/Archive 6

Hi Deathlibrarian, I hope you have been well.

I thought you might possibly be interested in hearing about an unusual epilogue to that dispute around those e-motorcycle articles earlier in the year.

You might recall that a certain agressive Wiki editor with admin powers seem to have an obsession with a those particular articles, constantly throwing around allegations of conflict of interest and and so on. I did my darndest to engage with the editor and repeatedly attempted to challenged the various claims, but it felt a little like arguing with a brick wall, and ended up getting dragged out for months. Despite my efforts to debate the issue, it seemed that every time I logged on to Wikipedia he would pop up, sending me a messages repeating the same type of claims.

A few months ago, I noticed he had suddenly become very quiet. I did some poking around, and it turned out the editor's account had been suspended from Wikipedia. Apparently, this was due to suspicions that the editor had recieved payments for some of his edits.

Bizarrely, even though his user page stated he spoke American English, lived in South Carolina and so on, apparently, the editor was actually Indian. Inchiquin (talk) 13:54, 25 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Inchiquin - I hope you've been well too! thanks for the update - interesting! I do remember the editing around these pages was a bit odd. Do you think he was being paid to edit on behalf of a rival motorcycle company - like a rival to the ones featured in the article you/we were working on? Deathlibrarian (talk) 08:24, 29 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Deathlibrarian

Yes, what you suggest might well make sense. He seemed to jump on me after noticing the abortive 'Revolt Motorcycle' page that I booted.

When I was reading through the debates via various editors/admins around the suspension of that users account, it seems that one thing that raised the red flag was that he gave the all-clear to an article that had been submitted about some wealthy Indian millionaire/billionaire called Nikhil Kamath, shortly after it had been submitted. So it could be possible that he was being paid by this business identity, and this figure might have been in competition with Rahul Sharma, the Indian entrepreneur who founded the Revolt Motors outfit.

Having said that, it is interesting that just a few days before his account got suspended, I noticed that this apparently errant-editor was kicking up a stink on the village pump page, adding a new section with the rather dramatic heading 'The unearthing of a massive UPE operation'. So I can't help but suspect that his apparent obsession about maintaining the 'purity' of Wikipedia may have been something of a smokescreen, the Wiki equivalent of someone yelling 'look over there!' in the hope of distracting everyone from some other background mischief.

Inchiquin (talk) 00:11, 3 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, it would be interesting to know how this all works.... but yeah, the smokescreen theory makes sense. I guess with these companies taking off, building prestige and getting market share, all this stuff is very important. Deathlibrarian (talk) 22:58, 16 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]