Commons:Requests for checkuser/Case/Chyah

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Chyah

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Status: open • view • edit • history • watch
Filed: 16:35, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

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Added June 1:

Rationale, discussion and results

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Reason: Chyah is globally locked. https://fa.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=ویژه:سیاهه‌ها/block&page=کاربر%3ARafic.Mufid shows that this user has been blocked on Persian Wikiquote for being a sock of Chyah. See also this edit by @Meisam.   — Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me 16:35, 26 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  • Chyah was globally blocked in 2017, so a check would be Stale (i.e., we would not have data to which to compare Rafic.Mufid). CU results are valid across projects, so, if fa.wikiquote was able to confirm a connection, that is all that is needed. Эlcobbola talk 16:52, 26 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    @Elcobbola: admins’ competence is not indeed “valid across projects”. Admins from fa.wikiquote declared this account a sock puppet,moot – see below although an account inserting the line ‹0› to the alleged master’s user_talk does not look anywhere near a deceptive puppet to me. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 17:01, 26 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    I said CU results, not admins' competence. Please read critically. Эlcobbola talk 17:03, 26 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    It’s namely me who did read Sonia Sevilla’s contribs critically. This account may belong to a relative of Chyah, but since the edit declares affiliation to Chyah almost explicitly, Sonia Sevilla unlikely was used (or intended to use) for deception. An experienced Wikimedian can realize that—after editing Chyah’s user_talk in such a manner—technical data have secondary importance. This clueless interpretation of an IP (or possibly even cookie) intersection led to branding Chyah a sockmaster.moot – see below Admins might afterwards list as a sock any account having a slightest technical relation. Wrong attribution of accounts having a slight technical intersection with some “well-known puppeteer” is not a fiction-only story pulled from Incnis Mrsi’s nose; it is something from bleak experience with English and Arabic wikipedias. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 17:33, 26 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
 Doing… (cross checks, obtaining evidence etc) Trijnsteltalk 12:38, 30 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Confirmed, confirmed by a Farsi Wikipedia CU. Trijnsteltalk 14:06, 31 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Trijnstel: which namely accounts are confirmed to Rafic.Mufid? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 14:19, 31 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Rafic.Mufid = Chyah. Trijnsteltalk 14:30, 31 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Chyah is globally locked since November 20 and cannot be used for 192 days. Which accounts Trijnstel—as a Commons check-user and Wikimedia steward—can confirm to Rafic.Mufid? We already had one steward who denied access to Commons to one of our legitimate contributors because accepted a Wikipedian libel uncritically. Please, enable the own mind and do not follow bad examples. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 14:59, 31 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
What exactly do you ask me to do? Like I said Rafic.Mufid = Chyah per confirmation of a Farsi Wikipedia CU. Therefore I blocked and locked the account. What else do you think should be done, or should not be done? Trijnsteltalk 15:29, 31 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Me, to give instructions? I’d prefer such instructions to originate from somebody experienced like Billinghurst, but can give a couple of advices indeed. Trijnstel sees fa.Wikipedia as a reliable source of information. It may be so, but we should ensure it. Let these Persian check-users put their data to checkuser.wikimedia (cf. a similar case) for evaluation by the same Trijnstel, and other check-users. These fa.Wikipedians also can be summoned to m:Stewards' noticeboard #Misuse of Userrights about Chyah and me, Rafic.Mufid, but it is optional. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 16:17, 31 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I asked you to be more precise, I do not need your advice. For the record: I made this connection based on information the checkusers from fawiki (Farsi Wikipedia) gave to me. The block on fawiki was not the main source. I cannot be more exact, nor am I allowed to tell you what is/is not or will be stored on the checkuserwiki. You should simply trust my judgement, and those of my colleagues. Case closed. With regards, Trijnsteltalk 17:37, 31 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Trijnstel: "We block this user, we can't say why, but trust us"
Uh yeah I have some issues with that. Now to start with, I do not know the history of this case. But given the above, I'm not sure there will be that much to find anyway. Rafic.Mufid was, as far as I'm aware, not a problematic Commons user and actually made good contributions. So a few questions:
  1. What kind of abuse in the past 3 months is this case about? Simply "having more than one account" is not abuse, that's allowed for various purposes. I mean page blanking, harassment, etc.
  2. Did Rafic.Mufid use multiple accounts on Commons?
  3. What is the evidence based on? If it's only that Rafic.Mufid and some sockmaster use the same IP that would be a bit weak, many people share an internet connection. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Alexis_Jazz&diff=prev&oldid=304031864 confused me. I am not actually convinced that was written by Rafic.Mufid. - Alexis Jazz ping plz 00:09, 1 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

