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[edit] Pick a Card, Any Card

Ever play Three Card Monte? That's the game where you see a guy with three cards on a table in the street and he's constantly talking, telling you how much you're going to win if you pick the marked card. You know, the game where you never win, ever.

The confidence artist (con artist) running the game usually employs a shill (partner) in the group of people playing. The shill walks up, and after some minor effort, wins and gets some cash. Then you step up, and you're unable to duplicate the same trick.

You have been conned.

Basically, the con and the shill are in cahoots, planning to take you (the mark, the sucker, the yokel) for your cash. Man, that sucks! Who would want to be tricked like that?

At least in Three Card Monte, you have the fleeting sense of being in the company of other people, even if you're all being fleeced by a couple of them. In other scams, the con man doesn't need another person to be the "shill", and they don't even need to be in front of you. By changing their voice, for example, they could make a scary telephone call to you, and then call up later as another person, and this second nice person will help you get out of trouble with the first "person", for a fraction of what the "first" person was taking you for. You're talking to the same guy, but you're making a "choice" of who to speak to, so you feel differently about giving money to the second person, even though you're still a sucker and it's all one guy.

Wikipedia itself, of course, is a huge con game, except it's a guy named Jimbo who's flashing the cards and everyone else takes turn being the shill and the mark.

But let's talk about the smaller con games going on, and about how you get to con and be conned.

[edit] Everybody is Welcome! Except You!

In Wikipedia, anybody can edit. Anybody! But the downside of everybody being able to edit is that they often do.

While Wikipedia makes a big deal about everybody getting to edit, in fact there's a number of things they don't like to see edited, and which are undone (deleted, reverted) as soon as they're recognized. This includes:

• Vandalism (saying things people don't like)
• Libel (saying things people don't like)
• Hate speech (saying things people don't like)
• Disruption (Pointing out that you keep getting deleted for "vandalism", "libel", and "hate speech")

Naturally, this leads to conflict: anger, flamewars, quoting of the wikipedia laws of the second, acronyms flying like panties in a dryer. And in this melee, it's kind of a toss-up who will actually "win". With enough effort, the people who added new information might be stopped from doing so, or the people who wanted to get rid of all that nasty new information will be thwarted and Wikipedia will incrementally improve. You could hold wagers on it, with the occasional surprise in each direction making it interesting. "I got 4:1 odds that they're going to be able to leave the paragraph in! Place yer bets! Place yer bets!"

But this fun and enjoyable back and forth obscures a more dark side: people end up having enormous amounts of their time wasted. They make an effort to improve the Wikipedia, add paragraphs of information, do actual research, and then some yamnut comes along and declares it null and void because of their unique interpretation of the ever-shifting "law".

Some people quit. Some people go on destructive sprees and get banned.

But some decide to regroup, to get like-minded friends to join them in ensuring the information they wanted in stays in. These semi-organized information gangs then run through the place, making the other opinion into the minority and temporarily holding back the tide of preventing their work from getting in.

The "other side" does this too, gaining friends who are dedicated to "the cause", whether it be to delete everything that doesn't specifically mention Captain Kirk or to make sure that every occasion of the word "Peach" is capitalized because that's what needs to be done.

But what if, like many people who edit on Wikipedia, you have no friends?

[edit] Behold the Sockpuppet

Well, since anyone can edit Wikipedia, it's pretty trivial to start creating new user accounts, entire new people, giving them all interesting lives or hobbies or statistics, and then having these "new people" start agreeing with you on everything. When you say something should be deleted, your other accounts agree. When you think a person should become an administrator, your other accounts agree. If you think that Wikipedia won't be worth it's weight in subway tokens until there's an entire section dedicated to your favorite band, your other accounts are right there, egging you on. Pretty powerful stuff!

In Wikijargon, these underdeveloped, always-agreeing-with-you accounts are called Sockpuppets. The idea is that you are talking, and you have these sockpuppets on each hand, and they're going "yeah yeah yeah!" while you talk, and therefore you are both the con artist and the shills supporting the con artist. Your magical army of You is going to fuck Wikipedia ov... I mean, contribute needed strength to your point of view.

[edit] Behold the Easily-Findable Sockpuppet

The problem is that a lot of people aren't so good at composing other characters. Sure, people who have experience with a lot of online games and the glory of cheating your ass off are pretty good at it, but it's sort of an art. If you really are making another whole person on Wikipedia, you have to approach it with a few basics:

• Don't create the sockpuppet, make no modifications to your puppet's user page, and then jump 10 levels down into an obscure article that your main account is editing and make some exact and total edit that perfectly mirrors what your main account was trying to say but was being thwarted. What, are you stupid? That's how most sockpuppets are nailed.
• Do give your sockpuppet some time just being an editor. Go edit a bunch of random shit. Do it wrong, nobody will really care, you're just trying to help. Add some meaningless phrases to Wikipedia articles you don't care about. Go look shit up elsewhere on the internet and then dump it into the article. Apologize when you're found out. Now you have a history!
• Do give your sockpuppet account opinions similar to you, but not totally the same. Maybe you both like Ska music, but make sure your sockpuppet mentions an entire other band and talks about them a different way. Then it makes sense you would both be fixing up Ska articles, but if your sockpuppet has the exact same favorite songs, bands, and albums you do, people will notice.
• Do use nearby cybercafes, open wireless access points, AOL accounts, and other tricks to make sure your sockpuppets come in from other lands. If all your sockpuppets come in from one location, Wikipedia now has people who can see where everyone's logging in from and then make choices based on it. Some even have scripts and bots to notice this, and will say "10 accounts registered today from one IP address" and then you're fucked like Kitty Genovese.
• Don't register all your crazy accounts on the same day. Space it out over a day or two. It used to be Wikipedia noticed even new accounts across several days, but now there's so many accounts coming from so many places, they've kind of lost track. If you have a cable modem or other connection that can be refreshed and given different IPs, that helps too.

