Why do two brand-new accounts turn up on the same article within days of each other, arguing the same three points in slightly different words? Usually because someone believed a chorus reads as consensus. It doesn't, and Wikipedia has spent two decades building tools that notice the pattern faster than the accounts can build a track record.
The venue for that kind of case is Sockpuppet Investigations, SPI for short. Most cases open on behavioral evidence alone: the same turns of phrase, the same three sources cited in the same order, edits landing minutes apart on unrelated pages nobody but one person would think to touch. A clerk can escalate to a checkuser, who compares IP ranges, browser fingerprints and login times without publishing the underlying data. The tool confirms a suspicion that already has legs; checkusers don't go looking without one.
Sock puppetry is the misuse of multiple Wikipedia accounts to deceive or mislead other editors, disrupt discussions, distort consensus, or otherwise violate community norms.
Meatpuppetry runs the same problem through real people instead of aliases. A founder asks three colleagues to open accounts and weigh in on a deletion discussion; each one is a genuine person, which changes the tell but not the outcome. What gives it away is timing and thinness: accounts with no history outside one debate, arriving the same afternoon a message went out on a company Slack channel. Closing admins read for that pattern as carefully as they read for outright socks.
None of this touches the accounts Wikipedia's own rules allow. An editor who handles sensitive topics under one name and routine edits under another, with both profiles cross-linked as policy requires, is following WP:VALIDALT exactly. A paid editor with one declared account, used openly for every disclosed edit, is doing precisely what the paid-editing policy asks. What the policy tracks is transparency: does each account operate in the open, disclosed, one at a time, inside one conversation?
Once an SPI case closes with a confirmed link, the blocked accounts are rarely the end of it. An article at the center of a case like that usually gets relisted for deletion or placed under extended protection, on the reasoning that a debate manufactured to look larger than it was proves nothing about the underlying subject in either direction. A genuinely notable topic survives that reset without difficulty; a case built mainly on headcount does not.
The discipline this leaves practitioners with is unglamorous: one account, declared, arguing its own case. A single sourced comment from a disclosed editor carries more weight at a deletion discussion than five anonymous voices repeating it, because the closer discounts the chorus and reads the signed comment on its merits alone.
