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Russia Poisons Wikipedia
- demek2016 5mo ago[flagged]
- lpcvoid 5mo ago[flagged]
- yamisnotreal 5mo ago[flagged]
- wheelerwj 5mo agoThis is the shit LLMs are trained on.
- OutOfHere 5mo agoIt is unfortunate that they can't think for themselves during the training process itself. The think-mode might help in training too if used correctly.
- SwellJoe 5mo agoThey're not trained on a raw feed of the internet. They are given curated and synthetic data. The curation and synthesis of new data is done by existing LLMs.
- OutOfHere 5mo agoEven if you're given the perfect textbook to read, it still helps you to take notes. Notes serve multiple purposes -- they help add clarity where it is needed, and more importantly, they help integrate new info (the current batch) with prior info (previous batches).
- SwellJoe 5mo agoOK, but, as far as I know, there isn't a technology to allow that, yet. LLMs don't work like human brains.
- OutOfHere 5mo agoHuh. The tech is what you make it. With your limiting logic, you would've said the same thing for thinking models at inference time too. There is nothing logically, mathematically, or physically prohibiting using thinking at training time too.
- fortran77 5mo agoWikipedia is full of various large disinformation campaigns. Not just Russia, but Iran, Qatar, North Korea, etc. Unless I'm looking at the history of DB-9 connectors or early Simpsons episode summaries, etc, it's not a reliable source.
- brandnewideas 5mo agoWhat about the USA, or China?
- cubefox 5mo agoThat's not a sentence. What do you mean with ", ..."?
- brandnewideas 5mo agoI've edited the comment
- estimator7292 5mo agoIf you learn to read, the fragments "not just" and "etc" clearly answer your question. Yes, China and the US also participate in this. Everyone knows this. You are not clever or special for pointing it out, you're just being stupid and trying to distract from the conversation. Literally whataboutism. Classic FUD and distraction technique. Go somewhere else with this nonsesne.
- Pay08 5mo agoChina is likely not doing it. Wikipedia is blocked by the great firewall.
- rdm_blackhole 5mo agoThat's awfully naive. China's cyber units or state actors most likely have access to Wikipedia and are not bothered by the Great Firewall. The citizens on the other hand, I agree with you.
- recursivedoubts 5mo agoThank goodness my government would never stoop to such levels.
- jszymborski 5mo ago[flagged]
- nmbrskeptix 5mo ago[dead]
- recursivedoubts 5mo ago[flagged]
- cpursley 5mo ago[dead]
- grafmax 5mo agoIn fact the commenter’s point is quite relevant. A central characteristic of the information war is to dismiss the “other side”’s POV as propaganda. This works to prop up one’s own propaganda. The article makes this quite clear: > Those words — foreign digital interference — are very important. > The West has neglected to fight on the battlefield that has been right in front of them the entire time — the internet. It’s remarkable that the author thinks this is true. The issue is the foreign source of the propaganda, not the propaganda itself, and in fact the solution is more propaganda, according to them. By limiting our focus to pro-Russia edits, and refusing to acknowledge the larger context, we let ourselves become unwitting dupes, casualties in this information war.
- Levitz 5mo agoThe problem is this goodwill seemingly never works both ways. When the western side of things does something bad or controversial, it's all about how the west is bad and any comment on other actors is deflecting. When the eastern side of things does something bad though, we must never stop reflecting on how the west is also bad, and also be aware of how our biases might actually paint an unfairly worse picture of the east. Which, funny enough, would be an ideal result of western propaganda.
- the-mitr 5mo agoA long list of controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...
- oomuinio 5mo ago[dead]
- justin66 5mo ago[flagged]
- milemi 5mo ago[flagged]
- cmrdporcupine 5mo ago"According to lexicographer Ben Zimmer,[14] the term originated in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Zimmer cites a 1974 letter by history teacher Sean O'Conaill which was published in The Irish Times where he complained about "the Whatabouts", people who defended the IRA by pointing out supposed wrongdoings of their enemy" (WP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism Or we could just call it by its older name, the "Tu quoque" defense. "The Oxford English Dictionary cites John Cooke's 1614 stage play The Cittie Gallant as the earliest known use of the term in the English language.[1]" C'mon, try harder.