See additions today. There is no doubt that Nahidlift1 = Saramohammadi9 = Leylapr‹numbers›, but their relation to both Rafic.Mufid and Sonia_Sevilla should be elucidated. Also note that, although Commons check-users can’t check directly who is Chyah, Sonia_Sevilla is her admitted alias (a fact that previously evaded from my attention) . Incnis Mrsi (talk) 04:42, 1 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  • I saw this only now -after the user was blocked- and would like to say a word or two: I have no idea about the background of the problem, and have conflicted several times with their edits (see their TP) but think that in general User:Rafic.Mufid was doing a many positive contributions to Commons, especially on categorizing. If some way is found to give them another chance I would support that move. Note: I am expressing only a personal opinion, that's it; and will not return here. --E4024 (talk) 11:36, 1 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Here is an excerpt from fawikiquote, written by Rafic.Mufid (Google translated):
" Culture 2016 has been around for a week and you have not responded to this request. It is your managerial responsibility to do this. Do I read or say again from the beginning? 'A handful of users in the English Wikipedia who have worked on Mohammad Ghorbanpour's article have been counted as Chyah's backpack (as Same ip, Same device); these have also been active in the Persian Wikipedia, but they did not get their own.' But until Rafic.Mufid began to participate, the system detected that it was Chyah's backpack. Of course, this system does not make a mistake, and if you report this diagnosis in MetaWiki or Wikipedia, it can help make my case right, that is, they are not Chyah's zapas, it's my backpack. Reporting this is your managerial task, as the Baqban user asks you. How do you get indifferent here? What can I do to get rid of daily harassment? Because I do not speak formal and dry? Has I had access history? I got tension? These things do not give you the right to do whatever you want to do against me. On the Wikipedia, which the user has with a little loss of his or her rights, is the wikigraphy turn to mimic the Wikipedia? Meanwhile, this same disconnection is against politics. Life culture, the user who has been disconnected, each of his zapasces should also be cut off the global access, Sharaki should report it in meta-my, so my account would be dropped all over. Not here Cut off and do not have any responses and whatever we say, listen to it. His second offense: based on his own words, his management is not consensual, therefore his management measures are not worthy. And apart from all that, I have the right to edit with an IP. You can not legally do it, if I've edited it with IP, you have no right to close it unless it's sabotage. So, let's just take a look at the Wikiquote, just a few "Trusted, committed, believers to the basics and principles"
To the degree I understand it (it's machine translated after all) this would only seem to confirm the suspicions from @Incnis Mrsi: people in the Middle East don't always have landlines (clarification: people with landlines often have their own IP whereas vpn/proxy/mobile users often do not) and I wouldn't be surprised if many have the same (mobile) device either. - Alexis Jazz ping plz 16:31, 1 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Some comments. First, my initial interpretation of the Sonia_Sevilla username was confused because I missed the name change (not least because of the bug in Steinsplitter’s bot which botched archival on Meta-wiki). Under this name we can see now the second Sonia_Sevilla, while the first Sonia_Sevilla mentioned in 2016 and before refers to the account now recorded as Chyah. Second, the word زاپاس translated as “backpack” and once transliterated as “zapasc[es]” means namely “sock puppet”. Third, I don’t see how landlines are now relevant – Sonia admitted her use of “VPN” (i.e. proxies) to access Wikimedia, to me via an off-wiki channel. Fourth, I still expect check-users to proceed with analysis of the accounts and IPs, given that 164.132.138.115 and especially 109.169.65.151 (off-wiki identified with a person claiming to be Sonia)—both definitely proxies—can be now help to distinguish the “true” Sonia from the Ghobanpour spam gang which was active on Commons as recently as in April. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 17:11, 1 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Just correction: in the last 40 hours Sonia edited Commons both via proxies and from her landline directly. This, certainly, creates some mess, but there are other factors such as User-Agent fortunately. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 07:47, 2 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Trijnstel and Billinghurst: "You should simply trust my judgement, and those of my colleagues. Case closed.", "I trust the experienced checkusers"
