> 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?
Maybe they just honestly enjoyed the work, then they didn't feel like it anymore, and banned themselves.
It let them have the last laugh - they just kept doing what they wanted even after being banned, then ended it on their own terms when they felt like it.
It's not like they lost anything, except the opportunity to perform unpaid work and get more articles written about them from people who cannot fathom someone would voluntarily relinquish some meaningless position.
it means they lost the power to use Wikipedia to promote another scam. The original account was no troll doing it for the lulz, they were after money and possibly actually a group of people. So either this revelation is now fake for whatever reason, or there is more going on. In either case, all of the activity of said admin (Lourdes) should probably be looked at with concern. Possible other scams to be found.
It seems like you are reading into it too much, the account only ever shilled for one company, not that it makes it okay, but that makes it more likely a personal affiliation rather than an admin for hire.
>>> making tens of thousands of edits and logging thousands of actions, to implode the whole thing over a pointless argument
Sounds to me like deep cover. Perhaps this wasn't one person. Perhaps this was a project run by a team over many years. All those tiny edits? The ability to spin up so many accounts without being detected? Getting privileges to those new accounts? These are the techniques of professionals. Perhaps this was a state actor. Perhaps an advertising agency. Any number of organizations might want to have a high-level wikipedia editor account as a tool for something. The fact that the persona was never clearly weaponized doesn't mean it wasn't there.
There was like 3-4 accounts that we know of. There is absolutely nothing here that that requires more than one person with a few hours of time on their hand each day.
Also their behavior doesn't mesh with being a state actor or organization - why would they throw away their admin account to get a last laugh in an internet argument? Why would their cover be an admin account of bad enough temperament and decision-making that it draws attention to itself and risks getting banned?
I don't know why, but this all reminds me of when I was in secondary school, and many of us were in IRC channels of local ISP's and sites, and things like being channel operator or admin, or getting kicked, banned or k-lined could all give incredible feelings of power or despair. The political structure in the IRC channels and servers could change dramatically any evening, and some would boast about their mIRC war script skills, or things like knowing the cousin of a server admin, the next day in school
That's exactly how Wikipedia operates. The difference is that on IRC everyone was doing it for the lulz. On Wikipedia some editors are trying to improve the encyclopedia while other are there for the power trips. The second group has an inherent advantage over the former group. Improving articles requires one to spend hours researching while undoing that work just requires a few clicks and vague references to POLICIES. This pisses editors off who becomes easy targets for SEALIONING and NPA. Eventually they write "fuck off, moron" which is a personal attack so they get banned and the power tripper wins again.
I think a lot of what people do in life is for power. Everyone wants to feel like they have power, especially power over other people. It's driven many of the recent social and political movements. Those who feel like they do not have power continually fight and struggle against those who they see have power, until they gain a modicum of power and almost universally abuse it.
> Everyone wants to feel like they have power, especially power over other people.
We only need to look to the comments here on HN, where there are usually several people in each post writing "the government should regulate" or "the government should ban", no matter how minute the issue is. I wouldn't be surprised if people here start requiring government regulations for scrollbar widths soon (apologies if they have already done that).
> Those who feel like they do not have power continually fight and struggle against those who they see have power, until they gain a modicum of power and almost universally abuse it.
The rulers know that, so I think anybody who successfully struggles against powers will start getting higher and higher offers until they cave and join the machine. Most will cave at the first offer, because they were really only out for themselves from the start.
It seems strange that administrators hide behind anonymous accounts on Wikipedia. I know providing who you are in real life has privacy issues for many, and regardless it is not clear there is even a reliable way to make sure someone truly is who they say they are. But it seems that at the administrator level Wikipedia could make an attempt at this.
User Beeblebrox, Wifione, Lourdes... It's weird reading this — like it's some kind of secret club in grade school where everyone has code names.
I know I am not typical in that my user name is my own name. Part of me cast off anonymity on the internet though if for no other reason to keep myself honest in my postings — a deterrent to allowing some kind of alter-ego to shit post and such.
