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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Possible sock?

I noticed you reported BasedGuy for being a sock and since then another account have appeared with a quite similar editing pattern. Just notifying you just in case. -UtoD 15:57, 15 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, thanks. I noticed that editor at Battle of Hamad. Not sure what to do about it yet. I'm curious how they noticed the article within half an hour or so of its creation. Blocking these kinds of editors is evidently ineffective. Even extended confirmed protection won't keep them away from the ARBPIA topic area for long given their dedication. Sean.hoyland (talk) 16:22, 15 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Quick request regarding AN comment

Thank you for your input at AE.

I would like to fix the issue you addressed at AE here. For me, it links to the right place, but I guess it doesn’t for others? Would this link to the right place? If so, am I just allowed to fix it after others have responded? FortunateSons (talk) 16:56, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That works for me now. Yes, I think you can change a link after responses when it's a change like this. More of a fix than a change. More precision. It's helpful. Sean.hoyland (talk) 17:07, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I will fix it, thank you.

I know we don’t always see eye to eye on content, but you thinking of me as an asset to the topic area is meaningful to me! FortunateSons (talk) 17:28, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You explain your reasoning and organize it. This is very helpful in the topic area, I think. Sean.hoyland (talk) 18:01, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much :) FortunateSons (talk) 18:03, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thats probably a kind of dumb question, but the contributions at AE feel like a joined a conversation late. Did I miss something? Was there a specific sock-related issue that I am unaware of? FortunateSons (talk) 07:50, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sort of related but more about the notion of casting aspersions...JDiala said "Two people on that thread arguing against me are proven or suspected sockpuppets (Galamore and ElLuzDelSur)." as part of their AE comment. There's no evidence of socking as far as I'm aware, hence The Kip's comment. My comment is more about structural issues/unintended consequences. Sean.hoyland (talk) 08:30, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, that does make more sense, thank you. Do you think socks in the I/P area are still a major issue? I feel like SPI is pretty good at catching them FortunateSons (talk) 08:34, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I'm not quite sure how to answer that question. Let me split it into 2 parts. I think there are multiple topic ban evading socks active in the topic area right now and I don't think the EC requirements have proven to be an effective barrier in that regard (despite being one of their objectives) for a variety of reasons, at least for the dedicated socks. But I'm not sure about the extent to which it can be described as "a major issue" because it depends on the behavior of the suspected sock, and that varies a lot. The question of when to file an SPI report, when it is "the right move", "for the best" etc., is not clear in my mind. Should it be in every case or only when there is problematic behavior? Blocked socks can simply come back, and they do, again and again, for years. It would better if there were a technical barrier, but that's difficult. One of the things that concerns me is that people tend to focus on easy problems they can solve rather than more difficult and perhaps more significant problems. Focusing on tone over honesty may be an example. If I think about a question like "is it a major issue", it depends on relative values, content creation vs honesty vs disruption vs bias etc. It's confusing, especially because socks come back. On the one hand I don't think the presence of well-behaved ban evading socks is intrinsically a major issue, on the other hand I think the presence of people willing to employ deception, regardless of what they do here, is a major issue, partly because it creates 2 classes of editors, the sanctionable and the unsanctionable. Sean.hoyland (talk) 09:28, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That does make sense, particularly making the distinction between „well-behaved“ (thereby indirectly harmful) and directly disruptive socks, as well as different ways of measuring harm to the project. I don’t believe that there is a perfect answer to this sort of question, and would (as a person, not as an editor) probably also draw a distinction between those that were simply blocked or tbanned for technical violations and those that caused severe harm to individual members of the project or the project as a whole, for whom I think some sort of quiet return should be impossible (to any part of the project, not just en.wiki).

Some technical measure would be really nice, but I know a few people that do “disruptive activism” on social media sites, and even the very large platforms struggle with effectively suppressing this sort of stuff, so I’m not sure if it’s doable for us. However, if it could be done, it would be great to add some more sting to the sanctions.

I agree with deception being more important than tone, but (acknowledging my own lack of technical skills) I don’t think we can truly know with people who are decently competent, thereby creating an evolutionary pressure instead of an actual remedy. Personally, I know that I myself focus mostly on requesting actions to be taken about tone and “surface-level-conduct” issues, but do know that those dealing with sockmasters are probably doing a lot more per minute of time spend. FortunateSons (talk) 12:27, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As for whether the community is good at catching them via SPI, one way to address that question is to look at the delay between registration and blocking as a sock, how long was the sock's account usable. Things don't look great from that perspective e.g. one sockmaster or another sockmaster Sean.hoyland (talk) 11:49, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That’s quite interesting, thank you, I always really enjoy looking at this sort of data. Just for curiosity, are the ones that get away mostly sleeper agents that get ‘activated’, or are many of those active for 1000s or 10.000s of edits before getting caught? FortunateSons (talk) 12:30, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

1000s of edits before getting caught is not very unusual e.g. here, you can see some edit counts. Sean.hoyland (talk) 12:45, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm, that is quite concerning. However (even with survivorship bias), it doesn’t seem like they are getting much better on duration, only on edit count, so that’s nice. Do you think that some technical measures could be promising? FortunateSons (talk) 12:51, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don't really have any idea what proportion of socks for any given sockmaster are detected, so that's a problem. Visibility into this issue isn't great. As for technical measures, the LITIS labs' SocksCatch could detect between 90% and 95% of sockpuppets depending on the approach used, and that was a long time ago now in machine-learning-time. However, Wikimedia doesn't appear to have followed up on it. Sean.hoyland (talk) 13:06, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That makes sense.

It is unfortunate that they didn’t follow up on it, it does look promising. Do you know why? It’s not like there is a lack of money FortunateSons (talk) 13:11, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe because of the state of this workboard. Sean.hoyland (talk) 13:43, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I know very little about tech, but I’m guessing there is not supposed to be this much stuff? FortunateSons (talk) 13:51, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

They look very busy, working on all sorts of ML related things. That's good I guess. Sean.hoyland (talk) 13:58, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That makes sense, thanks FortunateSons (talk) 14:03, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

btw, I should clarify that I think concerns about tone in the topic area are important and there does need to be some kind of moderating force to keep things within limits or else it just gets unpleasant to do anything there. Sean.hoyland (talk) 12:07, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Of course, I got that, don’t worry. I’m am mindful of not dragging someone somewhere for a single conduct violation (particularly if they have no prior warnings), but I find some types of “continuous low-lewel disruption” in combination with tone issues to be unpleasant enough for all involved that it’s just better for the project if that kind of editor edits something else for an indefinite (not not necessarily infinite) amount of time. FortunateSons (talk) 12:36, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Signature

Thank you for the feedback on the AE post about me. I think you forgot your signature though. JDiala (talk) 19:10, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oops. Thanks for letting me know. Sean.hoyland (talk) 04:19, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]