Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by NuclearWarfare (talk | contribs) at 02:57, 11 May 2010 (Marking case as closed). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Arab Cowboy

Arab Cowboy (talk · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · spi block · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki)

Populated account categories: confirmed

For archived investigations, see Misplaced Pages:Sockpuppet investigations/Arab Cowboy/Archive.

Report date April 12 2010, 20:06 (UTC)

Suspected sockpuppets

• Nefer Tweety (talk · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · spi block · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki)

Evidence submitted by Supreme Deliciousness

I had last summer filed a SPI against Arab Cowboy and Nefeer Tweety, the CU showed that they were unrelated. There has now been an arbitration case, it was basically several disputes involving AC/NT against me over several articles. The only thing the Nefer Tweety account was and is used for, ever since it got registered, is to carry out the exact same edits as Arab Cowboy, in edit wars or other instances when AC himself can not. I believe that If AC is not controlling NT directly, then he is controlling him indirectly, and telling him what to do. Take a look at the entire editing history of NT, its a SPA only performing same edits as AC.

I have here below put together some evidence to show on the behaviour alone that NT is controlled by AC. I don't want a new CU, I'm asking for confirmation through the behavior. The WP Swedish/English Omar sharif picture part and specially the last part of the evidence is the most astonishing. There is no way that he didn't knew who it was.

This started at the beginning of the summer 2009:

There had been a lot of arguing between me and IP 98/Arab Cowboy for a long time over the Asmahan and Farid al Atrash articles. It started out over the first line of the article, He wanted it to say that she is Egyptian. An RfC was created on the Asmahan talkpage, Everything here below was posted in about 2 hours.

Arab Cowboy started talking about: "15:48, 2 July 2009, is agreed." Meaning that, that article edit is "agreed", It was not agreed, no one ever suggested that, only him, and he kept on repeating this phrase. "Your latest edit of 15:48, 2 July 2009 is acceptable and does not need to be changed further."

HelloAnnyong was a 3O mediator, here Arab Cowboy asks the 3O "Annyong, please explain what is involved in this RfC process."

HelloAnnyong responds: "It gets listed at a central location, and people will come here and read the discussion and leave their opinions below."

Here Arab Cowboy says "Nationality needs to be in lead"

About one hour later a newly created account named Nefer Tweety, showed up and says: "This is my first contribution to Misplaced Pages, but I have been following the debate for some time. My position is that I support the current version of 15:48, 2 July 2009. And I believe her Egyptian nationality needs to be in the lead.

No one ever mentioned this: "15:48, 2 July 2009," phrase before, except Arab Cowboy.

Nefer Tweety later posts: "A suspicious start"? Why? I find it interesting to read the debates going on here about various topics. I never participated in one before, and I am not sure I will involve myself into this "edit warring". When I saw you opened RfC, and I read the options typed above, I thought of contributing by stating my opinion, and what I typed above was what I strongly supported from the very beginning. I was going to support either of the options anyway. If I had supported SD's point of view, would I have been considered SD's "socpuppet" by Arab Cowboy? What a disappointment!Nefer Tweety

Later Arab Cowboy was banned for three days. Only a few minutes after the block, Nefer Tweety immediately posted and once more declared that they were not a puppet, and did not know who AC was. Following this, an editor noted the short time period and suggested a CU lookup.

Since then, Nefer Tweety offered help to Arab Cowboy to try to help get him unblocked. Following orders from AC, Tweety then asked another admin to review the block. It is curious that Tweety had not made any posts for days until AC started his edit warring again.

If you look at the behaviour of Arab Cowboy, anything he doesn't like, he edits wars to gets his way through, In this edit I made a post that Arab Cowboys obviously wouldn't like. Having to do with Asmahans ethnicity, the whole dispute was about if she was Syrian or Egyptian, but when I posted this Arab Cowboy did not revert, in fact, he did not even say one single word about it at the talkpage, instead the day after, the newly registered Nefer Tweety account posted this

In that post, please pay attention to these sentences:

NT in the above link: "It was a statement, even if true, that was made as a boastful bluff to a "friend" and was taken out of context by SD." a while later, AC says the same thing: Nr 3."It was said by Asmahan as some sort of bluff on one occasion, not a statement of identity."