I totally get it, when I think of it from a privacy and personal security point of views.
With wikipedia, it really is a sort of "He who controls the information, controls the world" type of scenario.
Imagine being a Wikipedia admin and editing something that can be viewed as very volatile, such as something religious or political with your own real name visible in the log - that's really scary!
It's not at all a tinfoil hat thing to say that there are people who have the will and the means to take down people such as Wikipedia admins for publishing information which doesn't align with everyone's worldviews.
It doesn't even have to be so political or religious. There are also people who go absolutely crazy over something like someone "disrespecting" their idols or favourite singer or something. If they knew where you lived, they would absolutely drive across 10 states to let you know what you did.
If you edit a page about any Middle-East conflict, or gender - well you can expect at least one, if not both sides to hate you. Even if you were a perfectly rational and objective ideal editor.
A photo of the person who made the most edits (or something like that) on Wikipedia was posted on social media. And there were a lot of just rude and nasty comments about their appearance. It was despicable.
It’s interesting to me how many online people seem to not understand the implications of this sort of stuff on an intuitive level. Maybe I am the paranoid type but once something goes public these days it’s basically available to anyone in the present and future forever. “Anyone” being state actors like you mentioned down to bored teenagers looking for fun. As the ability to capture our data evolves our autonomy is being eroded, grain by grain.
Wikipedia has always been a secret club. I've always felt the admin's are required to follow a specific social and political mindset. It's not much different than Reddit. Like HN, moderation is only as good as the person doing it, and transparency is next to non-existent.
Not every country is setup to handle criticism in a way that doesn't punish the one who is sharing the criticism. Even in "modern" countries like Spain they can (and have in the past) punish you for criticizing the police or the monarchy.
So if you want to write/edit/admin Wikipedia articles about those "touchy" things, you might want to do so under anonymous identity, as otherwise it can really make things difficult for you.
As for Spain, the only case I've heard of is a rapper that glorified terrorism and rapped that he wanted to hang the king in the village square. Is it okay to rap that you want to murder specific individuals, or does that cross the limit of freedom of speech? Is it criticism of the monarchy when you rap that you want to put a noose around the king's neck? To me it sounds like incitement of violence and nothing more, nothing less.
In some other countries it is forbidden to make music that glorifies crime, while at the same time those countries have excellent liberty of speech as well as musical lyrics that are extremely offensive by other standards.
I have a good friend who was harassed in-person in a very damaging way due to their non-pseudonymous work as a Wikipedia admin. Knowing their story, I'm surprised any admins would not be pseudonymous.
Wow. Sorry to hear that. If your good friend is a she then she should get in touch with "Jennsaurus" at Wikipediasucks.co ASAP because Jennsaurus is a journalist who has discovered and compiled two dozen cases of sexual harassment against women editors.
There are ways to verify someone's identity, without exposing their identity to the whole web. I'm a seller on an ecommerce site (not an evil one), and they required me to submit a scanned photo ID and a a piece of mail showing my billing address. My storefront doesn't have my name on it, though.
Because if they acknowledged that marketing agencies, political zealots, and government operatives from various countries have infiltrated Wikipedia it would jeopardize the reputation of the project. They focus on there being few female editors or editors from Africa, rather than that every other biographical article about a living person is written by a marketing agency employee. Naivety as coping mechanism perhaps. The "honest" editors built the site for free, while many others are subverting it for their own gain.
> I know I am not typical in that my user name is my own name. Part of me cast off anonymity on the internet though if for no other reason to keep myself honest in my postings — a deterrent to allowing some kind of alter-ego to crap post and such.
You goal seems noble and born of good faith. I'd go past that to suggest you meant 'positively' instead of honest, because honesty could be inferred.
As a counterpoint (for a very diff use case), I ran a minecraft server and had to strongly encourage young players to anonymize themselves (starting with playernames) and to not share identifying info.
