What??? What the hell??? — arbitrator Moneytrees, arbitration request for Lourdes
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.
— Lourdes, at the case request
And blocked themselves indefinitely:
2023-11-01T22:47:55 User:Lourdes (talk | contribs) blocked User:Lourdes (talk | contribs) with an expiration time of indefinite (account creation blocked, email disabled) (Abusing multiple accounts)
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.
In short: what?
There is zero chance that there isn’t also a third account
technicallythetruth, as way before this fiasco she disclosed 3 accounts used in accordance with WP’s alt account policy
Aatube is wifione.
🧐
Playing the long con! Tell them about this extra account to throw them off his scent
This was a weird and gripping tale of a user who can’t stand being not an admin. Why they would dox themselves as the person that earned a previous super-duper ban is bewildering.
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Attention.
It’s deeper than that - secrets can eat away at you. See for example The Mysterious Mister Hokum, a fairly small-time con artist who always managed to elude capture, and still died of hypertension next a car insulated with ten thousand dollars in getaway cash.
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?
People do weird things. Mood disorders, (develop-/)mental disorders, personality disorders, extreme cases of having a shitty day, or just being a twat.
What is really fucked up isn’t just the meltdown, but the insinuation they did this to fuck with someone else, this Beeblebrox guy. That’s not very hoopy.
They need to find their towel, man.
Definitely not a hoopy frood
Definitely would not sass.
Ah yes, falling down
The fuck is that title?
Bastardized By Yours Truly
But why? “Extremely banned”, what the fuck?
Extreme baby! sounds of explosions and massive fireballs
The guy was not just ‘perma banned’, they rolled out the fucking carpet for him while there was heavy metal playing in the background.
‘Extremely banned™’ was the closest way to even begin describing how utterly hard the guy was banned.
Bannedly Broken 🥵
deleted by creator
as opposed to gently banned a little bit
It means banned but like giga banned
Also,
Search engine optimisation (finding of fact)
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Wifione has edited Wikipedia to the advantage of the IIPM and to the detriment of its competitors, in a manner consistent with attempts to optimise search engine results. (See Jehochman’s evidence and Harry Mitchell’s analysis.)
Passed 12 to 0 at 12:11, 2015-02-13 (8 years, 8 months, 25 days ago) (UTC−5)
Sock puppetry
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Following a review of Jayen466’s evidence and a historic CheckUser result, the Committee considers it likely that User:Wifione is a sockpuppet of User:Empengent, formerly Mrinal Pandey. The User:Wifione account was created and operated while Empengent (talk · contribs) was blocked.
Passed 10 to 2 at 12:11, 2015-02-13 (8 years, 8 months, 25 days ago) (UTC−5)
Endless disputes
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Commentary – varying from constructive criticism to ad hominem remarks – about Wifione has been posted in many forums on many occasions over five years without resolution. Forums include: Wikiquette assistance ([11], [12], [13]); the Administrators’ noticeboard, ([14]); the Administrators’ noticeboard/Incidents ([15], [16]); Jimmy Wales’ talk page ([17], [18], [19], [20]) and Editor review/Wifione [21]).
Passed 12 to 0 at 12:11, 2015-02-13 (8 years, 8 months, 25 days ago) (UTC−5)
Basically notorious.
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In addition, extensive evidence was presented during the case, backed up by analysis from Jayen466 in the workshop, that Wifione was likely a reincarnation of an editor who was blocked for extensive sock-puppetry in 2008, after abusing dozens of accounts to conduct a similar campaign over a period of several years which included threatening editors who persistently challenged the abuse. Arbitrators were sufficiently satisfied by the evidence of sock-puppetry that they passed (by a majority of ten to two) a finding of fact stating that Wifione was likely a sock-puppet, and thus that the account was created in violation of a block.
No, I mean those two words don’t fit next to each other, your title is just shit!
That part isn’t my title and your wording is shine. Rise, boy, adverbs can describe gerunds.
God dam.
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The way they’re arranged is yours though, the original makes it much clearer what was meant.
Hmm, how so? I don’t really see that.
I love that you take ownership of your mistakes. I’ll be putting this in your annual review.
This is making me miss the hobbydrama sub. I love this petty shit.
Was thinking the same thing. I’d read a lengthy diatribe about Wiki drama (again).
He’s just a mentally ill attention seaker and probably has some form of obsessive disorder.
He’ll be back, there’s no doubt.
It’s best to fade this news into the background as fast as possible so he gets nothing out of it.Wonder how many reddit subs this person ‘moderates’
Used to be the_donald and jailbait I assume
Is it the same person who runs awkwardtheturtle account?
Sorry to anyone who had their PTSD triggered by seeing that username
Everybody who isn’t you, is Unidan.
You just reminded me that everyone on reddit is a bot. Which… is getting closer to the actual truth these days.
