A 2015 arbitration report in this very periodical said “it was a matter of deep concern” that an abusive editor who had obtained administrator privileges “was able to fool the community for so long”. At that time, they were banned by the Arbitration Committee following a long case. We are sad to report that, not only did the abuse not stop in 2015, but the same person managed to obtain a second administrator account, and was just discovered a few days ago.
November 1 case request and startling admission
Beeblebrox opened a request for arbitration against administrator Lourdes on 1 November, claiming misdeeds including administrative blackmail — bullying other less-privileged editors over their votes during a recent request for adminship. With the case request around one day old, on 2 November, the respondent suddenly stated that they are the site-banned former admin, Wifione. The case request was closed as moot following Lourdes’ admission.
One of the contributors to the case, Kurtis, asked “Is this an ArbCom case request or an M. Night Shyamalan movie?” Others, like arbitrator Moneytrees in the quote above, were more to-the-point.
Wifione background
If you have read our prior coverage of how the Wifione siteban came to be, amidst allegations of paid editing while holding the admin bit, you can probably skip over this section.
According to the 2015 Arbcom case, the oldest known account used by the individual also known as Wifione was created in 2006. They created dozens of sock accounts, which were revealed by a 2008 checkuser request.
That prior account was later linked to another account called Wifione, which was created in 2009 and that had become a Wikipedia admin in 2010. The Arbitration committee case found that Wifione was engaging in search engine optimization related to an Indian educational firm. Wifione was sitebanned as part of the case resolution.
An admin called “Lourdes”
This long-term abuser created the Lourdes account in late 2015, initially under a different name. In 2016 they renamed the account. They were most active in 2016–17, and ran an unsuccessful, self-nominated request for adminship in early 2017; a second attempt in 2018 was successful with 207 in favor and 3 opposed. The account went mostly unused for 2020 through 2022, with many months of total editorial inactivity, although it continued to perform admin actions. In 2023, they returned to regularly editing the English Wikipedia.
Throughout their tenure, they made 2,282 admin actions, according to User:JamesR/AdminStats.
The arbitration case request filed this month alleged that Lourdes engaged in egregious abuse of their administrator status during a recent request for adminship, including the following:
Because I remember having acted on your complaints at ANI a few times, and on the basis of that connect and support that I gave you, I am requesting you to reconsider your stand
— Lourdes, at the case request
This kind of pressuring (there were other examples) was described by one of the contributors to the case request as “the kind of thinly veiled threat you’d expect to hear in The Godfather”. In response, Lourdes gave an admission nobody expected:
I am User:Wifione, the admin who got blocked years ago.
My RL identity has nothing to do with any celebrity or anyone like that. I am not writing this to have any final laugh. It’s just that I feel it appropriate to place it here specially for Beeblebrox, who I almost emotionally traumatised over the years with the aforementioned double sleight – aka, pulling him around for revealing my so-called identity. It also required double-doxxing myself on at least one external project, namely Wikipediocracy, which even placed mentions of my name in the private section to protect my identity.
All of the details of the request and the statements made there — which arbitrators voted to decline as pointless soon after the revelations and the self-block — can be seen at its last revision link.
Aftermath
Nobody is quite sure what to make of this. How did they get away with this for so long? How did they conceal it this well? How did nobody notice? What was the point of spending years as a productive administrator, making tens of thousands of edits and logging thousands of actions, to implode the whole thing over a pointless argument on an RfA talk page?
The Signpost’s sources have confirmed that the particular BADSITE mentioned in Lourdes’ final message has indeed discussed this issue, and that both Beeblebrox and the disgraced LTA have posted more about the events, but the thread over there doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either.
As someone who only tried making some random corrections here and there and wasn’t all that “in” in the whole editing world, over time the experience was miserable enough that I simply don’t bother anymore.