I also explained I would only chat publicly because I was an adult and my chat logs were available to any parent who asked. Not quite the same thing but I was trying to example helpful boundaries. I never got any takers on the logs but doubt that bit ever got passed on.
It's not unprecedented -- you can't turn to a random Encyclopedia Britannica article and see who edited it. You might be able to name the editorial board, however.
> Part of me cast off anonymity on the internet though if for no other reason to keep myself honest in my postings — a deterrent to allowing some kind of alter-ego to shit post and such.
Anonymity provides the reverse as well. Namely the ability to speak your mind without worrying about real world ramifications.
One man’s shit posting is another’s firmly held beliefs!
Probably just like in the most scenarios nowadays: user gets ban and cannot appeal the decision in any way
Perhaps in the basic form of dealing with users who break the rules Wikipedia allows an appeal or bans are temporary - I'm just guessing, I stopped being an active Wiki user some 10 years ago. I didn't want to lose nerves on trivial issues like edit wars with self-appointed experts who couldn't accept they might be wrong.
Also, I've found some 2 days ago that my IP range was banned from anonymous edits because someone somewhere did once something
> How are someone "extremly" banned? Either you are banned or not.
This Wikipedia page [1] explains the different categories of bans in use on the English Wikipedia. Additionally, there are also a couple of handfuls of "global bans" wherein an individual is banned from every Wikimedia project [2].
> How are someone "extremly" banned? Either you are banned or not.
You might be found to have committed 170 different bannable offenses. Banning is idempotent, so there wouldn't be any difference in the penalty, but such a person would be describable as "more banned" than other users.
Similarly, you might be found to have committed offenses which put you well over the threshold for banning. This too would make you "more banned" than other users who were more borderline.
FWIW the clear difference here is that if someone is banned over one thing, their ban might later be reversed if that thing is no longer considered bannable or if opinions on the incident change.
If they did 170 different things, each one warranting a ban, the only way for the ban to be lifted would be for each of those 170 things being dismissed individually.
The same goes for doing one bannable thing but "a lot" or to a very extreme degree. Say, defacing a Wikipedia article with a bogus message versus defacing the entire Wikipedia website with borderline illegal graphic content.
There's arguably no "mildly" banned but this distinction makes sense in a lot of contexts to give a rough idea of context: a corpse is dead but the scattered remains of someone caught up in a high yield explosions are extremely dead as even in a sci-fi story it would be hard to imagine them being "revived", a dainty woman might be pregnant but if she's visibly close to delivery with a pronounced waddle and struggling to get up after sitting down, it would be fair to call her extremely pregnant as there's no denying her state whereas the pregnancy might have been hard to even notice a few months earlier.
English lacks a grammatical signifier for evidence or degrees of confidence (no, the English subjunctive is a poor approximation at best and mostly limited to expressing explicit doubt) so superlatives are a good way to express high levels of confidence. "I am banned" means you're banned but leaves room for the possibility that this might change or be reversed. "I am extremely banned" suggests it's that way now and there's nothing to change that and nobody will likely ever be interested in changing that in the future.
this reminded me of the /KLINEs on the IRC servers. you'd first /KILL someone then you'd KLINE their username if they didn't behave, then you'd KLINE their IP. then there's /GLINE which would effectively do the same thing but for the entire network.
Sometimes "sockpuppet abusers" aren't just banned. They get doxxed on LTA (Long Term Abuse) pages and so on with their IP addresses, locations, habits, names, and even off-wiki activities. Talk about a GDPR violation.
I have a bit of silver lining - I saw an article on Wikipedia about Unicode that was factually incorrect and I edited that anonymously, fully expecting that some overzealous bot will overturn my edit. It’s a few months later now and my edit is still live for the whole world to enjoy!
I retired from admin status earlier this year. Can't stand the environment on Wikipedia these days. You can't even stay out of politics and contribute, ignorant people delete good faith contributions constantly.
