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.
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.
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.
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…
> 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.
In the first year or so of the english Wikipedia, I was very engaged in adding content but never really tried to engage with the community. I started adding articles about my topic of interest at the time, which was New York 80s punk and hardcore bands. Soon, I had the lot of my articles deleted for "lacking relevance".
The German Wikipedia is the main reason I keep my country setting on DDG off. That way I get en.wikipedia.org results first.
> 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
I once asked on (then) Twitter why they kept that crappy design, and got the most depressing NIMBY answers on even making the new design optional. That really killed any rest of hope I had for the German Wikipedia. Glad to hear that at least that tiny improvement made it.
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.
One of the obstacles to getting that point of view across is that very few of the people in countries with a majority religion (which is most countries) see criticism of their government's history as criticism of their religion. I've never really heard a Christian complain about the treatment of the thirty years war in history books, and that's presented in an extremely negative light. The equation you're making doesn't have a lot of traction in the broader world.
It's not documenting historical facts about Israel that's problematic, it's using that history to justify calls for the destruction of Israel. Does anyone cite the Thirty Years' War to advocate for the destruction of Germany?
One issue that occurs is when person A is criticized for documenting historical facts on the basis that since person B has in other contexts used them as a pretext for something wrong, person C, after finding out about the historical facts, might independently come to the same conclusion as person B. The effect is to treat person A's documentation activity with the same approach as person C's eventual choices.
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.
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).
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.
Nah she's just going where the money is. Look at how that page is all about telling her core market what they want to hear, and that she's happy to accept their money for a speaking engagement.
It reminds me a bit of campus preachers. They would go to great lengths to describe just how fallen they were before they found Jesus. By inflating how fallen they were, it made for a more dramatic, and to some people, more affirming message of the power of the Gospel. I don't doubt the people felt transformed, but they were motivated my narrative purpose as much as by factual history.
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.
Let’s get real, they can search. HN doesn’t have a repo of acronyms and this isn’t a technical document where you need to spell out the acronym on first use
Of course, but if everyone does it, it is very inconvenient to read and in some case leaves unnecessary space for misunderstanding. Usually, acronyms are followed by the full wording the first time they are mentioned.
While this is true, I don't think I have heard/read it once in more than a year, maybe five, actually. It's not used anymore. Pretty much anyone not MAGA has become "leftist", these days.
Usually hijacked and paid by quatar, russia or china. Its always fascinating how fast that im against injustice at home chute leads to "i support a monstrous regime abroad".
The cognitive dissonance can be disturbing. A frightening number of people never grew past a child's logic of "X has problems -> X is the worst thing ever -> if I hate X then that must mean I love the opposite of X" and suddenly they're a trans activist (which is a good thing, to be clear) frothing at the mouth in absolutist terms to defend people who want them dead..
Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can appraise the situation, Israel sucks and has a somewhat higher incidence of committing war crimes than other western countries, but Palestine would suck even worse if you switched their places around, the only thing holding them back from committing much worse atrocities being lack of resources, going by their human rights record and direct statements from their leadership. Israel isn't executing anyone for being gay for example. But out of many factors, one being some left leaning people taking the mental shortcut that the anti-American option is always more intellectual and "owns the conservatives", we've ended up in this nonsense scenario.
It's a term for anyone from a centrist liberal to a Greenpeace activist, with the implication that having left-of-median politics and understanding race and demography as anything other than biological essentialism makes you an utter loon. It is really only used by people who would describe themselves as "anti-woke".
The person he's referencing, specifically, got really pilled by evangelical Christianity and believes that anyone advocating for liberal causes has created a religion out of nebulous cultural values, unmoored from god. She blames the "cult of SJW" for the kind of character assassination she claims to have done, that it was the force of rootless bolshevism that was responsible for her supposedly destroying lives and careers by making up(?) relationships and cultural crimes on whole webs of Wikipedia articles.
The great thing about SJW is it tells you even more about the person using the term that the target. It’s your grandparents’ equivalent of “woke mind virus”.
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.
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.
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.
