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The English Wikipedia is a massive target for influence campaigns. I don't think there are any other communities as resilient as it. Just an example: There's c

by jjmarr 2y ago

The English Wikipedia is a massive target for influence campaigns. I don't think there are any other communities as resilient as it. Just an example: There's certain individual or group that edited under the name "Icewhiz", was banned, and now operates endless sockpuppet accounts in the topic area to influence Wikipedia's coverage on the Middle East. One of them was an account named "Eostrix", that spent years making clean uncontroversial edits until one day going for adminship. Eostrix got 99% approval in their request for adminship. But it didn't matter, because an anonymous individual also spent years pursuing Eostrix, assembling evidence, and this resulted in Eostrix's block just days before they became a Wikipedia administrator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Icewhiz/Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Committee/Noticeboard/Archive_48#Eostrix_Blocked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Com... It's a useful contrast to a place like Reddit, where volunteer moderators openly admit to spreading terrorist propaganda or operating fake accounts when their original one gets banned. You don't get to do that on Wikipedia. If you try, someone with far too much time on their hands will catch you because Wikipedia doesn't need to care about Daily Active Users and the community cares about protecting a neutral point of view. Not denying the existence of influence campaigns. There have been several major pro-Palestinian ones recently, which is probably why this letter has been sent. But the only reason you know about them is because Wikipedia openly fights them instead of covering them up. Most social media websites don't care and would rather you don't bring it to their attention. That is why Reddit banned /r/bannedforbeingjewish.

