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SPI Tools

This is a collection of utilities to help process wikipedia sock-puppet investigations, specifically on enwiki. This is very much a work in progress; expect things to break, to be missing, to be confusing, etc. Please file bug reports.

Quick Start

Index page screenshot

Start by navigating to the SPI Tools home page, https://spi-tools.toolforge.org/. The big drop-down menu lists all the currently active SPIs. This is obtained by parsing WP:Sockpuppet investigations/Cases/Overview on the fly. Pick the SPI you're interested in, and click one of the three buttons.

By default, both the current SPI page and the archive (if it exists) are pulled in. If the archive is large, that can be slow, so you can uncheck "Use archive?" if you want.

IP Info

ip-info page screenshot

This shows you all the IPs that have been mentioned in {{checkip}} templates. There's also a (rather clumsy) way to select a subset of them and see what CIDR range would cover them.

Sock Info

sock-info page screenshot

This gives you information about individual socks. For our purposes, a sock is any user mentioned in a {{SPIarchive notice}}, {{checkuser}}, or {{user}} template.

user-info page screenshot

If you click on a username, you can start to drill down into user-specific information. For now, that means a composite listing of their live and deleted edits. There's some options you can play with; it should be obvious what they mean. If it's not obvious, maybe you're not the intended audience for this tool.

Interactions

sock-select page screenshot

This section lets you look at groups of socks, in aggregate. The main screen presents you with all the socks found in the SPI report(s). You can select which ones you're interested in. Once you've picked the ones you want, you've got two reports you can get.

The Interaction analyser is the same Sigma tool that's linked in all SPI reports. The only difference is that the set of users compared is built on the fly, instead of a static set built when the SPI report was first generated.

timecard-detail page screenshot

The Timecard comparison shows you miniature timecards using the X-Tools data. You can see, for example, that Cadeken and Cadetrain have very similar work schedules.

Authentication

Some functions (such as listing deleted contributions) require admin rights. You can either login using the "Login" link at the top o the navbar, or wait to be prompted to login when you access some function which requires admin rights.

The tool uses OAUTH to authenticate using your mediawiki credentials. The tool only reads data using the mediawiki API; no edits or admin actions (other than reading admin-restricted data) are ever performed. The tool depends on your access permissions as conveyed via OAUTH; logging into the tool as a non-admin won't give you admin access to anything.

Future directions

There's a ton of possible ways for this to grow. Let me know what would be useful to you.

I'll almost certainly add some sort of caching. Parsing and re-parsing large archive files isn't very efficient. Some simple caching would be a big performance win.

Merging log entries (page moves, blocks and unblocks, user group changes, etc) into the chronological edit histories is on my short list.