More than once I tried correcting the Finnish version of some pages on a specific subject that had pretty blatant misrepresentations of what the source material actually said (as in they actually ended up claiming the opposite of what the source or the English page said), and my edits were reverted by some “power admin” who was treating the pages on that subject as their personal fiefdom. They refused to have any sort of rational discussion about it, and it turned into them just using obscure (to me, anyhow) Wikipedia policy references to get their way and I simply couldn’t be arsed to figure out how to get around this particular asshole.
As someone here in the comments said, “people will people.” Too many Wikipedia admins are in it simply for the feeling of power, and Wikipedia’s frankly quite complicated policy is used more as a weapon against people who dare encroach on their turf rather than as rules for ensuring good-quality pages.
Edit: also, am I the only one who keeps accidentally clicking on Lemmy’s “delete comment” button when meaning to edit a comment? Why in the everliving fuck doesn’t it ask for confirmation?
Honestly, both the behavior and the tone kind of remind me of someone in the Conan Exiles rp community. They’re a great roleplayer to a point, but they always have a meltdown and inevitably get themselves banned from every single new server. They can’t help themselves.
But their attitude at this point seems to just be that it’s going to happen, at which point they shrug and evade the ban until it happens again. I don’t think I know of a single server they haven’t gotten banned from, but they just kind of take it in stride and keep making alts.
The thing is, they love Conan and do actually want to have somewhere to RP, they just also have this other thing they can’t or won’t really fight
Toxic behavior has a double-edged consequence. It both tends to make the person responsible feel like they act that way naturally, and it also makes people respond to them as if they act that way naturally, it becomes a feedback loop. So much of the perpetual cycle is subconscious.
Sometimes it takes a hell of a lot of patience and a step back to say, “you aren’t toxic but your behavior certainly is.” It’s moments like those where maybe, hopefully they can realize that behavior is something for which they need to seek proper help.
god I hate wikipedia abuse. It even happens from non admins. There’s this one movie I watched and I realized that it wasn’t on the lead actor’s filmography so I added it, and within minutes it was removed without reason. I go on this guy’s talk profile and it’s full of people claiming that they religiously remove edits on a number of random articles. Probably 80% of edits in the past year alone on that filmography page were from this one guy and almost all of them were removing tiny contributions from other users. Some people just like to act like an article is “theirs”
I think in this case MMO is another word for “people will people”.
IRL people talk behind each other’s backs, online they sockpuppet, spreading rumors and half-truths, or even outright lies. It’s always been like that, but places like Wikipedia have better transparency tools to track them down, better than trying to track what some people talked about over a cup of tea, or while walking their dogs in the park.
If you enjoyed doing translations of pages, I don’t think you should stop just because “people will people”.
I will give some more info on what I saw at wikipedia, which arguable is common knowledge.
After I translated pages, I noticed people coming in to make small edits. I don’t mind those, but is baffled that people seem to be making meaningless changes all the time. Not to mention I am pretty sure I am more knowledgeable on said subjects than those “editors”.
I later realized that the number of edits and the number of edited pages count towards some arbitrary numbers which people can use to claim and move up the ladder of admin rights. It all made sense on why there are so many minimal edits performed by individuals. They are looking for low hanging fruit.
It soured my feelings toward wikipedia. I thought of it as a good volunteer project. Turns out some people play it as a numbers game. And they have enormous influence on the site.
Those people than use their power to suppress whatever they don’t like to see on wikipedia, similar to what OP posted.
By the way, to understand how absurd wikipedia’s system is, please take a look at the following news:
Why Emily St John Mandel asked for help getting divorced on Wikipedia
Well, edit count actually doesn’t matter at all in the scheme of admin rights, but some people think it to be some part of their ego. Getting admin rights is apparently exhausting and people usually oppose territorial people from getting admin. Also I’m curious how meaningless the edits were, copyediting is also important.
That was more than 10 years ago.
Maybe the changes are indeed meaningful and maybe I was too young at that time.
And I honestly don’t mind people making changes.
What made me quit was accidentally reading about wikipedia dramas and realized I was participating in a giant MMO in text. It was not a good feeling.