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Here’s the thing…
I’ve had personal experience dealing with them and they’re by far the worst and most narcissistic individual I’ve had the displeasure of interacting with.
What’s their deal? I never paid much mind to that whole side of reddit when I was on there. They just modded a bunch of subs or something right?
They modded several subs, including r/advice and /offmychest. They were incredibly touchy and prone to calling people stupid for not understanding their convoluted rules. I got banned for responding to a post that they deemed to be on the wrong sub. They didn’t have time to create a copy-paste to redirect people to what they thought was a more appropriate sub, but they did have time to write individual replies about how stupid I am and how I should have learned (not to question them, I guess?)
Yikes, that’s peak reddit right there
Makes me think, how many fediverse accounts has awkwardtheturtle created yet? How many instances are run on his servers? :D
Are there enough of us here to give them the attention/drama they clearly crave?
does awkwardtheturtle know about the fediverse
this is an extraordinarily terrible title
read the sign
I mean I thought something wasn’t right, a lot of Articles have been rather sus lately
🧐🧐
which articles? talk about them on their article talk pages
Can you share the discussion thread? I’m not going to bother making an account on a forum I’ve never heard of.
Made an account just for you. Here’s the first page.
Whack if truthfull
Was suspected of being paid to edit pages, and was an admin. But people tell me wikipedia is totally trustworthy. People never really see the fighting that goes on in the Talk pages, if they did they would absolutely give pause about giving full faith to wikipedia.
I am more likely to trust a site that is open and public about its edit wars and that demands sourcing claims than I am all the others that are completely opaque about it and is just trust us bro.
No one should give full faith to anything they read.
I don’t know how it is now but back in the late 00’s/very early 10’s I had attempted to correct some obvious mistakes in some articles I came across. Some edits were immediately reverted – seemingly by a bot while others were reverted to some editor. On some, I tried using Talk to discuss why the reversion is incorrect and had put forth better sources (the actual source) instead of some ‘scientific journalist’s’ article that got it wrong and was basically threatened that I’d be banned.
These weren’t some esoteric or difficult subjects but fairly well-known and straight-forward data. It was such a hassle that I just gave up after my very short foray into Wikipedia editing for 5 or so years. I gave it another go for some subjects in my industry and learned that editors are not only territorial but take corrections personally. Sources be damned. What I’ve seen is so-called scientific journalists for news articles/blogs are just anecdotes pulled from paper abstracts. An abstract of an abstract with opinions not derived from the actual data. How is something like theregister, CNN, MSNBC or Fox News more reputable than the sources that they sourced from?
With that, the well-known advice of “Take Wikipedia with a grain of salt and actually read the cited sources.” and more importantly, the cited sources’ source, rings true.
In other words, in my opinion, Wikipedia is more a summary of blogspam than it is an encyclopedia, though there are some exceptions of course.
and was basically threatened that I’d be banned.
That doesn’t sound normal to Wikipedia at all. In fact in the first half of Wikipedia history most editors weren’t territorial and even now territorialism is against policy (WP:OWN). It’s only warnings to block for 4+ repeated edits after informing.
Well, this was back in the late 00s/early 10s. So circa 2008 - 2010. I don’t remember the exact year.
I’d assume they had to make a policy against territorial editors because it was already a problem though. I definitely experienced it.
The policy had been around since late 2003. Reliable sources also don’t include blogspam.
Is there also a policy against evading blocks/bans? If there was then perhaps the subject in this article would have never happened.
Perhaps the takeaway here is that we could all learn from writing policies that would definitely solve every instance of a problem. For example, if a company could have policies against sexual harassment it could all stop.
In another example on a bigger scale, if countries would sign a treatise of some type with other peoples and nations then we could all get along far better. A great example of this could be when the US signed various treaties with different Native American Tribes such, as happens, this Wikipedia article describes.
Thank you. I believe the world could learn much from our discussion and I know, I feel that my own experiences and opinions have been rightfully invalidated.
Yes, there is. In fact SPI (sockpuppet investigations) is known as one of the hardest “departments”. You’d need pretty suspicious behavioral evidence before filing one for good reasons. Clerks need to sort through all the requests and see which ones deserve the actual IP-inspectors (CheckUsers) to check if the users seem to be the same (or an open proxy. Don’t worry, the IP address retention period is only 90 days). Also, cases to check if an IP address is the same as an established user will never be CheckUser’d cuz that would be exposing the IP address though it won’t go unpunished and will be judged purely on behavioral evidence.
Sockmasters who span ridiculously long amounts of time are documented at WP:LTA (long-term abuse). However, ones that inspire copycats (like some WillyOnWheels who move-vandalized tons of pages) have their documentation deleted as part of a policy called Deny Recognition (to the trolls).
