As I am a checkuser myself, albeit inexperienced, and based on plausible behavorial and timing evidence from the edit histories of the articles NXIVM and Keith Raniere, I did a preliminary check to see if this seemed worthy of further investigation. In my opinion based on what I saw there, it does at least warrant a closer look. I seek help from a more experienced checkuser. I have sent my results privately to checkuser-l. Jimbo Wales ( talk) 09:03, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
Accused parties may also comment/discuss in this section below. See Defending yourself against claims.
Sorry that this one took so long. Nobody seems to know what to do with it, and discussions with some involved accounts did nothing to clear it up for me. So I just summarize what I can tell.
Edits of the editor in question come from the range of a hosting company. Besides the account under investigation there are many other accounts. Their exact relations are unknown, but some are definitely related. I do know that it's more than one person there. There are at least two groups of accounts that have a significant enough timing overlap to make it very unlikely they are the same. Practically all edits in this range are very similar to each other. The vast majority of edits is gnomish and appears constructive.
On first glance, no abuse of multiple accounts is apparent.
The explanation I was given after discussion with one account was that this is done to protect privacy. In my opinion, considering the big picture, this is not a sufficient explanation for all of this. Two or more people in the same range making the same kind of edits, thousands of edits spread over those accounts, meticulously using one IP per account and switching/faking UAs, IPs from a hosting provider - this takes effort and money. Would any legit user, whose only intention is to improve Wikipedia, do that? I don't know.
There /are/ potentially problematic edits. I have not really looked at edit content, so only know one example:
There may be a significant connection here: according to our article NXIVM sued Rick Ross' institute. That was nine years ago though. And could be a coincidence. Someone would need to take a much longer look to determine whether there is a problem here.
Here are some of the groups that I am convinced are operated by the same person:
Confirmed:
Confirmed:
Then there is a sequence of accounts that were created on January 31 within a brief period, all to make 6-11 edits and then stop editing (some have resurfaced since):
These groups may or may not be related with each other. There are further accounts with yet more of the same kind of edits, but I haven't looked at them enough to call them one way or another yet.
Again, all of those I mention here (plus others) edit using a dedicated IP per account, and the person I've talked to claims this is all innocent.
Amalthea 15:07, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
I've opened a discussion here. Input welcome. TN X Man 14:55, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
Note: There was the Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/P0PP4B34R732/Archive in February that brought up the above accounts. So, might want to put that under this report. 14 of the 18 blocked accounts were in the P0PP4B34R732 report, plus others I asked Tnxman307 about. Me, a peon, the SPI goes nowhere. Jimbo, a somebody, brings results. I spent hours fixing up the messes they were creating. I'm pissed. Bgwhite ( talk) 09:18, 8 March 2012 (UTC)