Forum:What is sockpuppetry

I am wondering what is it? Spikeynikey123 (talk) 11:21, December 8, 2012 (UTC)


 * Sockpuppet (Internet). Sockpuppeting is when you have more than one Wikia account, or when you reply as anon in a conversation that you are already participating in whilst logged in while pretending to be a different person. It's a form of deceptive conduct people use to try getting around bans, create false consensus or to just plain stuff ballots. Lunarity 11:53, December 8, 2012 (UTC)
 * Simply having multiple accounts is not sockpuppetry - it is only sockpuppetry if you pretend your multiple accounts are different people. -452 19:05, December 10, 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree! -User454 (talk) 19:06, December 10, 2012 (UTC)
 * Additionally, it is not against the Wikia Terms of Use to have multiple accounts, or even to engage in actual sockpuppetry. (Local wikis may create their own policies about it, of course.)
 * The Wikia TOU does say you're not allowed to "Attempt to impersonate another user or person", but so long as you - as your sockpuppet - do not actually "impersonate another user or person" you're quite within your rights to take part in a discussion using multiple accounts. (Logging into a different account is not "impersonation", so long as I don't claim that User454 is not also my account.) -452 19:36, December 10, 2012 (UTC)
 * I would strongly disagree that you're "well within your rights to take part in a discussion using multiple accounts", even according to Wikia's fairly generous user conduct rules. It all comes down to the word "impersonate". I'd argue that when you have a second account, and you don't disclose that you are the operator of that second account, you are in fact impersonating someone who is not you. You don't have to explicitly impersonate a known person to be "impersonating another person". You just have to pretend to be "someone else". 04:12: Tue 11 Dec 2012


 * You're right that it comes down to the word impersonate. If me logging in as user:user454 is impersonation, then it could be said that I'm impersonating user:452 right now, as user:452 "is not me", it's an account I use. Maybe we need to ask Staff to clarify what the word impersonate means in this context. -452 13:02, December 11, 2012 (UTC)


 * To answer the original poster directly, sock puppetry is the act of using another account to say things that you either cannot or will not do with the principle account by which you are known on a particular wiki. In short, it is an act of cowardice, in which you hide behind another name, typically to escape something, whether that "something" be a block, the wrath of the community, or the fact that your forum proposal is down a coupla votes. If you need to use another account on Wikia, the chances are high that what you want to do with that second account is something you shouldn't be doing.


 * I would, however, agree that the simple act of having multiple accounts is not necessarily sock puppetry. There are a few legitimate cases where one would do that. Bots functionally need to be on a separate account from you. And I can imagine that you might want to use one account for one wiki, and another account for another wiki. Maybe you want to make a wiki-specific account to celebrate your fandom — like being LeiaLover at Wookieepedia and OrcHater at The One Wiki to Rule Them All. The problem comes when LeiaLover gets blocked at w:c:iCarly, and you then use OrcHater to circumvent the block. (Or does the problem come from the fact that you got blocked at iCarly in the first place? :) ) 04:12: Tue 11 Dec 2012
 * I think that definition is too vague.
 * Wikipedia's policy page for Sock puppetry has a bunch of examples of what is and isn't classed as "Sock puppetry". They have a lot of other cases other than the primary "Creating an illusion of support" - but they forbid a lot of things which Wikia allows, such as sharing accounts.
 * One acceptable reason for having an alt account there is "privacy" - to use another account to hide behind another name to say things you do not want to post with your principle account, to escape possible real-life consequences of an edit. -452 13:02, December 11, 2012 (UTC)


 * To clarify my original statement, my grammar was poorly formed. What I meant was using more than one account (or taking advantage of having multiple IPs if you have a multihomed connection or more than one service) on the same wiki [there should have been a second comma between "logged in" and "while pretending"]. I didn't intentionally imply that having multiple accounts was a problem in itself, since you need a second account for bots; I only meant using multiple accounts to participate in discussion or non-automated article editing on one wiki. AFAIK, having multiple accounts isn't an issue as far as Wikia is concerned, but people do generally expect that you will only use those separate accounts on separate wikis (if you have multiple normal editing accounts, each one should be used on a separate set of wikis from the others, you should not use 2 accounts on one wiki unless the second is a bot).


 * Like a lot of new terminology for social behavior, the exact definition of sockpuppets tends to be unclear but it generally boils down to breaching the implicit assumption that one account = one person in a given community (bots are seen as semi-separate entities, since they are partially autonomous). The label applies to someone pretending to be a crowd in a discussion, people pretending to be a different person for the sake of bypassing a block, and people who are blocked but don't even try to hide their ownership of their other account just so they have the opportunity to yell at everyone about how much they suck or whatever. Lunarity 13:22, December 12, 2012 (UTC)