LightHugger 2y ago
There are counterexamples where this has failed/continues to fail, the gamergate article is famously non-neutral, only accepting primary sources from journalists directly involved in the controversy. This is rather than true secondary sources with less extreme and biased views, like is supposed to be the rules there. You can switch from the english one to other languages and get completely different content with very balanced point of views because the other languages weren't controlled by the influence campaign. So, is it better than reddit? I agree, probably. That bar doesn't seem very high though. Part of the issue with gamergate discussion is that there's a lot of vapid perspectives along the lines of "it's just video game journalism who cares" which allows an infinite amount of bad behavior, dishonesty and manipulation in the name of an abstract greater good. I believe it was used as a prototype for future wikipedia manipulation for "more important" topics.
- acdha 2y ago
  Do you have any specific examples? You mentioned the Gamergate article but your assertion that it doesn’t reference non-primary sources needs some citations that all of the academic and media sources were directly involved. Since it was a harassment campaign involving journalists, there’s a big question about what a policy would need to look like to prevent someone from attacking a journalist and then saying Wikipedia can’t use their work because they’re involuntarily involved.
  - LightHugger 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - intended 2y ago
      > Q1: Can I use a particular article as a source? > A1: What sources can be used in Wikipedia is governed by our reliable sources guideline, which requires "published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy". If you have a question about whether or not a particular source meets this policy, a good place to ask is the Reliable sources noticeboard.
- jjmarr 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - moshegramovsky 2y ago
    > You'll get a bunch of leftist (because they don't have jobs) volunteer moderators with an agenda. What do you consider a leftist? Why do you think they don't have jobs?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - LightHugger 2y ago
    [flagged]
kurtreed2 2y ago
One can look into Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski's report about how the Polish ultranationalists have distorted the Holocaust topic area on Wikipedia (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...) if they want to find a counterexample. To the best of my understandings so far, I think Icewhiz is a good guy, just that he doesn't have strong grasp about Wikipedia's guidelines, particularly regarding multiple accounts, and was the victim of sustained smear campaigns by Polish ultranationalists who were able to psychologically manipulate the admins into banning him in order to let their distortionist edits stick. Now he's an Emmanuel Goldstein figure for both the ultranationalists and the pro-Hamas editors who seek to deflect external scrutiny to their edits.
- immibis 2y ago
  Can you tell us more about these pro-Hamas editors?
- jjmarr 2y ago
  A month after that article was published (and shortly after the article was posted on Wikipedia), the Arbitration Committee opened a sua sponte case to review the topic area despite the substance of that article being "Icewhiz was right".[1] It resulted in bans of Icewhiz' enemies for distorting the Holocaust topic area. I think moderators on pretty much any other website would laugh and ignore an article like that as being whining from a user they banned. I agree that Icewhiz is an Emmanuel Goldstein-like figure at this point who's used by pro-Hamas editors/ultranationalists. A bunch of those pro-Palestinian editors that loved to complain about Icewhiz to deflect from their own behaviour were topic-banned from Israel-Palestine area a few months ago in January.[2] It's challenging to deal with the Israel-Palestine conflict on any website that allows for user contributions. There's astroturfing and nation-state backed influence operations from probably a dozen countries. I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World_War_II_and_the_history_of_Jews_in_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel_articles_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
bjourne 2y ago
I knew IceWhiz. You are correct that he (or rather "they") eventually was kicked from the site. But he/they operated on the site for years and was the biggest PITA you can imagine. He must have single-handedly scared away two dozen honest contributors with his BS. It is very, very easy to game the rules on Wikipedia. Wars of attrition goes on for years. Normal people don't waste their time. IceWhiz and his meat puppets have endless patience and all the time in the world.
- gonzobonzo 2y ago
  Right. The fact that someone so terrible got 99% approval and only one anonymous investigator was able to stop them makes me think that it's likely a lot of other terrible admins who didn't have an anonymous investigator go after them probably go through the process. And the times I've brought up the fact that Wikipedia can be unreliable before, I've had numerous editors come in and claim that wasn't true and that people could rely on the claims they find in Wikipedia. This runs counter to the claim that Wikipedia editors know about these influence campaigns and openly fight about them. A lot of the active and vocal editors are openly dismissing such concerns.
  - chii 2y ago
    I wonder if there's room in using AI to gather past edits of someone, as part of vetting, and use the sentiment analysis to check how neutral their biases are.
    - sunaookami 2y ago
      AI is itself biased because the training data is.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Neutrality != necessarily accurate or useful. And the most neutral thing to say is nothing. And most LLMs probably have Wikipedia as a significant part of their training corpus, so there is a big ouroboros issue too.
  - 2y ago
StanislavPetrov 2y ago
The infamous "Philip Cross" always comes to mind. https://www.wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross https://www.wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross
0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
Did you read this post? https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
Did you read this post? "Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record" https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
- firesteelrain 2y ago
  Wow! I read the entire article. It sounds like this person may have a mental illness. It’s both their weakness and strength.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
hiddencost 2y ago
[flagged]
- viccis 2y ago
  [flagged]
hulitu 2y ago
This is the ideal picture of Wikipedia. In reality they are also used to spread propaganda and are happy about it as long as it fits certain naratives. Wikipedia is, today, a pale shade of what it once was, a source of information.
lukan 2y ago
To me those links you provided, indicate a lot, of what is wrong for me with wikipedia. Because it is extremely hard to figure out what is going on. Lots of mysterious abbreviations. Unclear timeline. I still don't really know it, it seems the scandal is, that he had a sockpuppet account? And there is only "private" evidence (meaning not public)? "The Arbitration Committee has determined through private evidence, including evidence from the checkuser tool, that Eostrix (talk · contribs) (a current RfA candidate) is a sockpuppet of Icewhiz (talk · contribs). Accordingly, the Committee has resolved that Eostrix be indefinitely blocked." So having a sockpuppet account is the reason for indefinite ban? Or that in combination with edits he made? Really, really hard to figure out for someone just having a quick look into the topic. And this is what prevented me since the beginning to participate in Wikipedia. I always got this impression. I made some edits here and there, but I think was mostly reverted/deleted/ignored - but no idea, I never felt like making the investment to really dive into it - and that seems required to contribute. Casual contribution seems pointless - and they likely miss out a lot through this. "But the only reason you know about them is because Wikipedia openly fights them instead of covering them up." So it seems good if wikipedia is more open - but from this story I just take "private evidence" with me and lots of questions about the whole process.
- simonw 2y ago
  "Really, really hard to figure out for someone just having a quick look into the topic." Sometimes things are genuinely complicated. If you want to understand the hardest, most elaborate forms of Wikipedia community management you're going to need to work really hard at figuring out what's going on. Community dynamics at this scale, and with this level of bad actors, are not something that can be explained in a few paragraphs.
  - lukan 2y ago
