Thread by @depthsofwiki

Not sure if Wikipedia admin drama translates well to a wide audience but last week, some of the most bizarre and perplexing shit went down??? thread

first of all, there's an article in the @wikisignpost that probably will give a more concise summary of this than I will en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia…

Okay so for a few years, there was this Wikipedia editor named Lourdes who would *occasionally* drop TINY hints that her true identity was Lourdes Hernandez Gonzalez, a moderately popular indie musician from Spain. Everyone was basically like, "okay, cool!"

The hints were *subtle*. And Lourdes tried to keep her identity under wraps (not unusual for Wikipedia editors). It was kind of an open secret. In general, people tried to respect her privacy

Anyway, Lourdes was super active on Wikipedia. Five years ago, she ran for adminship and passed! This is not a small feat! Only a few hundred people have as much power

As an admin, Lourdes was spending an incredible amount of time working on Wikipedia — writing articles about cricket players and also doing thankless behind-the-scenes tasks like blocking ~1000 disruptive editors, deleting ~1000 spammy pages. It's a big commitment

At one point, another editor called Bettlebrox discovered — and publicly revealed — that Lourdes was the singer Lourdes Hernandez Gonzalez. She was LIVID that her identify had been disclosed. She never forgave Bettlebrox

(since Bettlebrox's comment that ties Lourdes to the singer Lourdes Hernandez Gonzalez is now deleted, I don't know exactly what Bettlebrox actually said to connect the account Lourdes to the singer. Don't know if it was an accident)

Bettlebrox was sorry, but Lourdes was not letting it go. Lourdes started emotionally traumatizing Bettlebrox. She was breaking rules *just* to get in Bettlebrox's way. She bullied new editors into voting certain ways in community decisions, possibly just to spite Bettlebrox?

This is not allowed!!!!!! And Bettlebrox didn't know what to do! So Bettlebrox escalated the dispute to the arbitration committee, basically the supreme court of Wikipedia

THIS IS WHERE THINGS GOT VERY UNUSUAL. at 12:30am, Lourdes commented an apology. Then an hour later at 1:45am, Lourdes dropped an absolute bomb on everyone and promptly blocked themself from the site

The Wikipedia editor Lourdes was the same person who'd been blocked in 2015 for shilling a scam university, causing thousands to lose $. This had been a news story!!! newsweek.com/2015/04/03/man…

You may be thinking "OMG, so this Spanish indie musician-turned-Wikipedian had a dark past life as a scammer!"
But get this: The Wikipedian Lourdes revealed that they had NEVER BEEN the indie singer??? This whole time, Lourdes had been a random person in India?!!

Tldr:
Pulling off an advanced scam on Wikipedia and got blocked, made a new account and spent five years of pretending to be an indie singer, emotionally traumatizing the person who revealed their fake(!) identity, disappeared off the face of the earth

If you are new to the Wikipedia world, you maybe be thinking "okay, whatever, people are constantly committing to weird bits!" But this story is particularly crazy because Lourdes had a very very powerful position within the community. The general sentiment among Wikipedians is: