Apart from the legitimate alternate accounts and the illegitimate sockpuppet accounts,
there are other ways that alternate accounts exist.
Occasional contributors often forget their username and/or password. Password recovery
isn't possible unless you provide an email address at sign-up (it's optional, but
you can add it later). So what such people then do is just create a new user account
(I'm not sure there is anything else they can do). I see this sort of behaviour a lot
at events. The other variation of the problem is that they did provide an email address
but it is one not easily accessible to them at the event (i.e. a librarian who signed up
with a work email address that cannot be accessed outside of the organisation).
The other group of people with multiple accounts are those who edit anonymously as serial
IPs. The same person can use a number of IP numbers over time. Often you don't realise
it is the same person unless you see a lot of their work and can see a pattern in it. For
example, at the moment, there is a person with a series of IP accounts that is changing a
common section of a Queensland place article to be a subsection of another, who I notice
on my watchlist . This person appears to acquire a new IP address every week or so, but
the pattern of editing makes it obvious it's the same person behind it. Whether or not
an IP address can be considered "an account" depends on your purposes. The one
IP address can also be used by multiple people (e.g. coming through a shared
organisational network in a library or school). It is claimed by some people that many new
users do their first edits anonymously, so if you are serious about studying "new
contributors", then maybe you have to look at anonymous editing. And also even
regular contributors may sometimes choose to edit anonymously, e.g. being in an unsecure
IT environment and reluctant to use their username/password in that situation
(particularly people with administrator or other significant access rights).
Because I do outreach, I look for new accounts that turn up on my watchlist and send them
welcome messages etc. Because I also do training, I see a lot of genuinely new people in
action where I can observe their edits. So when I see new accounts or IPs doing far more
"sophisticated" edits than I see new users do, I tend to suspect they are not
genuinely new contributors.
I think the best you can do is look for new accounts and be prepared to omit any that show
signs of sophisticated editing (either in terms of they are doing technically or what they
say on Talk pages or in edit summaries). For example, no genuine new user will mention a
policy (they don't know they exist). Also genuine new users don't tend to edit
that quickly, so any rapid fire series of successful edits is unlikely to be a genuine new
user. I think this inability to know if a new account represents a genuinely new user is
an inherent limitation for your research and should be documented as such explaining the
many circumstances in which new accounts might belong to non-new users.
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of
Pine W
Sent: Tuesday, 19 March 2019 5:27 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Sampling new editors in English Wikipedia
Hi Haifeng,
Some users will state on user pages that an account is an alternate account. However, this
practice is not followed by everyone, and those who do follow this practice aren't
required to so in a uniform way.
Alternate accounts which are not labeled as such, and which are used for illegitimate
purposes such as double voting, are an ongoing problem. You might be interested in the
English Wikipedia page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sock_puppetry.
Alternate accounts can also be used for legitimate purposes, such as people who have one
account for their professional or academic activities and another account for their
personal use.
Good luck with your project.
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Thu, Mar 14, 2019 at 1:30 PM Haifeng Zhang <haifeng1(a)andrew.cmu.edu>
wrote:
Stuart,
I'm building an agent-based simulation of Wikipedia collaboration.
I would like my model to be empirically grounded, so I need to collect
data for new editors.
Alternative accounts can be an issue, but I wonder is there a way to
identify editors who have multiple account?
Thanks,
Haifeng Zhang
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