Sockpuppet personas, Best attempt at making a new persona different to master Options

[Casliber]

One thing about socking, I have been intrigued about folks' perceptions of sockmasters who have created a sock and successfully made a new persona that wrote and interacted substantively differently to the original account. Has anyone been really impressed at one which turned out to be a sock, and had otherwise been successful at sounding completely different?
Cas

(has this topic been asked before somewhere?)

[radek]

One thing about socking, I have been intrigued about folks' perceptions of sockmasters who have created a sock and successfully made a new persona that wrote and interacted substantively differently to the original account. Has anyone been really impressed at one which turned out to be a sock, and had otherwise been successful at sounding completely different?
Cas

(has this topic been asked before somewhere?)

I think you've overestimating the "persona" of the average Wikipedia editor. To have a persona one must have personality and a lot of them don't. Even if they do, it's not that hard to create "generic Wikipedia editor persona". This whole "it's easy to change IP but hard to change the nature of the edits" is received conventional wisdom, but it's simply not true.

For the record I've never used socks (never had much reason to either, plus it's Wrong! WRONG I tell you!) but as it turns out, apparently some of my Wiki friends have (and I was surprised) and I see a ton of what I essentially know are socks. I know they're socks because I'm familiar with the topic area. And usually there's clear cut red flags - like in Race & Intelligence area there's a buttload (something like a dozen) of accounts running around which were all created in October or November 2010, in other words, exactly during or right after the R&I case. And they're all SPA. You know they're socks of one person or another that got sanctioned in that case. Hell, some of them even admit to "having edited Wikipedia before". But all the AGF bullshit means that if you call any of them out on it, it's gonna be you who gets dragged to AE or AN/I for "incivility" and "harassment". Same thing with Eastern European topics (some of them I think I could actually compile enough evidence to get busted but as long as they don't get too obnoxious, it's not worth the trouble). Of course where I a big-shot admin, I'd have the right to just ban-hammer them based on a whiff of suspicion...

Anyway... I actually think that a lot of these sock puppet masters WANT TO GET CAUGHT. For folks like Poetlister it's part of the game, and hell, what fun is it to play the game if nobody knows you're still playing. Similar thing for Kohs and some of other youse, though the motivation is different. If Greg ran all his socks 100% under the radar then he would cease to be the bete noire of certain people, and would risk slipping into irrelevancy (in relative terms). So I'm sure it's actually good for him if once in awhile a sock or two of his gets caught and exposed.

The people who are really getting away with it are the ones who don't give a shit about personal notoriety or attention. They're serious about their POV pushing and all they care about is whether the content reflects their world view. And then flying under the radar is quite easy - make controversial changes, but avoid discussion. Keep edit summaries to a minimum. Pretend you don't speak good English, or, if in fact you really don't speak good English, make sure all your brief and succinct edit summaries are perfection of short English prose. Make a lot of bullshit Twinkle edits, or spend a lot of time assessing articles for a Wiki project, use Wikipedia jargon as much as possible instead of real English. Like I said, it's trivial.. and irritating as hell.