NT in the above link: "As the sources show, Asmahan had not lived in Suwayda in childhood" - AC, 1C."In fact, other sources show that Asmahan did not live in Suwayda in childhood"

NT in the above link: "Additionally, when it was time for her to choose between Syrian and Egyptian citizenships, as this source (http://ramsesthesecond.livejournal.com/32835.html) shows, she demanded a divorce a second time from Hassan and set on a road trip to Egypt to salvage her Egyptian citizenship” - AC: "I also gather from the sources that this is when the Egyptian government attempted to withdraw her citizenship on the grounds of dual nationality, and that, faced with this choice, she left Syria and returned to Egypt, married to Ahmed Salim, to reclaim her citizenship."

During past mediations, Nefer Tweety has jumped in at certain exact times when AC "needs it" to do the same edits as Arab Cowboy does. After ACs three edits going against mediation: Nefer Tweety jumps in and straight out lies, same as with Arab Cowoys behavior "all had been agreed in the Discussion page" and more of the exact same ACs behavior: complete reverts to non agreed edits while saying "It is rude to revert someone else's work."

Doing more of ACs edits while claiming I should "stay away from editing Egyptian articles" AC: NT: something AC have also said: (Response to Statement by CactusWriter) NT:

On the 27th July 16:18 AC uploaded a photo exactly 5 minutes later account Nefer Tweety uploads one

When I started the arb case in September 2009, AC said: "This is a huge waste of resources for editors and administrators, all to serve SD's secret "Syrian" agenda. He has called people, "Jews like you..." and they have called him back, "You are a disgrace to Misplaced Pages, if not the human race..." He has been fooling admins for so long by his constant childish nagging. Go ahead, if you wish, and start another round of "arbitration"... You are wasting your time. (at the bottom of Statement by Arab Cowboy)

Compare his comments with NTs: In February 2010 NT said in an enforcement request: "He's become too crafty at fooling the arbitrators and the system with his "borderline" violations and endless complaints that are a waste of time for all involved." (Nr 1 in Additional comments by editor filing complaint)

In October 2009, at Swedish wikipedia, AC changed the Omar Sharif picture, from a new one, to an old one, he edit warred with an admin over this:

In February 2010, at english wikipedia, NT did the exact same move, he removed the same new picture to replace it with the very same old one that AC had done at Swedish wikipedia: At this time AC was topic banned from the Omar Sharif article.

At the Omar Sharif article, AC removed sourced info based on things he claimed he had seen on TV:

Several months later NT claimed to have seen the same TV show:

NT carries out ACs edits at Omar Sharif: and has continued to do so:

On the 25th October, AC had not made a post at[REDACTED] for almost 24 hours, he makes a post at Arabic[REDACTED] and NT who had not made a post at Misplaced Pages for 21 days, makes a post in the same hour at english Misplaced Pages:

AC created a sockpuppet and used it to repeatedly violate his topic ban and restriction at the Coptic and Coptic Identity articles. He edit warred over this with a user named Lanternix.

At the Coptic article he for example: changes the population: from 12,700,000 to 18,000,000 - 4,500,000 to 16,000,000, removes: "most scholars and international observers assume that the Christian share of Egypt's population is higher than stated by the Egyptian government." "The Copts were severely affected by Nasser's nationalization policies", ". Ignorant of the Egyptian language for the most part, the Arabs confused the Egyptian new year's celebrations..." "In modern Egyptian Arabic, the word koftes (pl. kafatsa),..." and "In the same year, father Morkos Aziz the prominent priest in Cairo declared that the number of Copts (inside Egypt) exceeds 16 million." and adds text from the "The 2009 American Pew Forum on Religion and Public" at least to three different places.

He replaces the word "invasion" with "Emancipation" in the title of the =The Arab-Muslim Invasion of Egypt= section. and removes form the text that Arabs "invaded" Egypt, he also removes "Heavy taxation was one of the reasons behind Egyptian organized resistance.." and replaces it with "granted the status of mawali. Mawalis were in turn subject to the Zakat taxation, as well as their obligation to serve in the Muslim armies." Changes "violent persecutions of caliph Al-Hakim" to "eccentricities"

He removes the "The Arabs imposed a special tax, known as Jizya, on the Christians who acquired the status of dhimmis, and all native Egyptians..." he removes the coptic flag part, He removes freecopts.net orderofmaltacolombia.org netanyahu.org/strugaginemc.html from the article and coptsunited.com freecopts.net copts.com from the see also section.