- pasquinelli 5mo agothe point you're contesting is who coined the term, the unimportant part of the comment you're replying to. it sounds like you're saying, "of course the liberals are hypocrites, but they didn't coin the term!" is that what you mean to say?
- cmrdporcupine 5mo agoThere is nothing "important" about the comment I'm replying to, it's well below HN commenting standards. .. and yes, I see it's flagged/dead now.
- milemi 5mo agoIf you go to the Google ngram viewer you won’t see a single occurrence of whataboutism before 2006. I’m not saying it was coined at the Liberals Coining Scare Words 2006 conference, but use of the word is a hallmark of a shitlib hypocrite. Whatabout and whataboutism are two different words.
- paganel 5mo ago[flagged]
- xrd 5mo agoI'm unsure what the controversy is that you are pointing out. I clicked on the links you provided but don't see a reference to Atlantic Council. Can you point me to a summary of what atlanticist ghouls means? What happened in 2018 that relates to her claims made in her article?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- pet_the_bird 5mo agoI think the article tried to refer to this link https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10663 https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10663 As I understand from scanning the paper, the authors attempt to determine differences between the Russian wikipedia articles and the articles on the Russian fork. They show that articles on the fork that were that differ from RU wikipedia have a significantly higher number of edits on RU wikipedia. The authors suggest that these may be signs of manipulations, however, it may not have affected the quality negatively (as stated in the discussion). I do not find state sponsored activity on Wikipedia unlikely, but I am not convinced there is clear evidence that Russia poisoned wikipedia succesfully.
- Pay08 5mo agoWikipedia is full of state-sponsored activity, and even fuller of useful idiots for those states. Russia might not be doing it in particular, though.
- mmooss 5mo agoThe article is not about that link. Here's what it says: Yesterday, I read a Wikipedia page for a book I’m about to review. I am still unsettled. The page was stripped of reality, and in its place was a sanitized fairytale where Putin is good and the book — a brutal and damning historic account of Soviet abuses — is subtly and not so subtly undermined from every direction. Once I got over the shock of what I had just read — it was like being forced into an alternate reality — I began investigating Russia’s relationship to Wikipedia. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Russian state has been steadily distorting truth, exploiting the platform’s crowd-sourcing architecture to influence public knowledge.
- p91paul 5mo agoI found it unsettling that in an article about political manipulation the author did not provide a link to the book entry
- mmooss 5mo agoWhat book entry are you referring to? What book? The paper - not a book entry or book - cited in the GGP was linked to and reviewed in detail by the OP.
- aboardRat4 5mo ago[flagged]
- simondotau 5mo agoFighting poison with poison still leaves you with poison.
- regularization 5mo agoLook back to the earliest version of the history and information of various countries on Wikipedia. They say themselves they were from US State department or CIA histories of those countries. I was editing a page on the US massacre of civilians in No Gun Ri, Korea with some IP at CENTCOM removing my edits. I spend my off tine trying to send in facts of what happened, my taxes from my on time pay for some propaganda arm of the US armed forces to remove it. As the US kidnaps the president of Venezuela and his wife, blockades Cuba, bombs Iran and on and on, great to know someone else is smearing Russia to further my tax dollars funding the endless war on their borders too.
- cmrdporcupine 5mo agoIt's almost like both imperialist powers could be problematic and awful and we don't have to pick a side or excuse the actions of the one because the other does the same.
- kelipso 5mo ago[flagged]
- cmrdporcupine 5mo agoI mean that's clearly not the case. I'm swimming in anti-imperialist anti-US content. That it doesn't lead to mass action and the end of the current state of the American regime is a domestic American population problem, not a missing information problem. There is no poverty of information. The fact of the matter is a powerful section of the US population benefits from the current situation.
- kelipso 5mo agoThere is no poverty of information depending on your news bubble.
