Wikipedia:Long-term abuse/German reference desk troll
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Basic information
The "German reference desk troll" operates chiefly in three areas on English Wikipedia: Reference desks, Redirects for creation and talk page redirect creation.
- They operate cross-wiki, mostly in English and German Wikipedia, but also on French and other wikis.
- Creating almost 300 unnecessary, irrelevant and sometimes vulgar article talk page redirects on en.wikipedia. Some were re-created many times.
- Asking numerous, often interesting, open-ended questions at reference desks on this and other projects. However, when one sees the pattern, it is obvious that he's asking just to make people search for an answer, which is practically always a piece of trivia, without a valid use. For example, one of typical on Language desk was "Why is there no [X] combination of letters in the [XXXXX] language?"
- This person seems well-informed and educated, especially in mathematics.
- This person seems multilingual and fluent in English; he or she just as easily might be German or one of the millions of foreigners in Germany.
- This user has been Community Banned as of May 17, 2012 per discussion [1]
Targeted areas, pages, themes
Sample Reference desk themes, out of hundreds:
- Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Mathematics/2009 November 15#Free Burnside group B(2,4)
- Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2010 March 11#Chemical compounds with many elements
- Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 March 13#PIGS
- Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2010 March 16#Double-ace straight
- Talk:North Germanic languages/Archive 1#No voiced sibilants?
- [2] on Vietnamese
- [3] on Proto-Slavic
- [4] on Polish
- [5] ambiguity of "Mitsubishi car"
- [6] on Turkish
- [7] similar style on RD/S
Pages
Deleted redirects including number of times deleted:
Extended content |
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Total: 281 deletions
Similar request on
IPs
- Important caveats
- Not every IP listed here has been used by the cross-wiki vandal.
- Those IPs actually used for vandalism may have also been used by innocent contributors.
Suspect IPs identified by User:A. B. through October 2010:
in chronological order from oldest to newest
some have edited on other projects but not this one
Suspect IPs identified by User:A. B. in October-December 2010
Suspect IPs identified by Nil Einne:
Suspect IPs identified by others in October-November 2010:
Cases
- Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive646#Cross-wiki vandal flying under the radar 22 months: 280+ bogus page creations, 40+ IPs
- w:de:Wikipedia Diskussion:Botschaft#Odd cross-wiki behaviour by someone in Germany; sometimes includes edit-warring and disruptive page creation (permanent link)
- meta:Talk:Steward requests/Global#Cross-wiki vandal flying under the radar 22 months: 280+ bogus page creations, 40+ IPs (permanent link)
- Wikipedia talk:Reference desk#Cross-wiki vandal also very active on our reference desk pages (permanent link)
- Wikipedia_talk:Reference_desk/Archive_82#84.61.155.241_troll?