I do volunteer work to feel good. (Yes, really.)
I still sometimes do volunteer work. Just not on wiki.
I know about those, and I have to partially disagree.
The number of edits limits were introduced to filter out people who had no clue, or wish to have a clue, about how Wikipedia worked. I remember having to spend some time on the latest edits page looking for vandalism, or searching for misspellings, or helping people with the formatting of their articles, to get to a minimum number of edits needed for some vote. I learned a lot during that time, and I think it was a reasonable way of achieving it.
Where it started getting out of hand, is when over time the minimum number of edits got increased, and increased again, and again… getting into silly amounts more fit for a bot than for an actual human.
I haven’t looked at it for several years, probably lost my voting rights long ago.
Why Emily St John Mandel asked for help getting divorced on Wikipedia
This isn’t absurd, it’s one of the safety mechanisms to keep a minimum of quality to the information included in the Wikipedia: to be a tertiary source.
Anyone can be a primary source; they might be the ones with the most knowledge… or some rando making stuff up. Wikipedia doesn’t have a panel of experts capable of judging this, or even people in charge of verifying the identity of anyone, so instead it simply rejects all primary sources as a rule.
Because of that, Wikipedia is based on secondary sources and their reputation, on people deciding to analyze, and verify more or less, what someone else is saying.
It isn’t absurd, it’s the only way to run a project where everyone can edit everything, including people totally clueless of the subject at hand… who can nonetheless report on the analyses done by secondary sources, help with the formatting, spell checking, or double check the validity of sources added by others.
I am pretty sure I am more knowledgeable on said subjects than those “editors”.
That’s the thing: you may be pretty sure, but Wikipedia has no way of knowing whether that’s true, and doesn’t even try to.
If you are more knowledgeable, you’re free to become a primary source and publish your stuff, whether through academic means or simply on a website.
If you’d rather apply your knowledge to analyzing the articles of others, you can become a secondary source just as easily, start a WordPress or Medium blog and go ahead… but don’t forget to cite your primary sources.
Wikipedia is the entry point for people totally clueless about a topic, aimed not towards presenting knowledge, although it does some of that, but mainly towards presenting where to learn more.
It isn’t a perfect system, ideally you’d hire a panel of experts and have them curate all content… but that comes with a whole set of problems, that would never have let Wikipedia reach the size it has as fast as it has.
Keep in mind the original Encyclopédistes took 19 years to publish a single edition with little over 70,000 articles, while the Wikipedia has grown to 6.7 million articles in just 22 years (Size of Wikipedia as of Nov 2023)… plus some more in a bunch of different languages.
I’ve checked it now, and I see the permission systems have been changed since I was last seriously active on Wikipedia.
Somewhat ironically, I’ve now found a years old notification for a deletion vote… which I couldn’t take part in, because at the time I was busy almost dying. Funny how these things work.
Based on that, it would seem like these could be some possibilities:
Maybe they enjoy “the game” or deception more than doing anything real with it. They may already have another alt admin in the making, or even made one already.
It’s a lot of time to keep up the same charade, so maybe they’re doing it as a job, with who knows how many more accounts already.
Or maybe they finally got bored with it, and decided to go out with a “POP!” while showing everyone their “superiority”.
For better and for worse, the Wikipedia attracts people good with words, which includes those capable of writing clearly, and those who can organize the whole project, and also those who enjoy playing games of sophistry to whatever end.
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As someone who only tried making some random corrections here and there and wasn’t all that “in” in the whole editing world, over time the experience was miserable enough that I simply don’t bother anymore.
More than once I tried correcting the Finnish version of some pages on a specific subject that had pretty blatant misrepresentations of what the source material actually said (as in they actually ended up claiming the opposite of what the source or the English page said), and my edits were reverted by some “power admin” who was treating the pages on that subject as their personal fiefdom. They refused to have any sort of rational discussion about it, and it turned into them just using obscure (to me, anyhow) Wikipedia policy references to get their way and I simply couldn’t be arsed to figure out how to get around this particular asshole.
