Wikipedia:Long-term abuse/79.55.190.172

79.55.190.172
Wikilifespan	February 14, 2017 (but possibly earlier) - present for new reports
Instructions	Suspected 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.
Status	Pending Approval

Basic information

79.55.190.172 (talk · contribs · block log · arb · SPI)
Comprehensive edits analysis
The IP is listed as the sockmaster because, even though it's inactive, the first abusive edit seems to have come from it. I believe the abuser actually registered once but I can't find the account.

Targeted areas, pages, themes

The most heavily targeted person seems to be Martin Scorsese but Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Stanley Kubrick have also been subjected. The ANI report by User:AndrewOne, with helpful replies from admin User:Yamla and fellow traveler User:TheOldJacobite, was shamefully ignored by everybody else. Tons of abuse has been perpetrated since but this report is still definitive since the abuser has just kept doing the same stuff for almost two months.

Habitual behavior

This abuser is obsessed with editing articles relating to famous movie directors to include stuff about certain classic films' status as some of the greatest movies of all time. I don't know if just under two months is considered "a long duration of time" but we're still uncovering stuff they did days and weeks (and several identities) ago. The additions are puffery, which is not permitted even if they're also well-sourced and pertinent. That they're neither, contrary to the abuser's claims, is another problem. (One, the BBC isn't a great source for something published by the BBC per WP:PRIMARY. Two, there's no way we're going to add this stuff to all 100 or 500 movies' articles because new text is supposed to increase readers' understanding of their subjects and, to be painfully frank, nobody cares about this.) The abuser switches identities so often it might not even be deliberate but make no mistake, they're fully aware that every single thing they do violates the sock policy. When they're asked if they're violating, they lie. When flat-out accused of socking, they just abandon the blocked identity and get a fresh one.

The abuser is extraordinarily tricky because they seem to know there's no perfect way to warn and report. Given the seemlingly harmless edits, issuing a last-chance vandalism warning and reporting them to AIV might seem, to an unaware administrator, grossly unfair. Taking time over and over to explain this yet again in each vandalism report is not ideal, and neither is saying "LTA" with no room for further explanation in every revert's edit summary. A link to this report would solve both problems.

Cases

Linking again to the ANI report.

Other notes

The abuser's disgusting behavior at Leslie Mann should be reason enough to block as soon as any characteristic behavior, whether blatant or sneaky, is spotted.

The editors I notified here should feel free to correct, add, remove, or change anything.

Confirmed and suspected accounts

From the ANI report, the following are suspected with many blocked for block evasion, socking, etc.:

That's 13 accounts and the most recent edit from them was almost a month ago.

Here's every IP from Martin Scorsese filmography that one of the three high-revert editors reverted in the last two weeks. This definitely isn't every time this person has been reverted in that time:

This seemed like a good starting point in an effort to collect every identity across all or most articles this person has hit but obviously, that's not going to happen. That's another thirteen with no overlap with the previous list.

Sockpuppet category (if any): Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of 79.55.190.172
Suspected sockpuppet category (if any): Category:Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of 79.55.190.172