As a long-term editor, this is pretty off base. The discussion [1] that led to Grayzone being deprecated had almost nothing to do with Israel/Palestine. Meanwhile most Israel/Palestine articles are driven by Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and similar sources, while many Jewish sources (ADL, Jewish Chronicle, NGO Monitor, etc) are banned or restricted.
One example of a heavily debated neutrality issue was the opening paragraph of the Zionism article, which ended up like this. Surely noone would call this remotely pro-Israel? "Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible."
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.
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?
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.
My impression has been that the project has never been fully scoped and kind of bounced around between teams with nobody ever fully dedicated to seeing it through to completion. Scope creep and a whole lot of competing ideas, on top of a genuinely hard to solve set of problems has caused it to get put on the back burner more than once.
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.
It's going to be a Achilles heel for Wikipedia one day, mark my words. Those LTA pages often contains a lot of personal information which would violate GDPR in Europe, at least based on what I've heard from NOYB so far. Some editors have expressed their concerns about this.
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.
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.
Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a source, so "reliable" here has to mean "reliably presenting a full range of notable sources". No editor should be saying you can rely on claims found in Wikipedia, except in the sense of relying that the claims are in the sources.
(Except the claim as stated isn't always in the source anyway. Best to check.)
> The way we determine reliability is typically based on the reputation for editorial oversight, and for factchecking and corrections. For example, if you have a reference book that is published by a reputable publisher that has an editorial board and that has edited the book for accuracy, if you know of a newspaper that has, again, an editorial team that is reviewing articles and issuing corrections if there are any errors, those are probably reliable sources.
Yeah. Also, if a specific source is used a lot, it often gets put on a discussion where people vote on how reliable it is. If it's considered unreliable, the use of it will be banned.
Love the use of the "we" word here. :) What is counted as a reliable source is voted on on one of Wikipedia's meta pages. So "reliability" is not based on any factual circumstances, but on whether the vote is won or lost. And you can trivially game that using sock/meat puppetry. Notwithstanding, White's claimed policy heavily favors Western media giants such as The New York Times and The Washington Post which many editors know about. However, the actual information they publish are often much less accurate than what is published in specialized trade magazines or even activist blogs.
They sure do, it's still those who amass the most votes who gets to decide. And it leads to clownish ridiculous results. ADL is listed three times as green, yellow, and red. Comment says "There is consensus that the ADL is a generally unreliable source for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, due to significant evidence that the ADL acts as a pro-Israeli advocacy group and has repeatedly published false and misleading statements as fact, un-retracted, regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict." So an organization that has "repeatedly" been caught spreading false and misleading statements is still a reliable source. LOL
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.
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:
> 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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
I don't know what you mean by "embellished". Are you saying the statements in Wikipedia are false?
And yes, obviously controversy will focus on the one controversial detail. There are hundreds of other details that are not controversial, so they aren't mentioned.
I don't understand why this bothers you. The world is a controversial place. It's good to document these things.
If something is controversial to an insignificantly small number of people, is it by definition a controversy?
Hypothetically speaking, let's say you were a famous or notable person. Your Wikipedia article would probably have a controversy section with a vague statement like, "Some people find crazygringo's feet objectionable."
The citation would be a podcast where a guest told the host in an offhand comment, "I went on a date with crazygringo once and thought he had oddly-shaped feet."
Any attempt to delete this statement, even by you with full knowledge of your own feet, would be reverted as 'vandalism'.
This is Wikipedia in a nutshell.
Articles for celebrities and political figures are full of this garbage, which merely 10 years ago we would consider exclusively tabloid fodder.
I've read articles on complete nobody actresses with a controversy section that listed any and every political opinion she's ever said. It's a lame attempt to extrapolate (or reimagine) someone's entire personality from a few offhand statements made once in her life.
It's low quality content like this that undermines Wikipedia. Unfortunately it's all over the site and growing by the day.
It’s a post facto embellishment for modern times. When that movie came out, no one was saying that nor is it relevant or correct. We might as well put a controversy template on every Wikipedia page and wait for someone to invent a perceived injustice.
