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Requests for comment/Global ban for Piermark

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The following request for comments is closed. There is consensus to globally ban Piermark/House of Yahweh. Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 13:10, 7 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Opening statement

As some of you may know, I'm Unite together, a somewhat active user on multiple sites. Here I'm requesting that the user Piermark should be banned globally from all Wikimedia sites. This is my first ever RfC, and if my wording isn't very good, feel free to improve it.

Credits
  • Formattings: taken from this and this RfC;
  • Contents: myself

Piermark's behaviour

Early activities

This user has been registered as early as July 20, 2006 on it.wp, which can also be seen from his welcome message placed by a bot on his talk page there. There has been evidence that he made edits right on the very day he registered: his edits then are invisible nowadays, but some messages concerning his activities were placed onto his talk page. Despite this, his global account says that he was registered on April 17, 2013 (due to SUL). He was dormant for several years, therefore his earliest visible edit there is on February 2, 2015. He was blocked locally by Ignisdelavega on the same day for a day, with reason "read messages on your talk page" ("leggi i messaggi nella tua pagina di discussione" in Italian). Obviously, he ignored all of those reminders and warnings, and resumed his disruption almost immediately (2 minutes) after his block expired. After a series of edits he was blocked again by the same sysop for "you don't know what Wikipedia is" ("non hai capito cosa è wikipedia." in Italian). Later the block was modified, which disabled Piermark's ability to send emails, from which we can infer that he abused wikimail. Meanwhile, he created several local accounts on some other sites. No other behaviors can be observed after his email function was blocked as well. If he stopped his disruption then, damages he made wouldn't have been escalated to the degree where he should be globally banned.

In March 2016, he still edited it.wp under several IP addresses. Later these IPs were revealed and confirmed by local CU findings.

Recent activities

Starting from no later than January 2022, he began targeting House of Yahweh on it.wp. Most of the edits by his sockpuppets (registered/IP) have been revdelled. Consequently, the page was protected.

In the meantime, he also targets the English and Finnish versions of the very article (especially after November 2022). He also registered the username "House of Yahweh" at that time—that's how this alias as well as its shorter form "HoY" came about. To be frank, this name itself is a violation of username policy, as most Wikimedia sites disallow usernames "representing a group", with narrow exceptions.

On May 25, 2022, following a mass shooting in Texas, a group of accounts sprung up on en.wp, all of which were adding a single external link in multiple articles. CheckUser findings revealed that the group of accounts are related to another account (though it has no global edits) named "SOCKPUPPET PIERMARK-HoY", which makes it quite obvious that they're closely related to Piermark himself, based on username and behaviour evidences.

Lately, he has been creating multiple throw-away accounts, almost all of which have lengthy usernames. With these accounts, he heavily engages in spamming, harassing, and pushing fake POVs.

  • Spamming: he pastes identical external links into multiple articles, some of his targets even have little to do with those links he pasted;
  • Harassing: he likes to post contents mentioned above, or threatening messages onto random talk pages about users who reverted his spam/confronted him (e.g. "Global block for Mtarch11"), as well as privacy breaching usernames (which got revdelled or even suppressed later, a recent example here).
  • POV-pushing: many sockpuppets of him are spreading groundless (at least, unreferenced) allegations/hoaxes towards television networks, or promoting a religious group named "House of Yahweh" (let alone this group itself has been sometimes recognized as a "cult").

List of sockpuppets

To be concise, he has been blocked at least 200+ times (only on it.wp, not including indef blocks anywhere else), with several sockpuppets also blocked on en.wp, banned on fr.wp (see links above), and globally locked almost on sight, yet we cannot find any signs of constructive edits.

Formalities

Criteria confirmation

  • The user demonstrates an ongoing pattern of cross-wiki abuse that is not merely vandalism or spam.
    Not vandalism:  Yes
    Nor spam:  Yes
  • The user has been carefully informed about appropriate participation in the projects and has had fair opportunity to rectify any problems.
    Warnings from admins:  Countless
    Time given to change: He was first blocked under his original Piermark username (see above) on Feb 4, 2015. Recently, he has been increasingly disruptive. Evidently, 8 years passed, his misbehaviors are only getting worse.
  • The user is indefinitely blocked or banned on two or more projects.
    See above

Requirements

  • Required steps
    • Confirm that the user satisfies all criteria for global bans:  Confirmed
    • File a new request for comment on Meta:  Filed
    • Inform the user about the discussion on all wikis where they are active:  Done by Zabe
    • Inform the community on all wikis where the user has edited:  Done by Zabe
  • Nominator requirements:  All passed See my CentralAuth.
    • have a Wikimedia account
    • be registered for more than six months before making the request
    • have at least 500 edits globally (on all Wikimedia wikis)

Other users' statements

Please create new h3 sections below this line.

