seeking to improve Archtransit's performance as an administrator, including on ANI, on the RfC, and on Archtransit's talkpage. An admin mentor has expressed further concerns on his approaches [1], and it has appeared that the situation may lead to an arbitration case being presented with a view to desysopping.

Separate from the above, the Arbitration Committee has also received checkuser findings and extensive analysis of editing histories, and has independently concluded by an overwhelming weight of many types of credible evidence, that User:Fairchoice, User:Whoaslow, User:Bqwe123 and User:Lethte, who were variously blocked, unblocked or in on-wiki debate with Archtransit, are in fact sockpuppets of Archtransit himself. Archtransit was asked to comment on this finding privately and his answer was felt to be quite evasive, focussing on why it was better that an accusation should not be made, rather than evidence which might help refute it. Archtransit stated essentially as his defense, that if puppetry had occurred it would still not be a problem since (he felt) no false consensus was created. We do not agree with this reasoning. We conclude that abusive and disruptive sockpuppetry has taken place, involving at times gross misuse of tools. Our conclusion parallels the apparent view of the community that even apart from this, there is insufficient communal confidence in Archtransit's abilities to appropriately use the tools recently granted by the community.

Accordingly, Archtransit is desysopped. He may not seek to regain administrator status without the approval of the Arbitration Committee. All of the sockpuppet accounts will be blocked. Additionally, Archtransit may only edit Wikipedia through one account and any change of account name shall be reported to the committee.

The committee is continuing to investigate whether Archtransit himself may be the sockpuppet of any other user. Evidence bearing on this may be presented either [at the admin noticeboard], or privately to the Committee. Further action will be taken if developments warrant.

By agreement of the committee

evidence summary:

  1. Archtransit and the named accounts edit exclusively from the same dynamic range in the same metropolitan area.
  2. (Point of information): There are four accounts with significant edits in the relevant area (Archtransit, Fairchoice and two others), as well as a significant number of accounts previously blocked for trolling and socking.
  3. Archtransit has claimed to edit only during certain times of day and to have no internet access at other times. Each of the other 3 other significant accounts on this range also edits during the same time window, and also none has any edits from any other location either.
  4. A number of the users blocked and unblocked by Archtransit are also users within the same relatively small metropolitan location. This is considered very unlikely to be chance. The administrative actions of Archtransit also included unblocking related accounts that had been blocked by others for "trolling".
  5. Further information from checkuser indicates that despite the confounding effect of the dynamic IP, these different accounts are still strongly evidenced as editing from the same connection.
  6. In January, on one occasion, Archtransit and another account (Lethte) edited from the same IP within 2 minutes of each other.
  7. On January 22,23,30 Archtransit blocked or amended existing blocks of Lethte, Bqwe123 and Fairchoice. These blocks were notable for having autoblock deliberately disabled. Other blocks for cause of other users (other than username blocks) did not have this setting.
  8. The edit windows and interleaving strongly support sockpuppetry rather than friends or strangers.

FT2 (Talk | email) 02:53, 19 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]