You see where we're going with this: creating sockpuppets on Wikipedia is a game, just like everything else on Wikipedia. Why waste time doing this? Well, if you want your shit to stick to Wikipedia's wall, you're going to have to throw it very hard, and to ensure it gets thrown as hard as possible, you're going to need backup. Sockpuppets enable you to do that.

[edit] Behold the Beloved Administrative Sockpuppet

But there's another use for Sockpuppets than just ensuring that your special take on The Green Arrow's origin story stays in Wikipedia: Reputation Spiking.

See, we're all human. We get a little mad one day, overly generous another. We're forgiving and kind one morning but then we're rat bastards at night. You do things you don't want to see later, and you do things that you're proud of that you wish could be entered into the "Wikipedian of the Year" contest.

The problem is, you do some good work, and then run for Administrator positions, and people come out of the woodwork and say "But on October of last year, this user called another user a filthy spooge-rag. Do we really want that kind of person to become an administrator?" And then you're back being Kitty Genovese again.

But what if you have all your unpopular moves done through your sockpuppet? What if you make a sockpuppet that's a completely unpleasant person, who makes all the stupid moves you know might not be accepted? What if you funnel all your assholery into one place, leaving the rest pristine?

Well, then you see what happens; Sock Puppet gets all the shitstorms, while Your Main Account is an angel. Never said a bad word about anybody! Never made an unkind deletion, always had a good reason for everything. What a great person! This, my friends, is a perfect candidate for adminship!

And the best part is, once you run for admin... your sockpuppets can vote against you!

[edit] Wait, What?

Wait, vote against you? What are we talking about?

Well, remember, your sock puppets are not always your yes-men. Sometimes they're your sworn enemy. Sometimes they undo your work and then take the heat away from you. Let's say you want to add something that's questionable. Here's how that works:

• Add your unpleasant or unpopular fact: '"The Cole Bombing was perpetuated by Gay Whales."
• Immediately have your sockpuppet pull it down, with an insult. "What the hell! You're a useless sack of meat!!!!!!!"
• Come back with a kind apology, and then put it back in with couched language. "The Cole Bombing was perpetuated by parties unknown, which may have included (as had been said) by Gay Whales."
• Now the sockpuppet is SUPER PISSED. "Fuck you, you fucking fuck!!!" and they delete it.

Now sit back and watch the fun. People will side with you or your sockpuppet, and with these teams on each side, you can cause an amazing shitstorm that results in, with the right moves, your idea getting in unquestionably, simply because you're the guy "trying to do the right thing". Maybe you won't get your Gay Whales Theory in, but with enough effort, you can get a helpful Wikipedian to add a "Controversies" section that will include a reference to Gay Whales. Victory!

In the same way, if you're running to become an administrator, you want your sockpuppet to come out totally against you. You want them to drop some real ugliness into the conversation, remove the sense of decorum and consideration. Be sure to have your sockpuppet voting like an asshole or like a good guy for a good month before you go up for your vote. When you come up... oh boy, let those insults fly! People, shocked at the mistreatment of your main account, will throw in an approval vote just to stay away from Mr. Distasteful Jerkoff, Esquire. Congratulations! You just sockpuppeted yourself into Adminship!

These games go on all the time on Wikipedia, 24 hours a day. Sockpuppets are everywhere, doing amazing things, and if you watch long enough, you'll start to see them everywhere.

And that's the other problem.

[edit] The Sockpuppet Hunt

Because Sockpuppets are so easy to make, because they're so easy to maintain, and because some people are not particularly creative or energetic, it is very, very easy to call someone a Sockpuppet when in fact they might just be a real person who isn't coming in with an agenda. After about a week on Wikipedia, nobody believes that anyone doesn't have a hard, firm agenda that they're spraying onto the entries. Nobody believes someone could come on the site and just... edit. There has to be something fishy going on.

This level of high-grade paranoia manifests itself everywhere. If you watch discussions, you'll see someone call someone else a sockpuppet just for having the same opinion as someone else. Or being new. Or being unclear. Or, really... anything. "Sockpuppet" is another great accusation; how do you prove you're not a sockpuppet? Photocopy your driver's license? Take a photo of yourself with today's newspaper and an iron?

Wikipedians waste hours, days, weeks, trying to ferret out sockpuppets. It's used as an epithet, a name called in arguments, and, like a lot of Wikipedian jargon, it keeps new users cowed and afraid. Don't make your opinion too obvious, bucko, or you're going to sockpuppet land and nothing you write will ever stick, ever.

We've heard that Jimbo has, on a list in his pocket, the names of 300 known Sockpuppets in the Wikipedia organization, and he's going to hold hearings to find them out.

[edit] Solutions

There are many ways to solve this problem....

Ha ha, we're kidding. There are no solutions. This is one of the things that will haunt Wikipedia until it's bought out by Yahoo. But now you know the full story.

And we're telling the truth, too. Just ask this button-eyed stranger to our right.