- shevy-java 5mo ago
- qezz 5mo ago[flagged]
- casey2 5mo ago[flagged]
- delichon 5mo agoWikipedia should be more like Github, such that topics can be forked ad hoc, and we can get a truly diverse set of viewpoints on everything. Then auto-generate a summary page that highlights the agreements and disagreements. Or someone else should do it. If you build it I will come.
- tokai 5mo agoWikipedia's license allows you to fork the articles and take them in any direction you like. They just wont host it for you.
- delichon 5mo agoYep, the open data makes it possible. The unified UI is the key feature here, so that we can contrast and compare the various takes from one place. It doesn't work if they are spread and unlinked, across the web. Basically, take every article in the corpus and make it one leaf in a bush. The Wikipedia version can remain canonical for those who want it to.
- joenot443 5mo agoIn many ways Wikipedia is more like Reddit, in which taste making influence gets concentrated into cliquey power users. Reading the Talk page for any contemporary culture war stuff makes it clear Wikipedia’s not really a place for diverse thinking.
- hackeraccount 5mo agoThe more political a page becomes the greater the temptation to abandon a neutral viewpoint (consciously or unconsciously) and to limit the number of people making edits. When it comes to politics Feyman's line about "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool" is times 10.
- pjc50 5mo agoThe average of a bunch of lies is not truth, and the median of things that people have made up is not worth one source.
- Isamu 5mo agoGenuinely interesting strategy, the term “poison” should really apply more to AI that depend on Wikipedia for training >This strategy, in a likely attempt to evade global sanctions on Russian news outlets, is now poisoning AI tools and Wikipedia. By posing as authoritative sources on Wikipedia and reliable news outlets cited by popular large language models (LLMs), Russian tropes are rewriting the story of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The direct consequence is the exposure of Western audiences to content containing pro-Kremlin, anti-Ukrainian, and anti-Western messaging when using AI chatbots that rely on LLMs trained on material such as Wikipedia.
- ku-man 5mo ago[dead]
- anotherviewhere 5mo ago[flagged]
- simondotau 5mo ago“No, you!” would have been more efficient and equally insightful. You used so many words to say nothing more specific than that.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jampekka 5mo agoI don't doubt this happens, but given all the wolf crying about clandestine Russian operations, it's hard to assess what the scale and influence of these are. Especially as this is based on an analysis by Atlantic Council, which is essentially a NATO think tank. This will probably read to many as me being a useful idiot for Putin or something. And maybe I am, hard to say definitely.
- jeffbee 5mo agoGive some examples of prominent wolf-crying that wasn't eventually substantiated.
- jampekka 5mo agoSome major ones that come to mind: - Russia blowing up Nordstream - "Havana syndrome" - The Steele dossier
- jeffbee 5mo agoOK, those are interesting choices that are outside of the realm of stuff that I was thinking about. What I was thinking about is that the Russians have been working the American people via the media for decades.
- pessimizer 5mo agoWhat public state speculation about Russian interference in anything ever was substantiated? As far as I can tell, nothing that has been said about Russian intelligence operations in the West (over the past decade or so) has ever been substantiated. That's why everybody started blaming every single problem or disagreement in the West on Russia, because you wouldn't be asked to or expected to be able to substantiate it. I've been called Russian or Chinese more times since 2015 than I've ever been called anything else other than my name. I was usually called that by people when I was denying something that those same people now say nobody ever really believed or insisted was true.
