https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1183174852
It's naturally a little rude and self centred, but that is to be expected from volunteer Wikipedia Administrators. After all, who sets the standards but shitheels like Beeblebrox?That wastes my limited time, and my even more, my limited mental energy, which is my most precious resource. Cullen328 (talk) 05:12, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
It's noteworthy however because Cullen328 recently admitted he has for quite a while been operating a secret side hustle as a Wikipedia consultant. He charges gullible fools $60 an hour to advise them "every step of the way" in their editing of Wikipedia, advice given in complete secrecy. Advice that is readily available for free through the multiple avenues already provided by Wikipedia.
This comment regarding his capabilities is therefore is perhaps a sign that this old man lacks the mental and indeed physical capacity to both adequately perform the role of a volunteer Wikipedia Administrator and a Wikipedia consultant charging serious money for that which is free.
As he gets older, surely one of them has to give, and it seems likely that would be the volunteer activity.
However, what should trouble Wikipedians more is that since Cullen clearly places great value In his hobby, like most Administrators, allowing it to become a huge part of their sense of self worth in their otherwise boring retirement, a means to exercise power and attain respect perhaps to compensate for a lack of it in their real lives, he could quite easily decide it is the consulting that suffers.
He won't give it up, he was quite adamant he needs the money in his twilight years, but since his activities are completely secret and his clients have zero protection, he can safely start phoning it in. He surely knows this, and perhaps has even told himself he would never do such a thing. He has too much integrity. Sure. Nobody sets out to be a screw up.
If he had any decency, and and if he truly believed that being both a volunteer Administrator and a paid consultant was ethical and does have value to Wikipedia as well as his pocket, now that he is clearly seeing the effects of ageing on his mental and physical capacity, he would step aside and allow this function to be performed by people at the top of their game. People who can deliver a consistently high standard in both realms.
Someone who can interact with an editor as a volunteer without becoming a pompous ass, and can deliver high quality consultancy where he is awake, alert and indeed focussed for every single second he is on the clock.
In reality of course, he can do whatever the fuck he likes. Wikipedia supposedly has strong controls over the behaviour and standards of its Administrators, but they still somehow lead to people like Cullen and Bishonen and Drmies attaining exceptional levels of raw power.
And as we now know thanks to Cullen's indignant rage at having his integrity questioned by his subordinates, Wikipedia has zero control over what a Wikipedia business consultant does. Even though in this case, the ability to make money from Wikipedia in this fashion rests entirely on Cullen having attained the role of Administrator. It apparently reassures them he knows what he is talking about.
Presumably he doesn't tell his clients for example that he was one of the many Wikipedia Administrators who were fooled by Lourdes (a previously banned Administrator who somehow attained that role again) and were also fooled by Eostrix (a Globally Banned editor who was hours away from becoming an Administrator).....
Regarding Lourdes/Wifione.....
Regarding Eostrix/Icewhiz....Support I am impressed at how positively this editor responded to the criticism given at her previous RfA one year ago. She has improved her behavior significantly and I am now convinced that she will be a good administrator. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 03:59, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
It seems to me that perhaps one of the first ways that a declining mental and physical capacity affected the performance of Cullen, was to make him susceptible to confirmation bias.Support The first thing I did was to click on their GA 2020 Hpakant jade mine disaster, and immediately noticed that it was already on my watchlist. I read a bit further and remembered reading it last year but did not remember exactly why, but was pleased that I did. It is an excellent article about a heartbreaking industrial accident last year in an area of the world that English Wikipedia needs to cover better, and I discovered that the nominee is responsible for a large percentage of the content. Kudos. Then, I read their answers to various questions, and they gave an excellent answer about the relationship between the GNG and the SNGs, and correctly identified WP:NACADEMIC as an exception to the usual rule, and explained why in a clear and logical way. My next point is less germane to administratorship but relevant to my assessment of them as an editor, and a candidate for administrator should first and foremost be a good editor: I have nothing but respect for subject matter experts in areas like owls who set out to improve this encyclopedia in their topic area, and then branch out to other topics. Please continue with that. I am very pleased to support this candidate. For those opposing on the basis of inadequate content contribution, please take a look at Cécile Mourer-Chauviré, where this editor is responsible for most of the content. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 04:23, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
These !votes show that unlike most who turn up at RfA to support, Cullen did actually try to do a deep dive into the candidate's edit history. It is worth nothing that these candidacies came at a time when Wikipedia was panicking at the thought there were too few new candidates to replace the Administrators who were leaving, either because they found another hobby, got burned out by the demands of the role, got banned, or simply died.
I suspect Cullen just saw what he wanted to see. He wants to see subject experts, he wants to see policy knowledge, he wants to see people capable of change. Everything he is not, but thinks he is.
And he clearly lacked the mental and physical capacity to pull at the threads that we now know already existed. Lourdes did have a history of alarming policy ignorance and a disturbing need to please. Eostrix did have a troubling record of personal interactions.
Both had character flaws and curious deviations from the norm in their visible Wikipedia trajectories from supposed newcomer to guardian of the gates. Candidates are not required to be perfect, but the true purpose of RfA is to satisfy the community that where these oddities exist, they can be adequately explained. Where flaws exist, they can be rectified or even simply managed.
That was how it worked before the crisis in recruitment meant RfA became more of a coronation of anyone who looked reasonably OK. Where being nominated by someone like Cullen was effectively a guaranteed pass. Such is the folly of allowing trust to become such a huge aspect of Wikipedia governance.
What he didn't realise is that to the stone cold killers out there, the people so badly burned by the corruption and now greed of the cult dynamic that governs Wikipedia, it is easy to fake the qualities Wikipedia desires in an Administrator.
As one supporter of Lourdes put it....
It can be faked. Not perfectly, but well enough that in a climate of Admin shortages, warning signs are overlooked by both the proletariat and their betters, the should know betters, the existing Administrators. Eostrix was only caught at the last minute, and only using the special powers of ArbCom (which amusingly, if they had also been deployed against Lourdes, would have caught her too).Knowledge + Wisdom + Temperament = yes.
Where's the downside, you might ask? Well, in Lourdes' case it let someone who is clearly two peanuts short of a bushell, have real power over volunteers. And boy did she go to town with it, effectively demonstrating how much harm can be done once you have that power, before anyone can effectively stop you. And Eostrix, he was a well known warrior in the Israel-Palestine area, to the point many claim he is a real world threat to people's safety. So having him be an Administrator would be insane.
No doubt if Cullen does have to explain these things to a potential client, he would probably just try to fob them off with some garbage about how Lourdes and Eostrix fooled everyone. Well, on a point of fact, they did not. Thanks to the culture the has arisen in Wikipedia, especially in the days since people actually worthy of respect for their integrity when it comes to Wikipedia (such as the great Jimmy Wales) were supplanted by usurpers like Cullen and Floquenbeam, it has become the norm to crush minority opinion, regardless of merit.
Once Wales was purged, the already flawed concept of Wikipedia transformed from an evidence based meritocracy to a haven for bullies and gaslighters. A place where Administrators are routinely allowed to get away with the sort of deplorable behaviour that ordinary users cannot. Bishonen famously called an editor a little shit, as she exercised her power over them to protect a friend.
Jimmy Wales was outraged that such a person could be an Administrator. It was a matter of simple ethics for him. The public image of Wikipedia was stake. The Cullens of this world? Not so much. Not long after the takeover, it was hardly a surprise to see a study reveal that contrary to internal mythology, the vast majority of rank personal abuse occurring on Wikipedia, was being performed by a tiny minority of users. Not outsiders or newcomers, but people who were either Administrators themselves or clearly had the protection of them. In a word, corruption.
It is fair to say therefore the Cullen is no smarter than the average Wikipedian, and certainly no more ethical. He is certainly not exceptional in terms of his insight or his integrity. And things will only get worse as he declines.
In many ways of course, it is perfectly logical that the person now fleecing gullible fools by leveraging the trust placed in them by a bunch of internet randoms who rarely if ever do things out of simple integrity themselves, isn't some evil genius or master criminal, but rather just a bog standard example of the sort of unethical, corruptible, foolish, arrogant, not exactly blessed with intelligence individual, that Cullen has always seemed to be. To me anyway.
But then again, I am smart.
I do not charge people for this excellent analysis of the root causes of Wikipedia's evil stain on this world.
That would be unethical.
