Richard Symonds is the volunteer administrator who blocked an account on Wikipedia on suspicion that it was being operated by Grant Shapps or someone “acting on his behalf”. The Tory party chairman denies the allegations.
The 29-year-old had been named in this morning’s newspapers – with the Daily Mail noting he was a former member of the Liberal Democrats – and agreed to answer questions about how he reached the conclusion to block the account, had his investigation reviewed by Wikipedia’s internal court and was forced to leave his home after the story broke.
Channel 4 describes you as one of the UK’s most senior Wikipedia administrators. What’s your role?
I’ve been volunteering for Wikipedia since 2005 and someone nominated me to be an administrator in 2007.. I got more involved in doing investigations like this one – maybe a few each week – with most being relatively straightforward. In 2011, I stood for Wikipedia’s arbitration committee, and was elected to that too: that year I played a part in uncovering the edits that Bell Pottinger [a PR firm] had been making to Wikipedia, which was a big investigation that did hit the press.
When were you first alerted to suspicious activity on the Grant Shapps Wikipedia article?
On 2 April a journalist from the Guardian contacted me and a few other Wikipedians to raise concerns about the Contribsx account. He was asking about the edit history of the account, which had been used to remove information critical to Grant Shapps and insert information supporting him. I looked over the edits and there was prima facie evidence that something fishy was going on. It looked like a pretty blatant form of whitewashing, which I see quite often on Wikipedia and am quick to investigate. I decided to look into the edits independently of the Guardian’s own investigation, and I asked them for any evidence they had uncovered themselves and were able to share with me.
Why was the Guardian’s evidence worth investigating further?
The edits made really were whitewashing. There were some edits where entire paragraphs about Shapps, and a bibliography of the books he wrote under other names, were all removed, without any discussion or rewording. Perfectly valid, sensible, referenced work that people had put in was being removed from the article. When I checked 91 contributions by Contribsx, 29 were to Grant Shapps’ pages, all of which showed the Tory MP in a more positive light. At this stage I wasn’t drawing any conclusions about who might be responsible, but when the Guardian mentioned that Mr Shapps had admitted doing this sort of thing before, under a different username – “Hackneymarsh” – I started looking into a connection between the old account and this relatively new one.
What made you believe this was Grant Shapps, or someone working with him?
The edits made almost all show Shapps in a positive light, or criticise one of his opponents. If it was simply a random Conservative activist, their edits would be more generally supportive of all of the Conservative party, and more generally negative about all of the opponents of that party. Likewise, if it was a Labour activist “black hatting” – pretending to be Mr Shapps, then the pattern would be different: they’d be more likely to focus criticism on Liberal Democrats, Greens and Ukip, and put flattering light on the Conservatives: but they’d tend to leave Labour alone. In addition, a lot of Contribsx’s edits were focussed towards particular people who had wronged Shapps in some way – for example, critical edits to (Labour MP) Steve McCabe’s page were made a matter of weeks after Mr McCabe reported Shapps to the police.
This sort of pattern repeats itself again and again with others... The edits are all there in public history for people to cross-check, and although I should add that there’s no undeniable proof it’s Shapps, it’s clearly someone who has an intimate knowledge of Mr Shapps’ day-to-day battles and who supports him completely. I don’t know anyone who would match that description who isn’t in his inner circle, so I suspect - as would any person who reviews the edits - that it is either him, or someone he knows. Like I said though, there’s no smoking gun, just a wealth of other evidence that really points in his general direction.
You have become part of the story and had journalists turn up at your door. How does that feel?
Not fun. There’ve been lots of times where I’ve been harassed because of the certain sorts of investigations I do on Wikipedia – people have called my house phone, called my employer and tried to get me sacked. Some have even tried to make out that I am also a sockpuppet [a fake online identity used to deceive others] myself, or that my wife (who is also an editor) is a sockpuppet of me. Most of it is puerile “internet threats”, and there’ve been various threats against my wife too, and against people we’re friends with.
You have left your home in east London. Why?
My wife has been in and out of hospital recently, and the stress of being in the press was really getting to both of us and was affecting her. After the press and freelance journalists started showing up at the door, we thought it wasn’t a good idea to stay any longer, and that the best thing to do would be to go and stay with friends elsewhere.
What about your politics: there are claims your motivation to probe this was influenced by your Lib Dem affiliation?
My politics doesn’t really come into it. I’ve told people I am a “small-l liberal”. I don’t like some unions, and I don’t like big banks, so I sit somewhere in the middle. I’ve never been a political activist. I have been an armchair member of the Lib Dems for maybe two years of the past five, but I don’t think it’s right to call me an activist – I’ve never actually done anything that involves leaving my chair. I would struggle to name more than two or three Lib Dem MPs, and I’ve voted for all three major parties in the past. Politics is important, of course, but I don’t find it interesting.
What did the Checkuser tool (used by Wikipedia to track IP addresses) tell you?
I don’t want to say too much about it because we take user privacy very seriously. Nearly all of the logs are deleted automatically after 90 days, so the Checkuser tool can only tell you so much – just the IP address and a short bit of information about the browser used. I didn’t share it with the Guardian and I won’t share it with anyone else – but it was able to prove that the Contribsx account had been editing as an unregistered user beforehand. The IP address had only created an account after the Grant Shapps page had been “semi-protected”, incidentally because of the whitewashing that had been carried out by the IP address. Creating a Contribsx account would allow whoever controlled that account to circumvent that protection.
Explain why you think Contribsx is a sockpuppet of Hackneymarsh (an account linked previously to Grant Shapps) when you don’t know the IP addresses are the same?
That’s more complicated, but basically it’s down to behavioural evidence. In any case like this, checkuser can only tell you so much and isn’t reliable if a person has one account for home and another for work, or one which he only uses at his local coffee shop. More and more, Wikipedia administrators have to rely on this behavioural evidence – looking at the activities of the two user accounts, the sorts of edits they’ve made, the times they edited articles (during the evening, or during lunch for example). Certain things flag up suspicions. For a start, the sort of content that was changed by both accounts was almost completely identical – in both cases it was almost exclusively whitewashing in order to favour Mr Shapps, mixed with criticism of his opponents.
You have been taken to task by some colleagues over the way your decision was arrived at. They say not enough administrators were consulted and you were too close to the media. What do you say?
I stand by the decision I made, but some other volunteers are concerned that I could have been more clear in my reasoning and could have run it past other people first. They may be wrong or right, but that doesn’t change the outcome or the facts of the case – I felt I had to do something to stop Wikipedia from being whitewashed. As for being too close to the Guardian, I was contacted by them, along with several other volunteers. I ran an investigation independently, and I only told the Guardian the outcome of the case once I’d made a decision to block the user and made the decision public.
Will your verdict be reversed by the arbitration committee?
That’s not for me to say. The arbitration committee are a group of volunteers who are chosen by the community to serve as volunteers on Wikipedia’s “high court”. A community member has asked them to review my handling of this matter given the high-profile nature of the block. I don’t know if they’ll reverse the decision I made, but I would be surprised if Contribsx was allowed to edit again.
How long will the process of arbitration committee take?
Anywhere from a couple of days to a month, I think. They’re all volunteers, so it depends how many of them are around to answer emails. It might be pretty quick, or it might not.