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- cryptoegorophy 5mo ago[flagged]
- mistrial9 5mo agothis advice is lazy if not well intentioned IMO. There are certainly basic epistemological classifications that cut through "everything is an advert or propaganda" assertions; for example Science. It is not a matter of propaganda, the behavior of a solid fat above a certain temperature. Wikipedia is full of this kind of information. A physics colleague regularly cites Wikipedia on topics of linear algebra, rather than the thirty+ text books on the shelf. Why? because Wikipeda pages on certain topics are more useful, and more concise, than many of those books in practice. From which didactic approach does "throw the baby out with the bathwater" come from here? Wise words from a crypto practitioner ? say more
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Bender 5mo agoEvery site that can be random-user-edited or allow comments are infested with shills, grifters, astroturfers, scammers, spammers, propagandists within minutes. This only increases as the site gains popularity. What each site turns into depends on how it was engineered, how it is moderated and actively managed it is. To me personally I think that Wikipedia may have been purpose designed to let this happen or it would have stopped happening a long time ago. I am certain everyone here could each think of a dozen ways to minimize this behavior. Just as one example if it were up to me the edited version invisible until a panel of moderators gives the edit a +1. If a sub-set of moderators give it a +2 (override) everyone can see who did that. Moderators would have to show real names and their country of origin and current country of residence. A watchdog group must be able to vote out moderators. If users try to overwhelm the moderators then they get perma-banned. I would probably not allow edits from wireless devices. Edits must be treated like changes to the Linux kernel and I want the original abrasive version of Linus back for this but that's just my personal preference.
- dgellow 5mo agoHow familiar are you with Wikipedia processes? Asking because they are very sophisticated and definitely not « anyone’s can do anything unchecked », unless it is a page that isn’t visited much
- Bender 5mo agoFamiliar enough I have seen organizations and companies gripe for its entire existence that they can't keep topics related to them accurate because there are non-stop edit wars. I also remember when Stephen Colbert mass edited and resurrected an extinct animal out of extinction using his audience on Wikipedia. There are plenty of examples of this being a disinformation platform that people can find if they look.
- dgellow 5mo agoYeah, there is for sure a lot of misinformation and drama. One of my favorite is this one: https://youtu.be/A48oR4Zc9ik?is=s3wjS0uFYZCI8xbC https://youtu.be/A48oR4Zc9ik?is=s3wjS0uFYZCI8xbC
- loweritnow 5mo agoEhh, Wikipedia is already poisoned already
- Teever 5mo agoI’ve been watching people in /r/balticstates talk about how Russia has been actively changing the birth places of Estonian officials to say Russia instead of occupied Estonia. https://united24media.com/latest-news/pro-russian-narratives-target-wikipedia-marking-a-dangerous-trend-for-ai-chatbot-data-15230 https://united24media.com/latest-news/pro-russian-narratives... https://news.err.ee/1609903256/estonian-volunteers-struggling-to-protect-wikipedia-from-russian-propaganda https://news.err.ee/1609903256/estonian-volunteers-strugglin... It’s rather devious
- tryauuum 5mo agoNot change to "Russia", change to "Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic" If some force occupies and renames your country for 40+ years, seems fair to use that name in wikipedia when talking about this period I understand invading countries is not cool, but you cannot fix crimes of USSR by retroactively renaming places
- Teever 5mo agoMost countries never recognized the Soviet annexation de jure, and under the legal-continuity doctrine Estonia remained an independent state under occupation throughout 1940–1991. I wonder if French people born in Vichy France should have their Wikipedia entries changed to say that they were born in the French State and not the French Republic.
