Wikipedia:Long-term abuse/Alec Smithson

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Alec Smithson
WikilifespanOctober 2014 – present
ISP
Physical locationMilan, Italy and its surrounding towns in Lombardy
Sockpuppet investigationsWikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Alec Smithson
InstructionsSuspected socks should be tagged and reported to sockpuppet investigations for confirmation. When reporting, please link to this long-term abuse report. When the active abuse has been taken care of, please update this report with the latest information.
StatusActive

Basic information

This account was indefinitely blocked here on 20 December 2015 and globally locked on 23 January 2016 for long-term cross-wiki abuse (indef blocked on 10 Wikipedias). The account creates articles which are either hoaxes or about real people and places but with patently false information and spurious references. The AfD discussions for Gino Polli and Lordship of Nanteuil sum up the issues. Following the global lock, this account has edited under several now-blocked sockpuppet accounts (see the sockpuppet investigation and the Smithson sock category). However, since global locking, the account predominantly edits via anonymous dynamic IPs tracing to either Telecom Italia or Wind Telecomunicazioni and located in Milan, Italy and its surrounding towns in the Lombardy region. Judging from these global edits and these, the account has begun editing as of December 2017 from IPs tracing to Vodafone in Milan. As of December 2020 the account also continues to actively create articles on Wikipedias that allow article creation by IPs, e.g. Simple English Wikipedia, Esperanto Wikipedia and numerous others.

Targeted areas, pages, themes

Basically, any article here containing the words "Natoli", "Nantouillet", "Nanteuil", "Sperlinga", "Lierna", "Polli" or "Biotti" is a frequent target. The account is obsessed with creating articles about obscure members of the interrelated Natoli, Polli and Biotti families, and spurious attempts to link these families, especially the Natoli, to various real European noble families dating back to the days of the Vikings. Frequent attempts to insert false or irrelevant claims about Lierna (a town associated with the Natoli/Biotti/Polli families) into articles. The account also edits architect and artist biographies (often obscure ones), probably for people whose works or buildings his family owns, followed by biographies of obscure art historians to validate the material about the artists, and biographies of obscure "historians of nobility" to validate the usually spurious material about the various Natoli family members. Since October 2017, the activity has expanded to various subjects related to the city of Milan, especially buildings, parks, and streets of dubious notability as well as totally invented quartieri of Milan. Areas as of October 2018 include the artists and/or architects Giambattista Pittoni, Giannino Castiglioni (and other members of the Castiglioni family), Gualtiero Galmanini, Salvatore Garau, and Antonio Rotta and the Bernocchi and Bestetti families.

Habitual behavior

Additions will usually be characterised by poor English, sometimes using Google translation, or even adding untranslated foreign-language text. There is also a propensity to add:

  • large galleries of images (some not even relevant to the subject of the article)
  • related to the above, the addition of spurious/hoax images, example here
  • lengthy but vague "Bibliographies" which often have nothing to do with the subject. He has been known to list books which do not exist.
  • inappropriate categories and "See also" sections to imply spurious connections between the article targets and other subjects

These edits on Château de Nantouillet in 17–23 October 2017 by 3 different IPs (all Smithson) illustrate some of these tendencies.

Cross-wiki

The extensive and ongoing (as of December 2020) cross-wiki behaviour by the IP socks generally involves creating and editing articles with machine translations of articles that were originally on the Italian Wikipedia, and not necessarily ones created by Smithson. Often, they also include copyright violations either as machine translations of material from other websites or straight copy-pastes from them, depending on the language of the source, as well as patently false assertions. They often have the same characteristics concerning inappropriate galleries, bibliographies, "See also" sections, and categories cited above. Using IPs, he continues to create articles of dubious notability and veracity on the Italian Wikipedia.

There have been numerous throw-away sock accounts at Commons used to upload copyvio images and create error-filled gallery and category pages written in poor English on their favourite targets, e. g. [1] and [2]. Additions to Commons, a large number of which have been deleted as copyvio, often cite the source as a vague "archives of X" or "X Archivio", some with usernames which falsely imply connection to official archives.

Extensively edits WikiData entries using constantly shifting IP socks and adding false or spurious claims. Examples: 151.20.21.172 (blocked for one week in September 2018 and all additions reverted); 151.20.7.153 (blocked for 3 months in January 2019 and all additions reverted).

Cases

Other notes

Typical articles created here by Smithson or his socks and deleted as of December 2020

Titles of typical articles created by Smithson socks on other language WPs and deleted there as of December 2020:

Confirmed and suspected accounts

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