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User:TenOfAllTrades/Shustov

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This page has been removed from search engines' indexes. While this individual's contributions to Wikipedia are in desperate need of attention and cleanup, I don't wish to taint his professional reputation – whatever it might be – by having this page appear in Google searches. Consequently, I have NOINDEXed this page.

Please do not remove the tag without contacting me first. When the cleanup process is complete, I will blank or delete this temporary page. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 00:21, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Description of the problem

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The user account Shustov appears to be closely related to the earthquake engineering researcher V. Shustov. He has been creating a series of articles related to that topic. While normally the participation of subject matter experts is valuable and strongly encouraged, Shustov's contributions to Wikipedia have been problematic.

The serious problems fall into roughly two categories. In many cases, Shustov has added substantial amounts of material to Wikipedia which has been plagiarized from other sources. Verbatim copies of both copyrighted and public domain materials have been added, in some cases making up the bulk of entire articles. He has also violated Wikipedia copyright policy on a number of images, including by adding false public-domain tags to copyrighted images. Text was also often copied from other Wikipedia articles without acknowledgement in edit summaries.

A failure to recognize the problematic nature of this type of editing – up to and including edit warring to preserve plagiarized content – has led to an indefinite block of this user.

The second major area of concern is related to self-citation, -quotation, and -promotion. In the area of earthquake engineering, he has added direct copies of material from his own web pages, along with frequent citations of his own publications, YouTube videos, and websites. References to non-Shustov publications or web resources are few and far between — if present at all.

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Sockpuppetry

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Rather than acknowledge or attempt to resolve the issues which have led to his indefinite (not necessarily permanent) block (not necessarily a ban), Shustov has now resorted to sockpuppetry in order to push his agenda. Instead of stopping the sockpuppetry and responding to the concerns about his conduct, he has raised accusations of "paranoia", and seeks to have me "neutralize[d]".

The following sockpuppets have been identified so far.

enwiki only socks

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Crosswiki socks and accounts

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IP addresses

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Logged out edits by Shustov have come from the following IP addresses:

Meatpuppet recruitment

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Using deceptive messages, he has attempted to recruit meatpuppets from Structural Engineers Association - International. (Message archive by author, denial of plagiarism, request for meatpuppetry.)

Checklist for cleanup

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enwiki articles: 14 articles, 4 redirects.

Entries in italic have been examined and (to the best of my ability) fixed.

Articles

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Resolved enwiki articles

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  • Earthquake loss (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
    Done. Portions of the article (including figure) describing a "Damage Ratio Charts Method" are copied directly from Shustov's web page [2]. This method appears to be unique to Shustov. Google searches on that term and on "Damage ratio chart(s)" come up empty, save for Shustov's work and Wikipedia mirrors.
    Absent any indication that this method (presented, apparently, by Shustov in 1997) is recognized, recommended, or used, it should be removed from the article.
  • Earthquake Protector (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
    Article deleted. Device/concept designed/patented by V. Shustov. No obvious Google hits for non-Shustov web sites, documents, or engineering projects; article appears to be self-promotion only. Recommend deletion. (PRODded on 00:44, 12 January 2009 (UTC)). NB: Shustov's sockpuppets keep returning to this article.
  • Explosion protection (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
    Done. This article was not created by Shustov, but most of its references were added by him. The bulk of new text is aimed at promoting his 'sails-rigging blast protective structural shield'. Removed text specific to his structural shield; there are no apparent installations of this technology, and the link seems to be simple self-promotion by the patent holder.

Redirects

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Other language Wikipedias

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Non-engineering issues

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Shustov appears to be persistently promoting his 'Upstream Fitness' exercise program. There appears to be no online recognition of this program – Google search – save for his own web site and some promotional content he has added to various Wikimedia projects.

  • Shustov's Upstream Fitness page: [4]


December 2009

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And self-promotion of Upstream Fitness on ruwiki.

Other notes

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  • The history of User:Epic1218/Practice page shows the evolution from copy-paste to badly-concealed plagiarism on John Blume. This isn't Shustov's fault, but I needed to keep a note of this somewhere.