- tryauuum 5mo agothe "other countries recognition" is a valid point which I missed Still, it kind of feels weird if (I assume) for 40 years everyone had "Estonian SSR" stamped in their birth certificates / passports, and then we say "actually they were born in Republic of Estonia (occupied)"
- mopsi 5mo ago> If some force occupies and renames your country for 40+ years, seems fair to use that name in wikipedia when talking about this period "Estonia" is a distinct geographic and cultural region, the same way "Norway" is. Nobody refers to people born in Oslo during the German occupation in WWII as having been born in "Reichskommissariat Norwegen" or whatever name the Nazis invented, despite the fact that Norwegians were unable to govern their country at the time. The same applies to Estonia. Anyone born in the geographic region of Estonia is referred to as having been born in Estonia, regardless of whether that occurred during the German occupation in World War II when German forces advanced east, or later during the Soviet occupation, which lasted until the fall of communism. Last year, a page hidden deep in talk pages held a vote on how to name birthplaces of Estonians. 20 regular Wikipedia users participated in the vote. 12 of them voted in favor of a fringe naming convention that emphasizes the internationally unrecognized Soviet-installed authorities. Wikipedia now refers to this as a sitewide "consensus" that cannot be overturned. The user who initiated the vote (Glebushko0703) was a Russian troll who later got banned for attempting to organize a harassment campaign against a journalist who covered the story, but the "consensus" remains. A handful of powerful administrators continue to protect an utterly fringe naming convention. Their only argument is the "consensus" itself. Overall, the push is a very characteristic example of a Russian assault on indigenous identities. Every opportunity is used to replace ethnic naming conventions with Russian imperial designations. "Estonian" writers and artists become "Soviet-Estonian", or better yet, simply "Soviet". The more they manage to litter Russian imperial language everywhere, the more likely LLMs are to use it for describing persons and events. It's the good old keyword spam in a new dressing, and Wikipedia is bogged down by administrators who are average Joes, often from the other side of the planet and with very little first-hand knowledge, who try to play "reasonable impartial observers" in situations where a subject-matter expert would immediately recognize partisan astroturfing and nuke it.
- empressplay 5mo agoDisinformation isn't about convincing you that something is true; it's about convincing you that nothing is true. If information is considered to be unreliable, you are less likely to act on it decisively.
- jfengel 5mo agoIt also seems to have the effect of encouraging you to latch on to whatever "truth" you fancy, providing tools to dismiss any contradictions. I don't quite get how that keeps people from applying those critical tools to their own beliefs, but we certainly see that a lot. People show up with a Gish gallop attack, without considering the sources that they're using for it. Regardless, the effect is that in a world that has deliberately deprived people of certainty, they'll defend their own personal domains literally to the death.
- rdm_blackhole 5mo agoAnd the next question is who's to blame? News organizations each push their own agendas by misrepresenting facts or present rumors or second comments as certainty. Then months later, we finally learn really what happened and realize that a lot of the context of story was missing or completely fabricated. Then we lament at the death of democracy.
- Eyeland0 5mo agoReplacing the question of truth vs. falsehood is the question of effective influence. What is the influence of a message on its audience?
- Applejinx 5mo agoYou would think they'd run out of money. They are, but clearly this sort of thing is economical, especially in the age of AI: you don't even need banks of cellphones on little stands anymore, that was years ago. Technology evolves. The interesting part is not that this is happening, but the means and extent to which it happens. Who expects Wikipedia to be more resilient than, say, network television?
- nashashmi 5mo agoCan someone do another research article of similar nature for Wikipedia articles in any way related to Israel? There is a similar disinformation campaign happening there.
- flexagoon 5mo agoI've seen claims about Wikipedia pushing both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine agenda, depending on who you ask. Which only makes me think that the real bias lies in the reader.
- Pay08 5mo agoThat's because apparently adhering to Wikipedia's own policies is a "pro-Israel" agenda. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (the founders of Wikipedia) have both called out the site/foundation on this, but I can't find the one on Sanger from a more trustworthy source than the New York Post. https://www.theverge.com/news/813245/wikipedia-co-founder-jimmy-wales-gaza-genocide https://www.theverge.com/news/813245/wikipedia-co-founder-ji... https://nypost.com/2025/03/10/business/wikipedia-disrupted-by-edit-wars-to-manipulate-pages-on-war-in-gaza-report/ https://nypost.com/2025/03/10/business/wikipedia-disrupted-b...
- nashashmi 5mo agoOn the current events page, yes there is a bias. It will take time for them to be ironed out. I was referring to misinformation and disinformation on historical events. I have seen two parallel articles, the second created to give an incorrect narrative, of an event.