After Arab Cowboys sockpuppet edits had been in the Coptic article for 1,5 months, Lanternix comes back and reverts it, and only a few days later, the Nefer Tweety account who has previously never made one single edit there shows up and removes the strike out comments from ACs sockpuppet at the talkpage (and also formats the comments by ACs sockpuppet) and then he reverts the entire article back almost two months back to the same version by ACs sockpuppet: Not caring about edits made by 30 editors and bots, the exact same thing he did at the Asmahan article:

At the Coptic identity article AC with his sockpuppet for example: changed the numbers from 15% to 20% to between 5% and 10%, he removes the U.S. Bill Has Egypt's Copts Squirming, Washington Institute and christianpost.com sources, added "though these claims have not been independently verified" he removes these parts: "For instance, while the Arab invaders of Egypt were accustomed to subjugation of women...." "imposed on the Egyptians by the new dictatorship." "Foreigners visiting Egypt noted that Egyptians did not possess any Arab sentiment in the first half of the 20th century." "It looked to Egypt's pre-Islamic past and argued that Egypt was part of a larger Mediterranean civilization. This ideology stressed the role of the Nile River and the Mediterranean Sea." "also known as "Pharaonism"

At the Coptic identity talkpage NT removes the strike out comments from ACs sockpuppet, (and formats ACs sockpuppets comments) Also notice here that a lot of the signatures of different editors are changed. Think about this, why would they change? For example Lanternix signature consisting of Coptic scripture is changed to "?????????" everywhere and also user Seb_az86556s signature is changed everywhere. The reason for this is, this happens when someone copy's text and then sends it through for example email or msn, the scripture is then not recognized and it shows as such, and this is what I believe has happened. I believe that AC knows NT, and tells him what to do through a channel outside of Misplaced Pages and at instances sends him entire article texts to paste in the article for him.

NT then does the same thing to Coptic identity, ACs sockpuppet edits had been there for 1,5 months, it gets reverted, and only a few days later, the Nefer Tweety account is used to revert the edits AC had done with his sockpuppet Look closely at that edit, he re adds the population numbers, "5% and 10%" he removes the "Washington Institute" and "christianpost" sources.

NT was blocked for doing ACs edit:

At the end of last summer, AC had removed a sentence not according to his personal liking, On 2 September 2009, AC said on the talkpage: "I removed Beirut and Palestine because 'Alia did not "move to" them. They were merely stops on her way to Egypt.", I recently asked Nishdiani to take a look at some corrections that I had presented with sources, I had gotten permission from the arb drafter to do that: Nr 4 in corrections: Nishdiani later ads his suggestion to the article, 7 months after ACs comment at the talkpage, NT shows up and without participating at the talkpage, ads "stopped in" according to what AC had said 7 months before . Nefer Tweety has done this without saying anything at the talkpage, he just changed what me and Nishhdiani talked about and typed "corrections" in the edit summary, doing ACs edit. NT is continuing with the same old behavior of AC and NT which led to arbitration, anything that was talked about at the talkpage they just changed against what had been said on the talkpage. And NT is still continuing with this now and as always exclusively performing the exact same edits as AC.

Very Important: And this right here is by far the most astonishing "coincidence": I added a list of corrections at the Asmahan talkpage, the Nefer Tweety account went to ACs sockpuppet before it was revealed, pretended he didn't know who it was, and "asked" him if he could reply to my comments: NT had before ACs sockpuppet was exposed not made any edits at any of the articles AC edited with his sockpuppet.

Of the millions of Misplaced Pages users, the account he contacted to reply to my posts just happened to be controlled by the same user NT has exclusively used his account to back for 8-9 months. --Supreme Deliciousness (talk) 20:06, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Comments by accused parties

See Defending yourself against claims.

SD has for the last 9 months made every effort to be the sole editor of Asmahan and other pages in the Asmahan arbitration case. Other editors are either banned from contributing or are completely disgusted by SD's ways that they are staying away for the time being. I, personally, have no time for more endless arguments on the talk pages, however, I will revert any statements that have not received consensus with all parties prior to the arbitration.SD is subject to a topic ban specifically related to Asmahan due to his extremely disruptive behavior, while I am not under any restriction. While I am busy to be a regular contributor, I cannot allow SD's continued pushing of a Syrian agenda. -- Nefer Tweety (talk) 07:57, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Comments by other users

Clerk, patrolling admin and checkuser comments

No action taken for two reasons: first, Arab Cowboy and Nafer Tweety were checked last year and came back completely  Unrelated; submitting additional SPI cases will not change that. Second, No other admin has been willing to act on this case, likely because of those findings above. –MuZemike 18:36, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Hold on, the recent closure was based on the CU from last year, I specifically said that there had already been a CU, and that the confirmation was needed through the behaviour. So far no admin has explained at the SPI how its possible that the NT account contacted ACs sock. Which lead me to believe that no admin at the SPI has looked through the evidence.