    Oh in general for sure, but my first (attempted?) edit for Wikipedia was 20 years ago so I am not a completely newb. And this is kind of like a court decision. But in a real court, I can see the verdict and the laws that were broken. All in complicated, but readable english. Which makes it clear (usually). But in wikipedia to understand a indefinite ban, I have to understand global wiki community dynamics first? I am a bit reminded of Kafka - The Trial.
yannis 2y ago
Wikipedia is the best source of humanities "common knowledge". Yes there are users that abuse the system to push their own point of view. Many articles in Wikipedia have improved tremendously over the years; many times it is not unusual for an article to have over a hundred references. It gives you all the info you want to understand the subject before you delve further through books. Now for politics I can see the problem. Even on a well behaved site like HN you can get polarized views. Just say Israel is committing genocide or ethnic cleansing and you see the reaction. Ditto for Ukraine and now Trumpism. So yes there are pages that reflect views. Take them as such. Another advantage of Wikipedia is that many references are pushed to archive.org and saved. "DEAR AMERICAN FRIENDS IN THE ADMINISTRATION KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF THE WIKIPEDIA"
- BrtByte 2y ago
  Wikipedia's value isn't that it's perfect, it's that it shows its work
  - 20after4 2y ago
    On articles that are either controversial or cover some kind of current events, I often find more value from reading the edit history and the discussions than from the article itself.
    - BrtByte 2y ago
      It's messy, but honestly, that mess teaches you way more about how information is shaped than a polished "final" version ever could
ArinaS 2y ago
On Wikipedia people like Icewhiz are called "long-term abusers", and there's a public list with more than a hundred of them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LTA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LTA.
- atombender 2y ago
  That list is fascinating. Like the obscure Canadian illustrator [1] who for a decade has been repeatedly trying to put herself into Wikipedia despite being told she's a "non-notable" artist. I'm frankly amazed that enough people have the time to track this nonsense and stamp it out that it ends up being self-correcting. It's not just about time, either; chasing bad edits and prosecuting bad users must be a huge chore in terms of the sheer amount of work needed. I always find it amazing how horrible the tools are (like how almost anything, including having discussions, is done by editing pages; how can anyone have a discussion in such a disorganized way?), which surely must be a hindrance to productivity or to the ability to detect and deal with constant abuse. But seemingly it works. Maybe there are better tools that pro-level admins know about? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Ananny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Anan...
  - rvnx 2y ago
    She tried to add herself to a list called “professional Canadian painter”, and from what I see, she is a professional Canadian painter for 10+ years.
    - card_zero 2y ago
      But not notable. Unless notable for long-term Wikipedia abuse. Maybe eventually she gets mentioned on a news site for that, and then she can finally have an article.
  - 20after4 2y ago
    There are a whole bunch of little utilities like browser extensions and bookmarklets and even an entire in-house cloud infrastructure that is used for hosting various kinds of bots and web-based tools for automating workflows. It's all very ad-hoc, crude and not very well organized or publicized. There have been a few efforts over the years to create a repository for all of the little tools to help with exposure and some level of vetting for security risks. I'm not sure any of those projects were ever successful (or even made it past the planning stage) but there has been some appetite for improving that ecosystem.
BrtByte 2y ago
Wikipedia isn't immune to influence campaigns - honestly, no open platform is - but the key difference is how seriously the community takes it. The amount of volunteer effort that goes into investigating sockpuppets, enforcing sourcing standards, and maintaining some kind of neutrality is incredible when you step back and think about it.
- user3939382 2y ago
  Neutrality? I’ve never seen an English language wikipedia article on a politically controversial topic that wasn’t the DC establishment/State Dept official take. They listed Greyzone as an unreputable new source because it’s pro-Palestinian. When you Google the usernames of those who voted to ban them pro Israeli think tanks from DC come up. Wikipedia is a joke when it comes to politics. If you’re lucky you can find the real contours of an issue by seeing who’s been censored and silenced out of the article on the Talk page.
  - immibis 2y ago
    They spent basically two years rejecting the renaming of "Israel-Hamas war" into "Gaza war" (it has now been renamed) even though the full scope of the war was apparent after just a few months. It was very important to maintain the narrative that the only victims were Hamas. They protected the page so you couldn't request a rename without being a verified user.
  - ordu 2y ago
    > Wikipedia is a joke when it comes to politics. What isn't a joke when it comes to politics? The only way to be informed about politics I have found is to regularly read news from several different media sites paying careful attention when they talk about the same issue. This way you learn their biases and how to interpret their news articles, you get the ability to guess what really happens, not just their takes on it.
    - psychoslave 2y ago
      Or some attention is distracted about a topic the editorial feel fine to make readership lose time on.
eqvinox 2y ago
You're saying it yourself: it's a target of influence campaigns. The Wikimedia Foundation ìs not a source of them itself. The non-profit public benefit service they provide is the openly editable encyclopaedia wiki, not its contents or its editors. The same safe harbour provisions as with other content hosters should (and need to) apply as with YouTube hosting questionable videos.
ksajadi 2y ago
I am not sure if I agree with the statement "the only reason we know about them is because Wikipedia fights them". I am sure there are admins and accounts on wikipedia who work hard to protect the sites integrity. However, I know a lot of the misinformation on wikipedia pages, specific to the Middle East were uncovered by organizations outside of the site and with quotes of the content that have found their way to the site, so in those cases, the internal checks and balances of wikipedia didn't work.
TomK32 2y ago
What a contrast to the early days: 22 years ago I was simply appointed admin on the German language Wikipedia when there was simply a lack of hands doing deletions and stuff. No voting, just a show of hand a lots of trust put into people only know by what they write and discuss on this new website. A few years of work (10k edits) and a few years of dwindling participation on my side someone noticed that quite a few of those early admins never faced a vote at all. The process had re-elections when 25 wikipedians asked for a vote, took them almost three weeks, I got that treatment as well in 2009. Indeed someone had enough time to dig through and find a discussion where I wasn't the nicest person (at the same time writing and discussing on Wikipedia help me a lot to develop a healthy social skill). Well, I didn't use the admin rights anymore so I rather resigned before someone dug even deeper ;) For security reasons those admin rights should be time limited anyways.
- lxgr 2y ago
  In my experience (of also roughly 20 years ago), the German Wikipedia is as dysfunctional as it gets. The primary goal of the admins seemed to be to gatekeep, in particular to keep “unencyclopedic” content out at all cost, e.g. by contesting the very existence of articles on individual episodes of TV shows, software, or video games, which are all completely uncontroversial on the English one. “Just because it’s relevant on en.wikipedia.org doesn’t mean it’s relevant over here” is a sentence I heard frequently. Keeping the number of articles down was seen as an active ideal. For me, it was a great motivator to improve my English, and I’ve only ever looked back when the English version didn’t have a lot of information on some Germany-specific topic. Last time I checked, they only just accepted the redesign (the one that greatly improves legibility), after vetoing it for years. What a psychotic way to run an encyclopedia…
  - immibis 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - skywalqer 2y ago
      Yeah, Palestinians are indeed Semites, however, the word antisemitism (for historic reasons) is used to refer specifically to hatred of Jews. It makes historical sense that Germans are afraid to criticize the Jews. I probably disagree with your opinions, but the debate would likely be useless.
dustingetz 2y ago
what does that have to do with tax classification
PeterStuer 2y ago