- cbondurant 5mo agoWhat an interesting article that definitely isn't pulling incredibly obvious red scare tactics. I'd be quite interested to know what damn article it was that was apparently so out of touch with reality that it left this author reeling in shock and horror. Perhaps they neglected to mention what Wikipedia article it was, because they knew that if people were able to visit the page, look through its edit history, and inspect the content of its talk page, they would be able to come to their own conclusion that the author's claims are overstated, sensationalist fearmongering? In a time where the US federal government is trying its hardest to undermine the freedoms of its own people, I find any accusations of foreign actors to be laughable. You know its funny, I think I'm less worried about people on the other side of the planet stealing my personal data and trying to influence the way I think than I am about the people in the same country as me. Since, you know, not only would it be easier for them to, since we are in the same country, but also they stand to gain a lot more from it as well!
- talon8635 5mo agoIf we don’t assume the world revolves around the USA for just one minute, how might the fine people of Poland and Estonia interpret this comment? One wonders. It seems everything online, including the HN comments section, has become corroded by information warfare.
- giardini 5mo agoWell, back to Britanica!
- dyauspitr 5mo ago[flagged]
- tremon 5mo agoTo whom do sovereign countries need to prove their value?
- dyauspitr 5mo agoThe world at large?
- lpcvoid 5mo ago[flagged]
- yamisnotreal 5mo agoYou're not wrong. Capitalism really does seem to be falling apart.
- 3pt14159 5mo agoAlthough I believe that the war in Ukraine is unjust, I still do love Russia. They are an extreme people and that cuts both ways. If you learn even a little bit of their language and make friends with Russians you will see a glimpse of the Russian soul. It is a tragedy that they didn’t join NATO after the Cold War ended.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoI like individual Russians. My question is what does that country contribute to the world currently?
- junaru 5mo agoIt's not genuine and very opaquely biased. The same can be asked about any country depending on whos opinion you accepted as your truth. Theres always their side, your side and the truth. There's a push for extremes on both sides and both refuse to acknowledge it. It's as if the conflict is good for something...
- piokoch 5mo agoWell, not only Russia, there is a number of other countries that also do this. So don't count on wikipedia on any topic that might be politically difficult for someone.
- bijowo1676 5mo ago[flagged]
- keyme 5mo ago[flagged]
- jdonaldson 5mo ago[flagged]
- Bridged7756 5mo ago[flagged]
- jancsika 5mo ago> Yesterday, I read a Wikipedia page for a book I’m about to review. Without buying a new copy of that Wikipedia page on Amazon and comparing it to an old copy from Ebay, there's just no easy way to verify this. It'd be neat if there were a way to take every letter of these different versions of the Wikipedia articles and pretend they are numbers. Then subtract them from each other, and collate all the ones that don't come out zero. The author would still have to publish this "difference article" to Amazon so we could universally locate the resource. So I totally understand why they didn't do that expensive work. It's just frustrating nobody has solved this rocket science-level problem in 2026.
- tim333 5mo agoAll Wikipedia pages have a full record of past versions if you click view history,
- engineer_22 5mo ago[dead]
- lpcvoid 5mo ago[dead]
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- pphysch 5mo ago[flagged]
- lpcvoid 5mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 5mo agoWe've banned this account. It's always been against the guidelines to engage in political or ideological battle on HN, and repeatedly posting slurs about an entire nation is never acceptable here. It's one thing to critique a nation’s government and military in recent times; quite another to slur an entire people and its culture and history. HN is a site that reaches everywhere in the world and welcomes people from every nation, and it's not cool to post in ways that make people feel they don't belong here simply because of the country they were born into. Further, almost all your comments in recent days have been inflammatory, fulminatory or merely curmudgeonly, all of which is explicitly against the guidelines. We've asked you before to observe the guidelines, and with this pattern of activity in the past few days, a ban is necessary if we're to have any standards at all. If you don't want to be banned, you can email us (hn@ycombinator.com) and commit to respecting the site and its guidelines in future.