As someone here in the comments said, “people will people.” Too many Wikipedia admins are in it simply for the feeling of power, and Wikipedia’s frankly quite complicated policy is used more as a weapon against people who dare encroach on their turf rather than as rules for ensuring good-quality pages.
Edit: also, am I the only one who keeps accidentally clicking on Lemmy’s “delete comment” button when meaning to edit a comment? Why in the everliving fuck doesn’t it ask for confirmation?
I’d love to take a look
It’s been a good while so I’m not sure I could even pinpoint the articles anymore, and I honestly don’t really care at this point
You’re not, but clicking it again undeletes it.
… guess it’s better I found that out now rather than later 😅
deleted by creator
Honestly, both the behavior and the tone kind of remind me of someone in the Conan Exiles rp community. They’re a great roleplayer to a point, but they always have a meltdown and inevitably get themselves banned from every single new server. They can’t help themselves.
But their attitude at this point seems to just be that it’s going to happen, at which point they shrug and evade the ban until it happens again. I don’t think I know of a single server they haven’t gotten banned from, but they just kind of take it in stride and keep making alts.
The thing is, they love Conan and do actually want to have somewhere to RP, they just also have this other thing they can’t or won’t really fight
Toxic behavior has a double-edged consequence. It both tends to make the person responsible feel like they act that way naturally, and it also makes people respond to them as if they act that way naturally, it becomes a feedback loop. So much of the perpetual cycle is subconscious.
Sometimes it takes a hell of a lot of patience and a step back to say, “you aren’t toxic but your behavior certainly is.” It’s moments like those where maybe, hopefully they can realize that behavior is something for which they need to seek proper help.
Do they abbreviate past tenses of made-up verbs such as “nommed” like “nomm’d” instead of “nom’d”?
No, they mostly scream at people in voice chat or break character when something happens that they don’t like. Often after losing pvp.
god I hate wikipedia abuse. It even happens from non admins. There’s this one movie I watched and I realized that it wasn’t on the lead actor’s filmography so I added it, and within minutes it was removed without reason. I go on this guy’s talk profile and it’s full of people claiming that they religiously remove edits on a number of random articles. Probably 80% of edits in the past year alone on that filmography page were from this one guy and almost all of them were removing tiny contributions from other users. Some people just like to act like an article is “theirs”
report them. it’ll help the next person facing them. and probably increase quality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism
Though if there is reason to suspect they aren’t doing it out of malice, report it to the WP:HAPPYPLACE of Truth
Ah…the good old wikipedia drama. I remember some said wikipedia is playing an MMO, and I completely agree.
I used to do translations for pages until I realize there is so much drama going on.
deleted by creator
I think in this case MMO is another word for “people will people”.
IRL people talk behind each other’s backs, online they sockpuppet, spreading rumors and half-truths, or even outright lies. It’s always been like that, but places like Wikipedia have better transparency tools to track them down, better than trying to track what some people talked about over a cup of tea, or while walking their dogs in the park.
If you enjoyed doing translations of pages, I don’t think you should stop just because “people will people”.
Oh I agree with you.
I will give some more info on what I saw at wikipedia, which arguable is common knowledge.
After I translated pages, I noticed people coming in to make small edits. I don’t mind those, but is baffled that people seem to be making meaningless changes all the time. Not to mention I am pretty sure I am more knowledgeable on said subjects than those “editors”.
I later realized that the number of edits and the number of edited pages count towards some arbitrary numbers which people can use to claim and move up the ladder of admin rights. It all made sense on why there are so many minimal edits performed by individuals. They are looking for low hanging fruit.
It soured my feelings toward wikipedia. I thought of it as a good volunteer project. Turns out some people play it as a numbers game. And they have enormous influence on the site.
Those people than use their power to suppress whatever they don’t like to see on wikipedia, similar to what OP posted.
