Wikipedia Sucks!

This makes a good test case of how user ratings can be gamed.

https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/insat ... es-trolls/

INTO examined 100 of Insatiable’s most passionate raves — the five-star ratings boosting its stellar 4.2 score. To determine the likelihood that the rating came from a fake account, this publication placed reviewers into six categories: 1) No Previous Reviews, 2) One Review, 3) Two to Five Reviews, 4) More Than Five Reviews, 5) Profiles With Dead Links, and 6) No Profile.

By that measure, a near-unanimous 96 percent of all user reviews were suspect at best.

Unfortunately "reputation management" is an "underground business" and so we have no idea how large or effective it is. And probably never will. Especially when any Wikimedia project is involved--few online content providers are more secretive or dishonest than Wikimedia. People have quietly done similar things to the Insatiable rating scam on Wikipedia, and are still doing it today. And Wikimedia helps them, by pretending it doesn't happen.

Someday I'd like to get William "Mr. Wiki Excuse-Maker" Beutler in front of a judge and jury, sworn under oath to be honest. One could ask him all kinds of probing questions about how paid editing happens on WP despite WP's allegedly-institutional hatred thereof. Perhaps his head will explode.

The ultimate example of weird sockpuppeting had to be Commander Bunny (aka "Pat Murphy", real name Jerry Michael Graves, but search engines find him easier through the Pat Murphy moniker) who was dominating the small but influential shortwave pirate FRN (Free Radio Network) board (not the one that is up and moribund now, but the one that was operating from 1998 to 2013-ish) through a series of socks. "John Poet" of "The Crystal Ship" SW pirate station/show was not very happy at Murphy's actions toward him (on-air harassment, online stalking). His socks included "beans", "lovemyradios", "Winston 2531", many others. For about five years it split apart a small, necessarily secretive, US shortwave pirate radio community - until Murphy was named and shamed (because he had been a talk radio host in the 1980s-90s.)