- tryauuum 5mo agoBTW, the page about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war in russian wikipedia was surprisingly good. No "special military operation" crap
- britta 5mo agoI want the equivalent of Mythos for Wikipedia - I want world-class tooling that helps human editors efficiently find, prioritize, and mitigate attempts to add deceptive and low-quality content - and I know it's possible to build this kind of thing. A whole bunch of long-time editors, including myself, are excited about building better tools, trying a range of experiments. This is one of the really fun parts about a community-built encyclopedia: you can help build tools too! A few interesting experiments - you can also use these as a Wikipedia reader (some require logging in): * Cite Unseen (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cite_Unseen https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cite_Unseen): show icons in an article's References section that indicate what the Wikipedia community knows about that source, such as whether a website is a known unreliable source - such as whether a source is banned on Russian and/or Ukrainian Wikipedia. [https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/kevinpayravi/cite-unseen https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/kevinpayravi/cite-unseen] * AI Source Verification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alaexis/AI_Source_Verification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alaexis/AI_Source_Verific...): use LLMs to help check whether the citations in an article support the claims, providing a summarized report. [https://github.com/alex-o-748/citation-checker-script https://github.com/alex-o-748/citation-checker-script] * Suggestion Mode (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Suggestion_Mode https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Suggestion_Mode): provide automatic in-line edit suggestions, including using small language models to detect potential tone issues. Demo: https://www.tiktok.com/@wikipedia/video/7634591061553237266?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/@wikipedia/video/7634591061553237266?... * Microtask Generator (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Micro-task_Generator_for_Organizers_on_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Micro-task_Generato...): provide a list of prioritized edit suggestions based on the editor's choice of category. [https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/toolforge-repos/microtask-generator https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/toolforge-repos/microtask-gener...] * WikiTask Pro (https://nethahussain.github.io/wikitask-pro/ https://nethahussain.github.io/wikitask-pro/ + https://github.com/nethahussain/wikitask-pro https://github.com/nethahussain/wikitask-pro) - another approach to integrating signals to recommend potential edits to editors. There are also interesting conversations happening about developing and maintaining better data about questionable sources - check out this amazing compilation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kuru/fakesources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kuru/fakesources Some places to stay in touch with these things if you're interested: https://www.wikicred.org/ https://www.wikicred.org/ + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AI_Tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AI_Tools (not all of these kinds of tools involve AI, but it's a component of various things people are working on). If you’re in the SF Bay Area, come to our meetups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bay_Area_Wikipedians_User_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bay_Area_Wikipedians...
- shevy-java 5mo agoRussia is hardly the only one trying to put propaganda into Wikipedia. Wikipedia is great in general, but the quality of articles often is lacking. And some do have a lot of details and, to some extent, quality, but Average Joe - including me - often does not understand anything. I have this issue with mathematics on Wikipedia; on other websites it is often better explained. Wikipedia needs to improve here.
- britta 5mo agoCome help! When you come across a math article on Wikipedia that you find difficult to understand, consider writing a talk page comment with specific, polite, constructive feedback. That can help other editors figure out how to improve the article. We have a goal of making articles understandable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_technical_articles_understandable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_technical_artic...
- ibaikov 5mo agoI, uh, read the title as 'Russian poisons wikipedia', as if there is a list of poisons Russia uses...
- fabiopicchi 5mo ago[flagged]
- kennywinker 5mo agoThis is whataboutism - an unhelpful comparison to something else bad to dismiss criticism. If you had said “the US and Britain also does this, we need ways to combat state propaganda on wikipedia” it would be a helpful addition to the conversation.
- fabiopicchi 5mo agoIt wouldn't be helpful. It would be a way of ending the conversation in a neutral "everyone is bad" tone while concealing the difference in scale of the violations committed by the different parties. I didn't dismiss any criticism, I just said that, "given the scale of what imperialist countries do, pointing your finger at Russia is silly". Concealing the scale is the best way to keep the status quo, it is how US and Israel can call anyone terrorist while they murder tens of thousands of people. I don't believe there is a solution to state propaganda on Wikipedia. There is good, bad, and biased (which can be useful for analysis) information there, and the "solution" is to read things critically.