By the way, to understand how absurd wikipedia’s system is, please take a look at the following news:
Why Emily St John Mandel asked for help getting divorced on Wikipedia
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64033028
Well, edit count actually doesn’t matter at all in the scheme of admin rights, but some people think it to be some part of their ego. Getting admin rights is apparently exhausting and people usually oppose territorial people from getting admin. Also I’m curious how meaningless the edits were, copyediting is also important.
That was more than 10 years ago. Maybe the changes are indeed meaningful and maybe I was too young at that time. And I honestly don’t mind people making changes.
What made me quit was accidentally reading about wikipedia dramas and realized I was participating in a giant MMO in text. It was not a good feeling.
I do volunteer work to feel good. (Yes, really.) I still sometimes do volunteer work. Just not on wiki.
I know about those, and I have to partially disagree.
The number of edits limits were introduced to filter out people who had no clue, or wish to have a clue, about how Wikipedia worked. I remember having to spend some time on the latest edits page looking for vandalism, or searching for misspellings, or helping people with the formatting of their articles, to get to a minimum number of edits needed for some vote. I learned a lot during that time, and I think it was a reasonable way of achieving it.
Where it started getting out of hand, is when over time the minimum number of edits got increased, and increased again, and again… getting into silly amounts more fit for a bot than for an actual human.
I haven’t looked at it for several years, probably lost my voting rights long ago.
This isn’t absurd, it’s one of the safety mechanisms to keep a minimum of quality to the information included in the Wikipedia: to be a tertiary source.
Anyone can be a primary source; they might be the ones with the most knowledge… or some rando making stuff up. Wikipedia doesn’t have a panel of experts capable of judging this, or even people in charge of verifying the identity of anyone, so instead it simply rejects all primary sources as a rule.
Because of that, Wikipedia is based on secondary sources and their reputation, on people deciding to analyze, and verify more or less, what someone else is saying.
It isn’t absurd, it’s the only way to run a project where everyone can edit everything, including people totally clueless of the subject at hand… who can nonetheless report on the analyses done by secondary sources, help with the formatting, spell checking, or double check the validity of sources added by others.
That’s the thing: you may be pretty sure, but Wikipedia has no way of knowing whether that’s true, and doesn’t even try to.
If you are more knowledgeable, you’re free to become a primary source and publish your stuff, whether through academic means or simply on a website.
If you’d rather apply your knowledge to analyzing the articles of others, you can become a secondary source just as easily, start a WordPress or Medium blog and go ahead… but don’t forget to cite your primary sources.
Wikipedia is the entry point for people totally clueless about a topic, aimed not towards presenting knowledge, although it does some of that, but mainly towards presenting where to learn more.
It isn’t a perfect system, ideally you’d hire a panel of experts and have them curate all content… but that comes with a whole set of problems, that would never have let Wikipedia reach the size it has as fast as it has.
Keep in mind the original Encyclopédistes took 19 years to publish a single edition with little over 70,000 articles, while the Wikipedia has grown to 6.7 million articles in just 22 years (Size of Wikipedia as of Nov 2023)… plus some more in a bunch of different languages.
This is a very convincing argument.
I guess this shows the difference between projects run by hired staff and a volunteer project who had to guard against bad actors.
Since I have only worked on one side it is easy to miss out on the reason those safeguards exist.
And btw I am publishing as primary source as well ! Maybe that is more suitable for me!
I agree. They weren’t talking about protection though, they were talking about edit counts–ism
I’ve checked it now, and I see the permission systems have been changed since I was last seriously active on Wikipedia.
Somewhat ironically, I’ve now found a years old notification for a deletion vote… which I couldn’t take part in, because at the time I was busy almost dying. Funny how these things work.
Based on that, it would seem like these could be some possibilities:
For better and for worse, the Wikipedia attracts people good with words, which includes those capable of writing clearly, and those who can organize the whole project, and also those who enjoy playing games of sophistry to whatever end.