Keri Smith, a former hardcore SJW activist, has documented how she and others daily targeted people through Wikipedia edits for preparing a cancel. It's quite fascinating the extend of organization and process they used. For instance, they would not directly edit the target's page, but start working 2 links removed from it, compromise the "friend of a friend of a friend", and then work towards the actual target and finally try to cancel the target through "association with " accusations.
- maigret 2y ago
  What is SJW? Please avoid using unclear acronyms.
  - regularjack 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - albumen 2y ago
    Social Justice Warrior. The acronym has been around for a long time.
    - hnlmorg 2y ago
      That doesn’t mean what everyone is familiar with it. For example I’ve been around since internet slang first developed a life of its own. And yet I wasn’t immediately familiar with SJW either.
      - firesteelrain 2y ago
        By the time you commented you could have at least searched for the acronym or asked AI.
        hnlmorg 2y ago
        I wasn’t the one who asked. But even if I were, you’re not accounting for the cumulative benefit saving others from having to research the same acronym.
ralfd 2y ago
> But it didn't matter, because an anonymous individual also spent years pursuing Eostrix, assembling evidence Wait, why? If the edits were so clean and uncontroversial, what was suspicious? Sorry for asking, the wiki talk-page links very chaotic to read.
- jjmarr 2y ago
  There are little behavioural nuances in your writing or the timezones/subjects in which you edit. Using multiple accounts is mostly forbidden by Wikipedia policy, unlike most websites, so just proving the link can be enough. Icewhiz is a bad example because a lot of the evidence is non-public now (there's a cabal of CheckUsers approved by the Wikimedia Foundation who deal non-public cases). A simpler one is Lieutenant of Melkor/CaradhrasAiguo. Lieutenant of Melkor was banned in 2014, CaradhrasAiguo was made in 2015, and in 2020 someone linked the two accounts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Lieutenant_of_Melkor/Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga... > Editor interaction tool shows 2691 common pages. This is because both have been AWB power users in several same topic areas. However, there are numerous specific commonalities with extreme detail related to American cities, Chinese cities, weather templates and airports. > Both used navigational popups to revert edits which resulted in a non-standard date format in the edit summary. > LoM created many US city weatherbox templates. CA has been the only editor to do major updates in many of them. > Both have done major work with pushpins related to Chinese maps. 'Pushpin' is found in many edit summaries of both editors. > Both often removed bold text from non-English words. Both used edit-summaries with "debold" which I don't think is a real word. > Both updated snow days and precipitation days in US city infoboxes with almost identical edit summaries. > Both have an interest in classical music. CTRL+F for Beethoven, Mozart or Chopin in the editor interaction tool. They're also both named after Lord of the Rings characters. "Caradhras" is a mountain, "Melkor" was the most powerful Valar and later went by the name "Morgoth". Sauron, the antagonist of LotR, was his lieutenant.
kranke155 2y ago
The Portuguese Wikipedia does not allow the existence of details on corruption allegations against Portuguese or Brazilian politicians. There are moderators who take care of cleaning those up, then starting harassment against users who have posted these things. I've seen one particular page, when a corruption allegation was blown up against a politically connected individual, be set up for permanent deletion (the only way to remove a page so it can't be remade). They have all the time in the world and its clearly a full time job for them to do this, so its very hard to deal with as an individual editor. Hence the result has been that the Portuguese wikipedia has very little information on the corruption of Portuguese politicians, while the English language is full of it.
- virgulino 2y ago
  I agree. The pages on Brazilian politics are often grotesque propaganda. There was even a famous case in which a slanderous and fraudulent edit on two journalists' pages was traced back to an IP address in Dilma's Presidential Palace (Dilma was Lula's hand-picked successor).
  - kranke155 2y ago
    I saw horrendous violations to related to Bolsonaro related politicians. Seems like everybody does it then. In my case I saw that they even invent new rules if needed to remove things. Completely compromised.
- jjmarr 2y ago
  Post some specific references. This happened to the Croatian Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation stepped in.
  - kranke155 2y ago
    I am currently accumulating evidence to file the same kind of complaint that led the Croatian Wikipedia being reformed. But in order to do that you need X amount of edits. You also need strong evidence. There are other complaints for other Wikipedias in other languages that have become biased. You need to take into account that the Croatian Wikipedia had become a Holocaust denial website. That’s how far things had been allowed to slide. Just look into the fact that theyre is an article about ‘Super Dragões’ which is an ultra/hooligan mafia that runs the drug trade in Porto, Portugal. They’ve been involved in multiple murders, episodes of violence, and recently their leader was arrested. For some reason this article kept being altered/censored by two users, over literally months. They’ve successfully removed important details that link the leader of the group to an important murder (I assume they couldn’t do more). Every single major Portuguese org. Or political figure in Portugal is like this. You add things and then it’s a fight for months to get it to stick, if you’re lucky. Here a moderator clearly acted well, but they still managed to clean some of the detail. Or look at the article for Valentim Loureiro, where the major crimes are there, but it’s been removed that he was in fact convicted at least once. They clean up what they can.
donnachangstein 2y ago
Wikipedia has been captured by special interests. I recently watched The Silence of the Lambs, an Academy Award winning movie from the early 90s. Afterward, I skimmed the Wikipedia article to see if I missed any plot details. There is a whole section on how the movie is considered transphobic by some nobodies, how the director defends that it isn't, blah blah blah. Having just watched the film, the thought didn't even enter my mind. I realized that the entire section is irrelevant to someone seeking information about the movie and at its worst, an opinion piece or cleverly disguised political shit-stirring. Wikipedia is full of stuff like this. As a comparison I checked a 'real' encyclopedia (with editors) and of course not a mention of this, just the facts. Any attempt to delete irrelevant stuff from Wikipedia is closely guarded by self-appointed article gatekeepers because it has 'sources'.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  That doesn't have anything to do with special interests. Literally nearly every Wikipedia page for a fictional work or creator will have a section on "controversies" or similar, if there have been any. Regardless of which political direction they go in. If it's been covered in the media or a book or whatever, it tends to be included. This is a good thing. It helps situate everything in a broader cultural context. When I look something up on Wikipedia, I want to know these things. It's not irrelevant and it's not an opinion piece. It's not like the articles takes sides. They just objectively describe the controversies which are real objective things which exist. I find it curious that you seem to want to be shielded from the existence of these controversies. Nobody is forcing you to read them. But many people do genuinely find them useful and informative.
  - donnachangstein 2y ago
    The problem is controversies can be embellished. In this case, the controversy focused on a minor detail among hundreds of others in a nearly two hour long film. Is there guidance on what makes a controversy 'notable', or can anything be listed there? E.g. "Nobody blogger and her Twitter army were upset about $thing" - does that qualify? Nearly anything can be controversial, or have fabricated controversies. You see this a lot on political articles.
thayne 2y ago
> There have been several major pro-Palestinian ones recently, which is probably why this letter has been sent. I suspect the real reason is more likely due to Trump not liking pages related to himself, including the page on the Jan 6 attack.
deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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refurb 2y ago
This is my issue. Go to any wikipedia page that is in the least bit topical and you'll find a heavily slanted view and a discussion page too long to read where people fight over minutia. The only pages that seem useful are the technical ones.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