- kennywinker 5mo agoPretty silly of you to say “I didn't dismiss any criticism” when your comment was clearly dismissive of criticism of russian propaganda: “Pretty silly to point the finger at Russia” But you have a point - “both bad” can be used to hide one really-bad thing by putting it next to a kinda-bad thing. I don’t believe there is a solution per se, but there are ways to combat it beyond just reading critically.
- talon8635 5mo agoMight as well cite a used piece of TP: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-grayzone/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-grayzone/
- euphetar 5mo agoNo link to edits or specific article. Disappointed. This shouldn't be front page as it contains no substance besides speculation
- CrzyLngPwd 5mo agoWhy hone in on Russia, when practically every country does it?
- cindyllm 5mo ago[dead]
- esbranson 5mo agoBecause they suck at it, would by guess. And other countries are honed in on in other HN topics (even within this one), this is one of the few for the Russian SFSR/F.
- a96 5mo agoMaybe because they've started the WWIII that's simmering on as these words are written.
- CrzyLngPwd 5mo agoDon't panic. The regional conflict in Ukraine is no more a world war than the US attacking Iran is a world war...well, aside from the US being half a world away from Iran and being threatened by Iran like a little girl is threatened by a spider.
- esbranson 5mo agoToo bad they can't really remove entrenched information about their government systems, which are becoming easier to gain understanding of, often with official assistance. It is only going to increase despair in their country and without as knowledge of its formal descriptions get more detached from knowledge of actual federal subject governance, with no democratic outlets for change. Though I'm sure in the central okrug, and even in the Pecherskyi raion, they don't realize this.
- tim333 5mo agoA problem with Russia in particular is they put so much money into that stuff. Estimate here >[According to] Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, Russia spends some $2bn a year on cognitive warfare https://ecfr.eu/publication/from-shield-to-sword-europes-offensive-strategy-for-the-hybrid-age https://ecfr.eu/publication/from-shield-to-sword-europes-off...
- CamperBob2 5mo agoThat's the whole problem with Russia. They would rather spend $10 to fuck with other countries than $1 improving their own.
- dzhiurgis 5mo agoResource curse
- theshrike79 5mo agoThey have a 1000 year history on the former, very little experience on the latter.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- afroboy 5mo agoSame problem with every country, check how much US is paying in foreign terrorism.
- drysine 5mo ago>They would rather spend $10 to fuck with other countries than $1 improving their own. Where did you get that idea?
- CamperBob2 5mo agoConsider if all the money wasted on the Ukraine invasion had been spent on (or by) the Russian people instead. Even if you won the war tomorrow, it'd take a hundred years to recover.
- moondowner 5mo agoNation states have been editing history related pages on Wikipedia for ages, it has never been a reliable source of information on some topics.
- scoofy 5mo agoWikipedia is useful because of the citations. We don’t teach philosophy in school, so people don’t have an actual conception of what truth even means.
- inquirerGeneral 5mo ago[dead]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- brachkow 5mo agoI believe it is common for governments to do wiki editing as PR strategy. I actively browse Wikipedia in English, Polish and Russian, and see a lot of traces of government efforts. For example in Poland related topics: - Russian articles usually have negative stance, and articles have a lot of very strange quotes like wiki editor interviewed some person from 1920 in a bar with a drink. Most of these quotes are either folk anecdotes or made up by author. Not related to Polish topic – Russian editors are also dominating Russian Wikipedia, and significantly affect important articles for other russian-spoken countries like Belarus, Ukraine and countries of post-soviet east. - English articles about PLC are actively edited by Lithuanian editors. Polish nobles are renamed into Lithuanian manner, despite they definitely didn't knew Lithuanian and had absolutely slavic names, only by the fact they had any position on territory of modern Lithuanian or participated on event that considered "good" by Lithuanian historicans While I annoyed by these events, I think it's big win for a country if it can do that. Being able to shape opinions via "neutral" source is a big PR win. And country PR is very important – just look at "nice" Switzerland or Japan, catastrophic PR failure of Israel in recent years, or what oil-rich Arabic world does right now.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- gibberish78 5mo agoHey Tom, Go fuck yourself.