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?
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.
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).