by jjmarr 2y ago

LightHugger 2y ago

There are counterexamples where this has failed/continues to fail, the gamergate article is famously non-neutral, only accepting primary sources from journalists directly involved in the controversy. This is rather than true secondary sources with less extreme and biased views, like is supposed to be the rules there. You can switch from the english one to other languages and get completely different content with very balanced point of views because the other languages weren't controlled by the influence campaign. So, is it better than reddit? I agree, probably. That bar doesn't seem very high though. Part of the issue with gamergate discussion is that there's a lot of vapid perspectives along the lines of "it's just video game journalism who cares" which allows an infinite amount of bad behavior, dishonesty and manipulation in the name of an abstract greater good. I believe it was used as a prototype for future wikipedia manipulation for "more important" topics.

acdha 2y ago
Do you have any specific examples? You mentioned the Gamergate article but your assertion that it doesn’t reference non-primary sources needs some citations that all of the academic and media sources were directly involved. Since it was a harassment campaign involving journalists, there’s a big question about what a policy would need to look like to prevent someone from attacking a journalist and then saying Wikipedia can’t use their work because they’re involuntarily involved.
- LightHugger 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - intended 2y ago
    > Q1: Can I use a particular article as a source? > A1: What sources can be used in Wikipedia is governed by our reliable sources guideline, which requires "published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy". If you have a question about whether or not a particular source meets this policy, a good place to ask is the Reliable sources noticeboard.
jjmarr 2y ago
[flagged]
- moshegramovsky 2y ago
  > You'll get a bunch of leftist (because they don't have jobs) volunteer moderators with an agenda. What do you consider a leftist? Why do you think they don't have jobs?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- LightHugger 2y ago
  [flagged]

kurtreed2 2y ago

One can look into Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski's report about how the Polish ultranationalists have distorted the Holocaust topic area on Wikipedia (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...) if they want to find a counterexample. To the best of my understandings so far, I think Icewhiz is a good guy, just that he doesn't have strong grasp about Wikipedia's guidelines, particularly regarding multiple accounts, and was the victim of sustained smear campaigns by Polish ultranationalists who were able to psychologically manipulate the admins into banning him in order to let their distortionist edits stick. Now he's an Emmanuel Goldstein figure for both the ultranationalists and the pro-Hamas editors who seek to deflect external scrutiny to their edits.

immibis 2y ago
Can you tell us more about these pro-Hamas editors?
jjmarr 2y ago
A month after that article was published (and shortly after the article was posted on Wikipedia), the Arbitration Committee opened a sua sponte case to review the topic area despite the substance of that article being "Icewhiz was right".[1] It resulted in bans of Icewhiz' enemies for distorting the Holocaust topic area. I think moderators on pretty much any other website would laugh and ignore an article like that as being whining from a user they banned. I agree that Icewhiz is an Emmanuel Goldstein-like figure at this point who's used by pro-Hamas editors/ultranationalists. A bunch of those pro-Palestinian editors that loved to complain about Icewhiz to deflect from their own behaviour were topic-banned from Israel-Palestine area a few months ago in January.[2] It's challenging to deal with the Israel-Palestine conflict on any website that allows for user contributions. There's astroturfing and nation-state backed influence operations from probably a dozen countries. I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World_War_II_and_the_history_of_Jews_in_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel_articles_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

bjourne 2y ago

I knew IceWhiz. You are correct that he (or rather "they") eventually was kicked from the site. But he/they operated on the site for years and was the biggest PITA you can imagine. He must have single-handedly scared away two dozen honest contributors with his BS. It is very, very easy to game the rules on Wikipedia. Wars of attrition goes on for years. Normal people don't waste their time. IceWhiz and his meat puppets have endless patience and all the time in the world.

gonzobonzo 2y ago
Right. The fact that someone so terrible got 99% approval and only one anonymous investigator was able to stop them makes me think that it's likely a lot of other terrible admins who didn't have an anonymous investigator go after them probably go through the process. And the times I've brought up the fact that Wikipedia can be unreliable before, I've had numerous editors come in and claim that wasn't true and that people could rely on the claims they find in Wikipedia. This runs counter to the claim that Wikipedia editors know about these influence campaigns and openly fight about them. A lot of the active and vocal editors are openly dismissing such concerns.
- chii 2y ago
  I wonder if there's room in using AI to gather past edits of someone, as part of vetting, and use the sentiment analysis to check how neutral their biases are.
  - sunaookami 2y ago
    AI is itself biased because the training data is.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Neutrality != necessarily accurate or useful. And the most neutral thing to say is nothing. And most LLMs probably have Wikipedia as a significant part of their training corpus, so there is a big ouroboros issue too.
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StanislavPetrov 2y ago

The infamous "Philip Cross" always comes to mind. https://www.wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross https://www.wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

