![]() | The following is a draft working towards a proposal for adoption as a Wikipedia
policy, guideline, or process. The proposal must not be taken to represent consensus, but is still in development and under discussion, and has not yet reached the process of gathering consensus for adoption. Thus references or links to this page should not describe it as policy, guideline, nor yet even as a proposal. |
Sock farming is a type of abuse against the Wikimedia community and projects in which a bad actor creates many sock puppets, develops each of them with an editing history, reserves them in anticipation of later misconduct, then deploys them as semi-disposable accounts for some bad purpose. As an example, these accounts might be sold to do undisclosed paid editing or troll a serious community discussion.
Historically sock puppets existed in small numbers as developed by human labor. As machine learning techniques became easier to deploy, sock farming became easier with automatic techniques to create accounts which are mostly automated but pass the Turing test for the growth phase of the fake account life cycle.
Various machine learning projects are identifying what seem to be clusters of sock farmed accounts.
Sock-farmed accounts have behavior which differs from the activity of typical Wikimedia editors.
![]() | The following is a draft working towards a proposal for adoption as a Wikipedia
policy, guideline, or process. The proposal must not be taken to represent consensus, but is still in development and under discussion, and has not yet reached the process of gathering consensus for adoption. Thus references or links to this page should not describe it as policy, guideline, nor yet even as a proposal. |
Sock farming is a type of abuse against the Wikimedia community and projects in which a bad actor creates many sock puppets, develops each of them with an editing history, reserves them in anticipation of later misconduct, then deploys them as semi-disposable accounts for some bad purpose. As an example, these accounts might be sold to do undisclosed paid editing or troll a serious community discussion.
Historically sock puppets existed in small numbers as developed by human labor. As machine learning techniques became easier to deploy, sock farming became easier with automatic techniques to create accounts which are mostly automated but pass the Turing test for the growth phase of the fake account life cycle.
Various machine learning projects are identifying what seem to be clusters of sock farmed accounts.
Sock-farmed accounts have behavior which differs from the activity of typical Wikimedia editors.