On svwp

The user has been active in svwp in article sv:Sacred Name Movement with several user accounts and reverted & blocked. So support for global ban.Yger (talk) 12:56, 15 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Some more figures from it.wiki

As sysop on it.wiki, I can confirm you that there is a continuous bombing with attempts for entering the project by registering or out-registering lengthy usernames, in many case including also sensitive data like personal street addresses. Just to provide you some figures, that clearly denote that all Wikimedia projects are facing something more than a simple harassing: on it.wiki we developed specific filters to prevent him logging into it.wiki either with users registered locally or registered on a different Wikimedia project. The first filter was defined on Jan 12, 2023 and then was strengthened by another more powerful filter. Well, from Jan 12, 2023 up to the right moment I'm writing this comment, the filters blocked him 6382 times without any false positive. Last time was just a few minutes ago. Not to talk about another 600 blocks by another filter that was preventing him editing spam or cumbersome sentences as anonymous, starting from December 28, 2022. We are talking about at least more than 7000 attempts for sockpuppeting, improper editing and all his usual staff, in a time range of about four months - and this only on it.wiki. This is something more than a simple cross-wiki LTA. These behaviours are simply devastating. By the way, we shared our filters with sysops on fr.wiki, so you have to further add all interventions of the filters there. I think that this marks the point: he has to be stopped, everywhere, definitely, without regrets, without return. I Support Support the global ban.--Superspritztell me 15:26, 15 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Off-wiki harassment

One issue that I don't think has been mentioned is the harassment activities outside of wikipedia easily attributable to Piermark based on various coincidences and details (e.g. just visible IPs in email headers)

Years ago when I was particularly following the case I received a couple of emails in which he was posing as someone else (real people, including Italian Adventist exponents) with a threatening attitude. Something that happened to others as well, including new users less familiar with this sort of thing. I don't know if he has persisted with these behaviors for the past two years but I have no doubt to give Strong support Strong support--Shivanarayana (talk) 09:33, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

EstrellaSuecia

Seems like there are at least 3-5 socks of this guy at any given time reported on SRG and has been for quite some time, at least 10 months now. With the extensive crosswiki activity and history, I support the ban. This is far beyond normal LTA. EstrellaSuecia (talk) 17:09, 15 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Response from Piermark

Comments

Support

Oppose

Neutral

Questions

  • Piermark/HoY created several accounts on a lot of wikis and they edited in most of them. Why were only a bunch of wikis notified about this procedure? Thanks. --Superpes15 (talk) 19:44, 24 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Piermark created hundreds of accounts, making it difficult to completely enumerate how many wikis on earth he had edited. Say, he created a sock somewhere and only made few edits over there, then that isn't where he's active. I notified about this procedure on the bunch of wikis where he's (increasingly) active, especially where local sanctions have been imposed on him. IMHO this is to make them aware of the very procedure, and notifying them at places where he's active is very likely to get him notified. If we succeed on one wiki, then fair enough. -- U.T. 04:05, 25 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Inform the community on all wikis where the user has edited (not "has been active")! This is to notify the project and not the user. I know perfectly the amounts of account they create everyday, but this has nothing to do with this prerequisite, and it's never okay to only notify projects where a user is already blocked when asking for a ban. I've always blocked (and now locked) HoY's sock on sight, in practice it wouldn't change much because my fellow stewards do the same too, but the procedure must be followed correctly! Superpes15 (talk) 17:12, 26 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    In fact, I consulted @DerHexer: on this particular issue, and he gave me the suggestion above. What's more, his best-known aliases has only registered on few wikis, and it isn't worth to look into all his sockpuppets where he "had edited", despite with only 1 edit. But, if the procedure calls for, I can construct one more message to inform any wikis else where he had edited but not informed before. -- U.T. 02:41, 27 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Yep the procedure requires it! Superpes15 (talk) 09:07, 28 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Done by 1234qwer1234qwer4 -- U.T. 12:41, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    There is an invitation to participate to thwiki. As far as I check, this user doesn't make any contribution in thwiki at all, so even though the procedure requires the matter be informed to the wiki where the user is active/has been edited, sending it to other Wiki without relevance would confuse the people on that Wiki who has to find out what's it all about. It's not like community consultation or ratification of Universal Code of Conduct which affects all users. Given that the MassMessage can barely targeted the affected Wiki in a subset of proposal, there should be a revision of procedure that mentions the relevant Wiki, or simply state the blanket term that the proposal should be delivered to all Wiki, with a disclaimer of the scope where the incident is most relevant. Regards --G(x) (talk) 13:26, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @G(x) Piermark uses a lot of sockpuppets. On thwiki, as far as I know, he made edits using the sockpuppets Donald McLaughlin Jr. Mayor of Uvalde, TX (CU requests on enwiki [16] and frwiki [17]) and Cosa sapeva la BBC di Rothschild su Jimmy Savile (CU request on frwiki [18]). --Golmote (talk) 16:27, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Noted your comment, but my position mainly deals with the significance of the contribution that warrants notification in a particular Wiki. This person's contribution in thwiki is very minor, and any damage it may cause has been reverted by patrollers of Small Wikis, so there's no lasting damage or ongoing vandalism, and thwiki is more likely to treat it as a one-off vandalism than the LTA. G(x) (talk) 18:48, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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