Did you read this post? https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

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0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

Did you read this post? "Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record" https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

firesteelrain 2y ago
Wow! I read the entire article. It sounds like this person may have a mental illness. It’s both their weakness and strength.
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hiddencost 2y ago

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viccis 2y ago
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hulitu 2y ago

This is the ideal picture of Wikipedia. In reality they are also used to spread propaganda and are happy about it as long as it fits certain naratives. Wikipedia is, today, a pale shade of what it once was, a source of information.

lukan 2y ago

To me those links you provided, indicate a lot, of what is wrong for me with wikipedia. Because it is extremely hard to figure out what is going on. Lots of mysterious abbreviations. Unclear timeline. I still don't really know it, it seems the scandal is, that he had a sockpuppet account? And there is only "private" evidence (meaning not public)? "The Arbitration Committee has determined through private evidence, including evidence from the checkuser tool, that Eostrix (talk · contribs) (a current RfA candidate) is a sockpuppet of Icewhiz (talk · contribs). Accordingly, the Committee has resolved that Eostrix be indefinitely blocked." So having a sockpuppet account is the reason for indefinite ban? Or that in combination with edits he made? Really, really hard to figure out for someone just having a quick look into the topic. And this is what prevented me since the beginning to participate in Wikipedia. I always got this impression. I made some edits here and there, but I think was mostly reverted/deleted/ignored - but no idea, I never felt like making the investment to really dive into it - and that seems required to contribute. Casual contribution seems pointless - and they likely miss out a lot through this. "But the only reason you know about them is because Wikipedia openly fights them instead of covering them up." So it seems good if wikipedia is more open - but from this story I just take "private evidence" with me and lots of questions about the whole process.

simonw 2y ago
"Really, really hard to figure out for someone just having a quick look into the topic." Sometimes things are genuinely complicated. If you want to understand the hardest, most elaborate forms of Wikipedia community management you're going to need to work really hard at figuring out what's going on. Community dynamics at this scale, and with this level of bad actors, are not something that can be explained in a few paragraphs.
- lukan 2y ago
  Oh in general for sure, but my first (attempted?) edit for Wikipedia was 20 years ago so I am not a completely newb. And this is kind of like a court decision. But in a real court, I can see the verdict and the laws that were broken. All in complicated, but readable english. Which makes it clear (usually). But in wikipedia to understand a indefinite ban, I have to understand global wiki community dynamics first? I am a bit reminded of Kafka - The Trial.

yannis 2y ago

Wikipedia is the best source of humanities "common knowledge". Yes there are users that abuse the system to push their own point of view. Many articles in Wikipedia have improved tremendously over the years; many times it is not unusual for an article to have over a hundred references. It gives you all the info you want to understand the subject before you delve further through books. Now for politics I can see the problem. Even on a well behaved site like HN you can get polarized views. Just say Israel is committing genocide or ethnic cleansing and you see the reaction. Ditto for Ukraine and now Trumpism. So yes there are pages that reflect views. Take them as such. Another advantage of Wikipedia is that many references are pushed to archive.org and saved. "DEAR AMERICAN FRIENDS IN THE ADMINISTRATION KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF THE WIKIPEDIA"

BrtByte 2y ago
Wikipedia's value isn't that it's perfect, it's that it shows its work
- 20after4 2y ago
  On articles that are either controversial or cover some kind of current events, I often find more value from reading the edit history and the discussions than from the article itself.
  - BrtByte 2y ago
    It's messy, but honestly, that mess teaches you way more about how information is shaped than a polished "final" version ever could

ArinaS 2y ago

On Wikipedia people like Icewhiz are called "long-term abusers", and there's a public list with more than a hundred of them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LTA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LTA.

atombender 2y ago
That list is fascinating. Like the obscure Canadian illustrator [1] who for a decade has been repeatedly trying to put herself into Wikipedia despite being told she's a "non-notable" artist. I'm frankly amazed that enough people have the time to track this nonsense and stamp it out that it ends up being self-correcting. It's not just about time, either; chasing bad edits and prosecuting bad users must be a huge chore in terms of the sheer amount of work needed. I always find it amazing how horrible the tools are (like how almost anything, including having discussions, is done by editing pages; how can anyone have a discussion in such a disorganized way?), which surely must be a hindrance to productivity or to the ability to detect and deal with constant abuse. But seemingly it works. Maybe there are better tools that pro-level admins know about? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Ananny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Anan...
- rvnx 2y ago
  She tried to add herself to a list called “professional Canadian painter”, and from what I see, she is a professional Canadian painter for 10+ years.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    But not notable. Unless notable for long-term Wikipedia abuse. Maybe eventually she gets mentioned on a news site for that, and then she can finally have an article.
- 20after4 2y ago
  There are a whole bunch of little utilities like browser extensions and bookmarklets and even an entire in-house cloud infrastructure that is used for hosting various kinds of bots and web-based tools for automating workflows. It's all very ad-hoc, crude and not very well organized or publicized. There have been a few efforts over the years to create a repository for all of the little tools to help with exposure and some level of vetting for security risks. I'm not sure any of those projects were ever successful (or even made it past the planning stage) but there has been some appetite for improving that ecosystem.

