# Sockpuppet Detection in Wikipedia: A Corpus of Real-World Deceptive Writing for Linking Identities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.6772 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.6772/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2013.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Characterizing, Detecting, and Predicting Online Ban Evasion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05257/) (2022)
- [Grammar as a Behavioral Biometric: Using Cognitively Motivated Grammar Models for Authorship Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08462/) (2024)
- [Detecting Sockpuppetry on Wikipedia Using Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10314/) (2025)
- [Sockpuppet Detection: a Telegram case study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10799/) (2021)
- [Detecting People Interested in Non-Suicidal Self-Injury on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07014/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper describes the corpus of sockpuppet cases we gathered from Wikipedia. A sockpuppet is an online user account created with a fake identity for the purpose of covering abusive behavior and/or subverting the editing regulation process. We used a semi-automated method for crawling and curating a dataset of real sockpuppet investigation cases. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first corpus available on real-world deceptive writing. We describe the process for crawling the data and some preliminary results that can be used as baseline for benchmarking research. The dataset will be released under a Creative Commons license from our project website: http://docsig.cis.uab.edu.