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"
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.
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/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...) 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.
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.
> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.
There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to. After Wikipedia went big in the 2000s it was for a very long time a de-facto monopoly for people seeking out reference information on the Internet. Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years. Same goes for Everipedia as well.
> There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to.
It is not survivorship bias to point out that the survivor survived.
> Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years.
Not “faltering after a few years” is part of “succesfully navigating that minefield”. If you fall out of the “race” no matter how good your policies would be otherwise you won’t be a reliable source of information. Because your can’t be if you no longer exists.
This is not a statement about what could have worked, this is a statement about what did work. And there survival is a necessary ingredient of success.
It is indeed a survivorship bias since we have no good other sample in the form of competitor to compare to, like how Pepsi is to Coca-Cola. Which part of my statement you find difficult to understand?
> Which part of my statement you find difficult to understand?
I understand your whole statement perfectly. It is just wrong. My understanding is not the problem here.
We are not comparing them to other samples. We say that out of the currently existing X they are the best.
Imagine a town with 3 bakeries. Lets call them A, B, and C. Bakery A gets shut down by the health deparment and B goes bankrupt. Then we can, rightfully and without survivorship bias, call C the best run bakery of the town. Because if you get shut down by the health department, or you go bankrupt then by definition you are not the best run bakery. (Obviously it is not a high praise with that kind of competitions, but they still are the best run bakery.)
Staying in the business is not some incidental part of “being the best run bakery”. It is a core component of it.
Imagine a marathon with 100 runners. Henry runs the fastest time, and 25 others do not finish. Some got lost, some had medical issues during the race. Is it survivorship bias to call Henry the fastest competitor in that race? Of course not. You need to finish the race to be even considered to be the fastest. Just because there are others who didn’t make it, doesn’t make him somehow not the fastest. Definietly doesn’t make calling him the fastest “survivorship bias”.
Finishing the race is a core component of “being the fastest finisher”.
Similarly in the case of wikipedia. If other similar sites stopped operating then they by definition did not “successfully navigated that minefield”. Their bakery is shut and they did not finish their marathon. That is the very definition of “not succesfully navigating that minefield”.
This is how rationalwiki defines survivorship bias: “Survivorship bias is a cognitive bias that occurs when focusing on entities that made it past a selection process, while overlooking those that didn't.”
We are not overlooking the failed attempts here. We are considering them.
Bakery A and B is worse run than C. And we know that because they got shut down.
The runners who did not finish the marathon are not faster than Henry. And we know that because they haven’t finished the marathon.
The abandoned community edited websites are worse at “successfully navigating that minefield” than the ones which are still operating. We know that because they are no longer operating. They were not overlooked.
What you are missing is that the “selection process” here is not some independent, and unrelated thing. The selection process is, at least in part, is what we are talking about. You cannot be considered the best run bakery unless you are running a bakery. You cannot be considered the fastest racer unless you finished the race. And your community edited website cannot be the one who most succesfully navigates a minefield unless you are navigating the minefield at all.
Please let me know if any of the above is unclear. Happy to go into details.
I think the goalpost is being moved. Your initial criteria was all about the resilency against state-sponsored disinformation attempts and the gaming of systems. For that criteria we don't have a comparable sample to look into when evaluating Wikipedia's.
By comparable, I'm meaning an alternative or competitor that had gained equal prominence as Wikipedia, in terms of Google search results, and the eyes of the whole world, again like what Pepsi is to Coca-Cola and vice versa. We would have something to compare to in terms of the criteria if Google has given their favoritism to one or more other platforms, instead of just Wikipedia.
> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.
I don't believe this is the case, the Israeli/Palestine are restricted to long-time contributors, so the articles are either messy and unmaintained due to lack of editors, or worse, edited only by members of influence campaigns who have scared away everyone else
That's right. They only survived because competitions were crushed out with both network effects, and the help of Google which reportedly prioritizes Wikipedia in search results while downranking any others which could challenge Wikipedia.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Can you point out any factual errors in the article, with sources that demonstrate the error?