BrtByte 2y ago

Wikipedia isn't immune to influence campaigns - honestly, no open platform is - but the key difference is how seriously the community takes it. The amount of volunteer effort that goes into investigating sockpuppets, enforcing sourcing standards, and maintaining some kind of neutrality is incredible when you step back and think about it.

user3939382 2y ago
Neutrality? I’ve never seen an English language wikipedia article on a politically controversial topic that wasn’t the DC establishment/State Dept official take. They listed Greyzone as an unreputable new source because it’s pro-Palestinian. When you Google the usernames of those who voted to ban them pro Israeli think tanks from DC come up. Wikipedia is a joke when it comes to politics. If you’re lucky you can find the real contours of an issue by seeing who’s been censored and silenced out of the article on the Talk page.
- immibis 2y ago
  They spent basically two years rejecting the renaming of "Israel-Hamas war" into "Gaza war" (it has now been renamed) even though the full scope of the war was apparent after just a few months. It was very important to maintain the narrative that the only victims were Hamas. They protected the page so you couldn't request a rename without being a verified user.
- ordu 2y ago
  > Wikipedia is a joke when it comes to politics. What isn't a joke when it comes to politics? The only way to be informed about politics I have found is to regularly read news from several different media sites paying careful attention when they talk about the same issue. This way you learn their biases and how to interpret their news articles, you get the ability to guess what really happens, not just their takes on it.
  - psychoslave 2y ago
    Or some attention is distracted about a topic the editorial feel fine to make readership lose time on.

eqvinox 2y ago

You're saying it yourself: it's a target of influence campaigns. The Wikimedia Foundation ìs not a source of them itself. The non-profit public benefit service they provide is the openly editable encyclopaedia wiki, not its contents or its editors. The same safe harbour provisions as with other content hosters should (and need to) apply as with YouTube hosting questionable videos.

ksajadi 2y ago

I am not sure if I agree with the statement "the only reason we know about them is because Wikipedia fights them". I am sure there are admins and accounts on wikipedia who work hard to protect the sites integrity. However, I know a lot of the misinformation on wikipedia pages, specific to the Middle East were uncovered by organizations outside of the site and with quotes of the content that have found their way to the site, so in those cases, the internal checks and balances of wikipedia didn't work.

TomK32 2y ago

What a contrast to the early days: 22 years ago I was simply appointed admin on the German language Wikipedia when there was simply a lack of hands doing deletions and stuff. No voting, just a show of hand a lots of trust put into people only know by what they write and discuss on this new website. A few years of work (10k edits) and a few years of dwindling participation on my side someone noticed that quite a few of those early admins never faced a vote at all. The process had re-elections when 25 wikipedians asked for a vote, took them almost three weeks, I got that treatment as well in 2009. Indeed someone had enough time to dig through and find a discussion where I wasn't the nicest person (at the same time writing and discussing on Wikipedia help me a lot to develop a healthy social skill). Well, I didn't use the admin rights anymore so I rather resigned before someone dug even deeper ;) For security reasons those admin rights should be time limited anyways.

lxgr 2y ago
In my experience (of also roughly 20 years ago), the German Wikipedia is as dysfunctional as it gets. The primary goal of the admins seemed to be to gatekeep, in particular to keep “unencyclopedic” content out at all cost, e.g. by contesting the very existence of articles on individual episodes of TV shows, software, or video games, which are all completely uncontroversial on the English one. “Just because it’s relevant on en.wikipedia.org doesn’t mean it’s relevant over here” is a sentence I heard frequently. Keeping the number of articles down was seen as an active ideal. For me, it was a great motivator to improve my English, and I’ve only ever looked back when the English version didn’t have a lot of information on some Germany-specific topic. Last time I checked, they only just accepted the redesign (the one that greatly improves legibility), after vetoing it for years. What a psychotic way to run an encyclopedia…
- immibis 2y ago
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  - skywalqer 2y ago
    Yeah, Palestinians are indeed Semites, however, the word antisemitism (for historic reasons) is used to refer specifically to hatred of Jews. It makes historical sense that Germans are afraid to criticize the Jews. I probably disagree with your opinions, but the debate would likely be useless.

dustingetz 2y ago

what does that have to do with tax classification

PeterStuer 2y ago

Keri Smith, a former hardcore SJW activist, has documented how she and others daily targeted people through Wikipedia edits for preparing a cancel. It's quite fascinating the extend of organization and process they used. For instance, they would not directly edit the target's page, but start working 2 links removed from it, compromise the "friend of a friend of a friend", and then work towards the actual target and finally try to cancel the target through "association with " accusations.

maigret 2y ago
What is SJW? Please avoid using unclear acronyms.
- regularjack 2y ago
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- albumen 2y ago
  Social Justice Warrior. The acronym has been around for a long time.
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    That doesn’t mean what everyone is familiar with it. For example I’ve been around since internet slang first developed a life of its own. And yet I wasn’t immediately familiar with SJW either.
    - firesteelrain 2y ago
      By the time you commented you could have at least searched for the acronym or asked AI.
      - hnlmorg 2y ago
        I wasn’t the one who asked. But even if I were, you’re not accounting for the cumulative benefit saving others from having to research the same acronym.

ralfd 2y ago

> But it didn't matter, because an anonymous individual also spent years pursuing Eostrix, assembling evidence Wait, why? If the edits were so clean and uncontroversial, what was suspicious? Sorry for asking, the wiki talk-page links very chaotic to read.