I've been editing Wikipedia for 15 years, but I've never wanted to be an admin.
Yeah, I get reverted a fair bit. I very rarely bite back; disputes are incredibly draining of time and energy, and usually pivot on obscure interpretations of Wikipedia policy.
If you look on having your edit reverted as "Someone on the internet is wrong", and don't take it personally, you can just walk away from that article without your blood-pressure getting out of control. There are always other articles that need fixing.
Never sought it either, it was offered to me in the early days (~15 years ago) and I simply agreed. Never much used the powers. I do however think a diverse set of interested people is a stronger community than a small set of policy zealots, and that the Wikiverse has largely lost its way, abusing the significant contributions of a few by rewarding what amounts to negative behavior.
Readit News
Maybe they just honestly enjoyed the work, then they didn't feel like it anymore, and banned themselves.
It let them have the last laugh - they just kept doing what they wanted even after being banned, then ended it on their own terms when they felt like it.
It's not like they lost anything, except the opportunity to perform unpaid work and get more articles written about them from people who cannot fathom someone would voluntarily relinquish some meaningless position.
If you read about the original incident, linked in another comment:
https://www.newsweek.com/2015/04/03/manipulating-wikipedia-p...
it means they lost the power to use Wikipedia to promote another scam. The original account was no troll doing it for the lulz, they were after money and possibly actually a group of people. So either this revelation is now fake for whatever reason, or there is more going on. In either case, all of the activity of said admin (Lourdes) should probably be looked at with concern. Possible other scams to be found.
Sounds to me like deep cover. Perhaps this wasn't one person. Perhaps this was a project run by a team over many years. All those tiny edits? The ability to spin up so many accounts without being detected? Getting privileges to those new accounts? These are the techniques of professionals. Perhaps this was a state actor. Perhaps an advertising agency. Any number of organizations might want to have a high-level wikipedia editor account as a tool for something. The fact that the persona was never clearly weaponized doesn't mean it wasn't there.
There was like 3-4 accounts that we know of. There is absolutely nothing here that that requires more than one person with a few hours of time on their hand each day.
Also their behavior doesn't mesh with being a state actor or organization - why would they throw away their admin account to get a last laugh in an internet argument? Why would their cover be an admin account of bad enough temperament and decision-making that it draws attention to itself and risks getting banned?
This is utter nonsense.
Deleted Comment
We only need to look to the comments here on HN, where there are usually several people in each post writing "the government should regulate" or "the government should ban", no matter how minute the issue is. I wouldn't be surprised if people here start requiring government regulations for scrollbar widths soon (apologies if they have already done that).
> Those who feel like they do not have power continually fight and struggle against those who they see have power, until they gain a modicum of power and almost universally abuse it.
The rulers know that, so I think anybody who successfully struggles against powers will start getting higher and higher offers until they cave and join the machine. Most will cave at the first offer, because they were really only out for themselves from the start.
I've felt the way you described at some points in life, but not the majority of the time.
"Manipulating Wikipedia to Promote a Bogus Business School"
https://www.newsweek.com/2015/04/03/manipulating-wikipedia-p...
That was back in 2015.
User Beeblebrox, Wifione, Lourdes... It's weird reading this — like it's some kind of secret club in grade school where everyone has code names.
I know I am not typical in that my user name is my own name. Part of me cast off anonymity on the internet though if for no other reason to keep myself honest in my postings — a deterrent to allowing some kind of alter-ego to shit post and such.
With wikipedia, it really is a sort of "He who controls the information, controls the world" type of scenario.
Imagine being a Wikipedia admin and editing something that can be viewed as very volatile, such as something religious or political with your own real name visible in the log - that's really scary!
It's not at all a tinfoil hat thing to say that there are people who have the will and the means to take down people such as Wikipedia admins for publishing information which doesn't align with everyone's worldviews.