And if one day I am caught making money from my deep and extensive knowledge of Wikipedia, if perhaps I have leveraged how easy it is to fool them into granting Admin rights into a secret side hustle, that too would not be unethical.
A man has to eat, after all.
One day there will be a scandal so disgusting, it will consume Wikipedia in a fire storm.
It is helpful to know that as it stands today, Cullen becoming a secret consultant is not it, and Lourdes being unmaksed is not it. Such things are now the everyday of Wikipedia's roiling cauldron of filth. My how they have grown from the days where Bishonen being a punching down power abusing cunt counted as a controversy.
She still is, by the way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1182430109
That's Bishonen and Drmies making big noises about how unacceptable it is to use grossly offensive language and generally being an odious editor simply because you are convinced you are right and protecting Wikipedia. You can't make this shit up. They see the irony, they just know that nobody else will ever dare hold them to the same standards. Their target is of course a nobody. Evil people. Born Wikipedians.Endorse WP:TBAN on music genres per Cullen328. I considered adding also a short sitewide block for the nasty edit summaries, but many of the ones linked above are years old, so I'm letting it pass with Drmies' recent warning. For now. No prejudice to another admin placing such a block. Bishonen | tålk 08:26, 29 October 2023 (UTC).
And Cullen was of course right in the thick of that incident. Pompously declaring that the offending editor should just go and write a blog or something. Drmies is fond of that turn phrase too, although he naturally delivers it in a far more offensive way - "fuck off back to Facebook" being one such widely quoted occurence.
This river of hypocrisy and rank corruption all occurs under the noses of Cullen and Floquenbeam and Beeblebrox and NewYorkBrad and anyone else you care to categorise as the great moral leaders of Wikipedia. No correction ever occurs, no improvement is ever discernable, so you can rule out the possibility that these supposed great men of the Wiki are offering quiet words of advice in private. As we all know, the stench was such that the great women, all two/three/foure of them, left long ago.
The everyday irony of Wikipedia. I bet you don't get told that by Cullen as he is fleecing you.
How ironic that it was Lourdes who was the only one to even spot that when not being an offensive asshole, the editor in question is bringing value to Wikipedia and that is undoubtedly the source of their misguided passion. But since the editor in question was not Eric Corbett or any of the other established editors under the protection of Administrators, that will not matter.
They will not be entitled to the policy that says that ye shall not be punished until you have demonstrated you are unrepentant. And as he has done so many times, Drmies has ensured that by needling and harassing and bullying their victim, they very much do not come across as unrepentant.
As they put It themselves.....
And who would really deny that one reason Drmies does what he does is to first have the thrill of being able to eject someone from Wikipedia by force (oh God, the power!), and then obtain further deviant pleasure by detecting the inevitable sock-puppetry that such malevolent acts invariably produce.I've never experienced anything like this in my 10 years of being on the site. Initially in the middle of this I wasn't aware this guy was a admin since I've never seen an admin engage in such petty matters/vindictive behavilor like this before, but seeing as he is I'm not even sure what to do or where to begin. I'm really just tired of this nonsense. I'm considering on just making a new account to be left alone before he does find his reason to give me a block. Second Skin (talk) 20:45, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
This would be a good time to remind people that before Wikipedia was usurped and Jimmy Wales had power, It was considered wise and ethical to ensure that even the worst offenders, people who are totally irredeemable and must be ejected, should treated with respect and dignity, lest they want to return to Wikipedia for the sole purposes of revenge. And before reaching that point, you should try your absolute hardest to educate and reform in a human, empathetic way, in the sure fire knowledge you have nothing to lose and perhaps a lot to gain.
This lesson is lost on the likes of Cullen, who always thought of himself as a better man than Jimmy. Drmies proactively ignores It for his own warped pleasure. I guarantee that scumbag would be a wife beater or even a child abuser if he didn't have the outlet that is Wikipedia.
But with money now a factor, It might be fun to see if Cullen is willing to at least try to sell such a thing......advice for how to get fair and equitable treatment when one of your steps in wikiland will inevitably see you cross paths with the wicked witch of Wikipedia and her poisonous husband.
Something tells me his ego will overiee his frailty, and he will try to earn that particular piece of corn.
And hopefully it is what kills him in the end.
Now, these are all just words. Nobody should embark on any experiments that might result in the death of Wikipedians, no matter how curious you are.
The would be unethical.