The only admin so far that have went through the evidence was at the ANI and she said it looked quacky and that I should have opened it here instead.

I'm gonna contact some admins tonight to try to go through this. Please don't close it yet. --Supreme Deliciousness (talk) 10:30, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

I've requested assistance at the WP:AN about this case. This needs closure. –MuZemike 21:43, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Another admin who has looked at it, Shirik, has said that the evidence is pretty compelling but since he is relatively new to SPI he wont act on it:. --Supreme Deliciousness (talk) 22:05, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

I've examined the editing histories of both. I was reluctant to do so being very new to SPI and a new admin, but it's sat on AN and almost stagnated here. I concur with Shirik's informal findings- there is definitely some kind of connection between the two accounts. They obviously both tag team with each other and noticeably the second account makes appeals to admins on behalf of the first to have blocks lifted. I'm willing to act on these conclusions if I'm expected to, but I'd like the input of MuZemike or another experienced SPI clerk and admin. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 12:05, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

One more admin now see the connection. HJ Mitchell, could you comment on this edit. The fact that after exclusively using the NT account for 7-8 months to revert to ACs edits on several articles, the NT account then went to ACs sockpuppet before it was revealed that AC controlled it, and "asked" him if he could go to the Asmahan article where the main dispute was. This could not have been a coincidence. --Supreme Deliciousness (talk) 22:23, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

I don't think it proves anything in itself, however, combined with the evidence above and the stark similarity between the editing patterns of the two, I'd say it only adds to my conclusion that the two accounts are most definitely related one way or another. I don;t know what action should be taken, though- should either or both accounts be blocked and if so, for how long? HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 22:34, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Exactly as you say, combined with the evidence above it proves the deception that has been going on, it proves the connection that AC controls the NT account in one way or another. Look at the evidence, NT first showed up right after AC had just found out what a RfC was. And then for almost a year now the NT accounts sole purpose on wikipeda is to revert to ACs edit in edit wars and to back AC. So of course this was not a coincidence.

Arab Cowboy has used a sockpuppet before to repeatedly violate both his topic ban and restriction. The evidence here above shows the deception that he orchestrated from the very beginning with the NT account which he controls, which led to arbitration at the Asmahan article. He could never have done what he did without his NT puppet. Both these two accounts should be permanently banned from[REDACTED] for massive and repeated puppetry and disruption and deception and should never be allowed to edit the Asmahan or any other article again. --Supreme Deliciousness (talk) 22:56, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree, especially given the length of the block log of someone with so few edits. Can I just indef the pair of them or should I wait for more comments? HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 23:07, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I have reviewed this case now that I have a little time to spare. It takes very strong evidence to overcome an  Unrelated CU, but  CheckUser is not magic pixie dust and it has its limits. The long-term pattern of behavior here strongly suggests that there is some connection between those two accounts - what sort of connection, we cannot tell for sure; it could be a crafty sockpuppeteer (though I doubt that, given that AC's sock Medjool (talk · contribs) was detected by CU and blocked on that basis); it could be some sort of off-wiki collaboration between different people, which would explain the CU result; it could all be just a coincidence, but the long term pattern is such that I consider it very unlikely. The exact nature of the connection is, however, irrelevant. It is my view that the behavior of the two accounts here, whether controlled by a single person or by different people, amounts to abusive usage of multiple accounts, either by sockpuppetry, or by meatpuppetry and/or canvassing. Due to the AC's lengthy history of blocks, I have blocked both accounts indefinitely. I leave it to someone else to determine what, if any, tags should be applied. Tim Song (talk) 02:11, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Excellent. Good call, Tim. I stand b that action 100% to the extent that if it hadn't been for the  Unrelated, I probably would have blocked both per WP:DUCK. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 02:29, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Marking as closed then, unless there is something else to say? NW (Talk) 02:57, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

This case has been marked as closed. It will be archived after its final review by a Clerk or Checkuser.

{{SPIclose}} is deprecated. Please change the parameter in the {{SPI case status}} to "close" instead.

• Open SPI cases
• SPI cases pending close