jjmarr 2y ago
There are little behavioural nuances in your writing or the timezones/subjects in which you edit. Using multiple accounts is mostly forbidden by Wikipedia policy, unlike most websites, so just proving the link can be enough. Icewhiz is a bad example because a lot of the evidence is non-public now (there's a cabal of CheckUsers approved by the Wikimedia Foundation who deal non-public cases). A simpler one is Lieutenant of Melkor/CaradhrasAiguo. Lieutenant of Melkor was banned in 2014, CaradhrasAiguo was made in 2015, and in 2020 someone linked the two accounts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Lieutenant_of_Melkor/Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga... > Editor interaction tool shows 2691 common pages. This is because both have been AWB power users in several same topic areas. However, there are numerous specific commonalities with extreme detail related to American cities, Chinese cities, weather templates and airports. > Both used navigational popups to revert edits which resulted in a non-standard date format in the edit summary. > LoM created many US city weatherbox templates. CA has been the only editor to do major updates in many of them. > Both have done major work with pushpins related to Chinese maps. 'Pushpin' is found in many edit summaries of both editors. > Both often removed bold text from non-English words. Both used edit-summaries with "debold" which I don't think is a real word. > Both updated snow days and precipitation days in US city infoboxes with almost identical edit summaries. > Both have an interest in classical music. CTRL+F for Beethoven, Mozart or Chopin in the editor interaction tool. They're also both named after Lord of the Rings characters. "Caradhras" is a mountain, "Melkor" was the most powerful Valar and later went by the name "Morgoth". Sauron, the antagonist of LotR, was his lieutenant.

kranke155 2y ago

The Portuguese Wikipedia does not allow the existence of details on corruption allegations against Portuguese or Brazilian politicians. There are moderators who take care of cleaning those up, then starting harassment against users who have posted these things. I've seen one particular page, when a corruption allegation was blown up against a politically connected individual, be set up for permanent deletion (the only way to remove a page so it can't be remade). They have all the time in the world and its clearly a full time job for them to do this, so its very hard to deal with as an individual editor. Hence the result has been that the Portuguese wikipedia has very little information on the corruption of Portuguese politicians, while the English language is full of it.

virgulino 2y ago
I agree. The pages on Brazilian politics are often grotesque propaganda. There was even a famous case in which a slanderous and fraudulent edit on two journalists' pages was traced back to an IP address in Dilma's Presidential Palace (Dilma was Lula's hand-picked successor).
- kranke155 2y ago
  I saw horrendous violations to related to Bolsonaro related politicians. Seems like everybody does it then. In my case I saw that they even invent new rules if needed to remove things. Completely compromised.
jjmarr 2y ago
Post some specific references. This happened to the Croatian Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation stepped in.
- kranke155 2y ago
  I am currently accumulating evidence to file the same kind of complaint that led the Croatian Wikipedia being reformed. But in order to do that you need X amount of edits. You also need strong evidence. There are other complaints for other Wikipedias in other languages that have become biased. You need to take into account that the Croatian Wikipedia had become a Holocaust denial website. That’s how far things had been allowed to slide. Just look into the fact that theyre is an article about ‘Super Dragões’ which is an ultra/hooligan mafia that runs the drug trade in Porto, Portugal. They’ve been involved in multiple murders, episodes of violence, and recently their leader was arrested. For some reason this article kept being altered/censored by two users, over literally months. They’ve successfully removed important details that link the leader of the group to an important murder (I assume they couldn’t do more). Every single major Portuguese org. Or political figure in Portugal is like this. You add things and then it’s a fight for months to get it to stick, if you’re lucky. Here a moderator clearly acted well, but they still managed to clean some of the detail. Or look at the article for Valentim Loureiro, where the major crimes are there, but it’s been removed that he was in fact convicted at least once. They clean up what they can.

donnachangstein 2y ago

Wikipedia has been captured by special interests. I recently watched The Silence of the Lambs, an Academy Award winning movie from the early 90s. Afterward, I skimmed the Wikipedia article to see if I missed any plot details. There is a whole section on how the movie is considered transphobic by some nobodies, how the director defends that it isn't, blah blah blah. Having just watched the film, the thought didn't even enter my mind. I realized that the entire section is irrelevant to someone seeking information about the movie and at its worst, an opinion piece or cleverly disguised political shit-stirring. Wikipedia is full of stuff like this. As a comparison I checked a 'real' encyclopedia (with editors) and of course not a mention of this, just the facts. Any attempt to delete irrelevant stuff from Wikipedia is closely guarded by self-appointed article gatekeepers because it has 'sources'.

crazygringo 2y ago
That doesn't have anything to do with special interests. Literally nearly every Wikipedia page for a fictional work or creator will have a section on "controversies" or similar, if there have been any. Regardless of which political direction they go in. If it's been covered in the media or a book or whatever, it tends to be included. This is a good thing. It helps situate everything in a broader cultural context. When I look something up on Wikipedia, I want to know these things. It's not irrelevant and it's not an opinion piece. It's not like the articles takes sides. They just objectively describe the controversies which are real objective things which exist. I find it curious that you seem to want to be shielded from the existence of these controversies. Nobody is forcing you to read them. But many people do genuinely find them useful and informative.
- donnachangstein 2y ago
  The problem is controversies can be embellished. In this case, the controversy focused on a minor detail among hundreds of others in a nearly two hour long film. Is there guidance on what makes a controversy 'notable', or can anything be listed there? E.g. "Nobody blogger and her Twitter army were upset about $thing" - does that qualify? Nearly anything can be controversial, or have fabricated controversies. You see this a lot on political articles.

thayne 2y ago

> There have been several major pro-Palestinian ones recently, which is probably why this letter has been sent. I suspect the real reason is more likely due to Trump not liking pages related to himself, including the page on the Jan 6 attack.

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refurb 2y ago

This is my issue. Go to any wikipedia page that is in the least bit topical and you'll find a heavily slanted view and a discussion page too long to read where people fight over minutia. The only pages that seem useful are the technical ones.

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