from "Comrade Sagecandor", Wikipedia Review (Proboards)
Given Sagecandor's creation of the Caputo article has appeared to suck in a paid sock-puppeteer and the fact that, if Sage is Cirt, this article would itself be a serious violation of his political biography ban I think it would be good to present all the general evidence of which I am aware that has accumulated regarding the Sage-Cirt allegation.
- Cirt stopped editing Wikipedia on April 24th. This was after Trump won the New York primary, leaving him as the only candidate capable of a mathematical majority of delegates, and two days before Trump sweeped a number of Northeastern states by substantial majority votes in each state. On May 4th, the day after Trump won a majority in the crucial Indiana primary forcing Cruz to concede and the same day Kasich conceded, making Trump the presumptive Republican nominee, Cirt requested the removal of all his admin privileges on all Wikimedia sites and once that was done made no further contributions on any Wikimedia sites. My opinion is this timing indicates Cirt was responding to Trump's electoral successes and potentially planning a return to editing under an account where he could violate his political biography ban undetected. The roughly six month period of inactivity on a registered account may have been to evade checkuser detection or perhaps waiting for the outcome of the election, maybe both.
- Several weeks before the 2016 election an Antigua IP user begins making edits related to politics. IP Quality Score claims this IP belongs to a proxy service. Many of the early edits in this period are to an article on a Dr. Who franchise spin-off show called The Class, Dr. Who being one of Cirt's notable editing interests. An edit made to the reception section bears striking similarity to edits made by Cirt to one of his Dr. Who-related articles. Other edits made by the IP show considerable familiarity with Wikipedia formatting. The Antigua IP begins making a series of edits to the article on Fake News in the wake of Trump's victory and just hours after the IP stops editing that page and any others, the Sagecandor account begins editing the same page. For comparison check some edit summaries from edits to the page by the IP user and some others by Sagecandor. It is reasonable to surmise the IP was being used by Sagecandor before that account was created.
- Both Cirt and Sagecandor have produced a prodigious amount of content about books, especially those related to politics or culture. Sage has created 18 articles about various books all directly or implicitly related to Trump. Cirt was extensive in his editing related to books, typically of a political or societal nature. Out of the 125 articles he raised to Good Article status, 48 were about books, and four out of the 18 Featured Articles he wrote were about books. One noteworthy result of this is both have shown an interest in writing bibliographies. Sagecandor edited the Donald Trump bibliography on Wikipedia to nearly quadruple its size over the course of a couple weeks. As for Cirt, he once successfully requested an exemption to his biography ban so that he could develop the Dan Savage bibliography up to Featured List status.
- Related to that, another noteworthy convergence in their interests is the intersection of politics and eroticism. Dan Savage was the progenitor of a campaign to have Rick Santorum's last name be associated with a by-product of anal sex. The Wikipedia article on this campaign saw extensive contributions during the early stages of the 2012 presidential election from Cirt and partly served as the basis for his ban from political biography edits. In a similar fashion, Sagecandor's article on the Trump Tower novel was heavily focused on erotic elements to the work. Another bit of editing activity in this vein is his extensive editing of the biography for Elijah Daniel, who authored an erotic novel about Trump. Sagecandor, after some revision, edited the page to triple its size from before his first edit.
- Lastly, both Sagecandor and Cirt show some similarity in their choice of phrasing on Wikipedia. As sashi outlined in this post, Cirt and Sagecandor both use the rather uncommon phrasing of "respectfully defer to" in comments on Wikipedia. One other choice of phrasing, though more common, was to say "acknowledgment of my" in responding to people speaking positively of his contributions. Both seem to be the most frequent users of that phrasing and are usually the ones using it in the same fashion. My own inquiry showed a number of similar phrasings used in edit summaries, including "commented" and "minor copy edit" that both prove to be very rare, if not unique, summaries as dozens of editors I looked at all consistently used different summaries. Slightly more common, but shared by both, was the use of "re" for replies and another oddity was a recurring typing of "Thank you !" with a space before the exclamation mark.
Any one of the above points would be cause for reasonable suspicion about a Cirt-Sagecandor connection, but all of it together is about as close to meeting Wikipedia's DUCK test as I can imagine absent a direct admission or return by Sagecandor to editing the same exact articles Cirt edited.