And you can also trust me when I say this ain't over until it's over. I asked some very simple questions and I want answers. I can't even find the actual reason Chyah was blocked. (I don't see any vandalism in their last edits?) And Rafic.Mufid was blocked based on nothing but a CU from fawiki. If fawiki wants to block Rafic.Mufid locally because their checkuser says so, I guess that would be their problem. I don't know if that would be justified, they may have a different policy for socking locally and I don't understand Farsi.
  1. What did Chyah do wrong?
  2. What did Rafic.Mufid do wrong?
  3. How was Rafic.Mufid linked to Chyah?
This looks more like a witch hunt than anything else. I can't accept Commons being a place where people, good contributors, just "disappear" and the leaders say "trust my judgement, case closed". Who will be next? Maybe a CU will think I'm a sock of User:Donald Trung because we both speak Dutch, we could easily be in the same IP range (I have no idea if we are, but we could be) and we both disagree with admins every once in a while. Global lock us both and tell everyone "trust my judgement, case closed", I'm sure that'll go down well.
Please, please give us more information. - Alexis Jazz ping plz 01:55, 2 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Alexis Jazz: This is an especially difficult case. We reveal as much information publicly as we can. In this case, we can't reveal it because a) the information is protected by WMF policy and b) (more importantly) it would compromise our ability to do CUs in the future. Detectives don't always tell the public how they solve a murder case if it can hurt future investigations.
In any case, this is a very frustrating read for me. We don't assume bad faith in you. Please do not assume bad faith and incompetence on our (checkusers') part. This only hurts our ability to proceed. We are competent enough to know how to treat VPNs, cellular networks, shared IPs and the like. We aren't going to just assume it's the same person because we're moustache-twirling supervillains. Also, no one is assuming you and Donald Trung are the same person because the evidence for this is non-existent. This is an apples to oranges comparison.
Now before I can proceed, is there anything we could tell you which would convince you that these are the same person? You've said above that sharing an IP is not enough for you. Behavior is not enough for you. Even if they are the same person, long-term problematic editing is not enough for you to think this person should be blocked under this account (hence What did Rafic.Mufid do wrong? as a separate question from What did Chyah do wrong?). What do you possibly hope to accomplish with this conversation? I ask this not because I'm talking down to you, but because I genuinely want to proceed. Magog the Ogre (talk) (contribs) 03:00, 2 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Magog the Ogre: I believe that Commons check-users are competent admins and are not malicious. Next. Sonia clearly used this account in abusive way, and also evaded Commons blocks (against her persona Rafic.Mufid) as IP not less than twice. These certainly are abuses. But I also have reasons to believe that Sonia was (at worst maliciously or at best incompetently) framed with those spamming accounts. Quality standards for en.Wikipedia admins (esp. check-users) are poor nowadays, we know, and I’m even afraid to think about typical level of competence in fa.Wikiquote. Again, did anybody from Commons check-users see data implicating genuine Sonia’s accounts with all these Leylapr‹numbers› singer’s fans? People sometimes have follies, and it is perfectly possible for a Commons user with 10k uploads to promote some obscure artist, but such an accusation requires evidence of a decent quality. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 07:47, 2 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Jeff G.: won't @Magog the Ogre: scream at me? I was paraphrasing Magog. - Alexis Jazz ping plz 06:14, 8 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Personally I uphold the theory that there was no such guy “Rafic.Mufid”. It is based on off-wiki intelligence revealing a picture of one misguided girl, an alien in her country of residence. But still awaiting a serious investigation about the spam case, as necessary data are not yet squandered. Admins (Trijnstel included), remember please that you serve your communities, not the groupthink of Wikipedian check-user establishment. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 07:21, 8 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the Request for checkuser. Please do not modify it.
Subsequent requests related to this user should be made above, in a new section.


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