In addition to Kerry's excellent examples there are users editing wikipedia though TOR, the anonymity and censorship circumvention network. These users face extra scrutiny.
cheers stuart
-- ...let us be heard from red core to black sky
On Tue, 19 Mar 2019 at 13:04, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
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@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@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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