It doesn't even have to be so political or religious. There are also people who go absolutely crazy over something like someone "disrespecting" their idols or favourite singer or something. If they knew where you lived, they would absolutely drive across 10 states to let you know what you did.
Wouldn't be so surprised if you'd get a knock on the door or need a new window sometime soon...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5503354 ("French homeland intelligence threatens a sysop into deleting a Wikipedia Article (wikimedia.fr)")
So if you want to write/edit/admin Wikipedia articles about those "touchy" things, you might want to do so under anonymous identity, as otherwise it can really make things difficult for you.
In some other countries it is forbidden to make music that glorifies crime, while at the same time those countries have excellent liberty of speech as well as musical lyrics that are extremely offensive by other standards.
Thank goodness we'd never do anything like that here on HN
I'm shocked Wikipedia doesn't do this.
You goal seems noble and born of good faith. I'd go past that to suggest you meant 'positively' instead of honest, because honesty could be inferred.
As a counterpoint (for a very diff use case), I ran a minecraft server and had to strongly encourage young players to anonymize themselves (starting with playernames) and to not share identifying info.
I also explained I would only chat publicly because I was an adult and my chat logs were available to any parent who asked. Not quite the same thing but I was trying to example helpful boundaries. I never got any takers on the logs but doubt that bit ever got passed on.
Anonymity provides the reverse as well. Namely the ability to speak your mind without worrying about real world ramifications.
One man’s shit posting is another’s firmly held beliefs!
Just made me laugh. How are someone "extremly" banned? Either you are banned or not.
Perhaps in the basic form of dealing with users who break the rules Wikipedia allows an appeal or bans are temporary - I'm just guessing, I stopped being an active Wiki user some 10 years ago. I didn't want to lose nerves on trivial issues like edit wars with self-appointed experts who couldn't accept they might be wrong.
Also, I've found some 2 days ago that my IP range was banned from anonymous edits because someone somewhere did once something
This Wikipedia page [1] explains the different categories of bans in use on the English Wikipedia. Additionally, there are also a couple of handfuls of "global bans" wherein an individual is banned from every Wikimedia project [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Banning_policy#Site_...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_bans
You might be found to have committed 170 different bannable offenses. Banning is idempotent, so there wouldn't be any difference in the penalty, but such a person would be describable as "more banned" than other users.
Similarly, you might be found to have committed offenses which put you well over the threshold for banning. This too would make you "more banned" than other users who were more borderline.
If they did 170 different things, each one warranting a ban, the only way for the ban to be lifted would be for each of those 170 things being dismissed individually.
The same goes for doing one bannable thing but "a lot" or to a very extreme degree. Say, defacing a Wikipedia article with a bogus message versus defacing the entire Wikipedia website with borderline illegal graphic content.
There's arguably no "mildly" banned but this distinction makes sense in a lot of contexts to give a rough idea of context: a corpse is dead but the scattered remains of someone caught up in a high yield explosions are extremely dead as even in a sci-fi story it would be hard to imagine them being "revived", a dainty woman might be pregnant but if she's visibly close to delivery with a pronounced waddle and struggling to get up after sitting down, it would be fair to call her extremely pregnant as there's no denying her state whereas the pregnancy might have been hard to even notice a few months earlier.
English lacks a grammatical signifier for evidence or degrees of confidence (no, the English subjunctive is a poor approximation at best and mostly limited to expressing explicit doubt) so superlatives are a good way to express high levels of confidence. "I am banned" means you're banned but leaves room for the possibility that this might change or be reversed. "I am extremely banned" suggests it's that way now and there's nothing to change that and nobody will likely ever be interested in changing that in the future.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImpaledWithExtre...
Not healthy
Yeah, I get reverted a fair bit. I very rarely bite back; disputes are incredibly draining of time and energy, and usually pivot on obscure interpretations of Wikipedia policy.
If you look on having your edit reverted as "Someone on the internet is wrong", and don't take it personally, you can just walk away from that article without your blood-pressure getting out of control. There are always other articles that need fixing.