> The pro-gamergate editors were completely shut out of that article eventually and the article doesn't even mention any perspectives from the other side
The "pro-gamergate" perspective is described in the very first sentence under "Purpose and goals":
The most active Gamergate supporters or "Gamergaters" said that Gamergate was a movement for ethics in games journalism, for protecting the "gamer" identity, and for opposing "political correctness" in video games and that any harassment of women was done by others not affiliated with Gamergate.
Then why are other language articles completely different? Have you gone and checked? Are all the other articles just wrong? Why is the "consensus" for the gamergate article citing direct primary sources that were involved and attacked by gamergate instead of reliable and impartial secondary sources? Nobody has even bothered addressing any of questions or points i brought up yet. Because they break the narrative.
The way the article is written is arguably biased and irrational on it's face, when reading it you should get the feeling of something being amiss and information being excluded. Sometimes you can just tell when writing is biased based on the language, it's a pattern that's good to learn.
Wikipedias policies to promote neutrality are often counter productive.
Because neutrality is hard to define, what these policies actually do is progressively raise the effort required to keep or remove a particular point of view. Unfortunately, requiring more effort also means substituting the point of view of knowledgeable but time poor and inexperienced contributors, with the point of view of time rich chronic contributors and admins. The result is that instead of neutrality, you actually select for the strongest held points of view of a small ingroup of chronic users. The viewpoint diversity of such users is extremely low, which is why you’ll notice all controversial topics tend to lean a certain way.
"Gamergate was actually 8chan communists fighting sensasionalist journalism but their message was then twisted and used against them to push people into far-right MAGA."
Amazing... I can't tell if you are trolling or seriously think this.
Communists no, young progressives yes. It's kind of insane to believe that a majority audience of gamers in the year 2014 would be anything but progressive, at least until the entire media turned on them and orchestrated a misinformation campaign out of a combination of a core of malice then a majority of laziness.
I think your view of gamergate is absolutely fucking delusional. I watched it all go down in real time like many of us did. Saying Gamergate was about ethics in games journalism is roughly as accurate as saying the US Civil War was about "states rights". In that it is kinda sorta technically true if you ignore 99% of what was actually happening.
You mean you watched people writing misinformation articles smearing people in realtime, or were you actually on the hubs where gamergate was organized? There is a big difference between these things, and no there were not people organizing for "misogyny campaigns" the discussion was 99% corruption and ethics focused. Especially in gaming circles of 2014 which were very progressive.
Quite frankly i find people who think there were actually some kind of organized misogyny campaigns in 2014 to be a form of insane, like something breaks inside a person because they need a bogeyman so badly that it becomes a core of their being even though it's incredibly irrational. At the time journalists would just take random twitter people who weren't affiliated with gamergate and hold them up as if they represented the movement. Reminds of me the tactics used against occupy wall street honestly. It's not a rational or reasonable belief.
for those doubting this claim, the secret mailing list "GameJournoPros" used by journalists to collude is not even mentioned once, and is akin to scrubbing the holocaust article of the word "jew"
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.
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.
"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.
More and more, especially in engineering, I am in contact with people who just want everything to be easy to understand in TikTok length video clips or short posts.
Some things are hard to understand, dynamic systems especially, black or white answers do not exist.
(Sorry for the slightly off-topic/meta rant. This hit a nerve by me.)
Well, I believe things with serious consequences like banning someone permanently - should indeed be presented clearly. Exactly because I know some organisations like to shield themself from criticism, by having a intransparent process.
It's pretty straightforward but nothing on Wikipedia is really black-and-white. Most decisions are made through a consensus process. It's really quite different from what most people are used to.
A good place to start for information about how user blocking is done would be the following links:
In this case I think that a sock puppet account can be trivially blocked without much process as long as it can be proved that it is operated by someone who is already blocked for some violation. The sock puppet is an attempt at evading the block that was placed on that user's other account.
That's right. Often due process is skipped even if the blocks turn out to be errors or collateral damages later. It's not going to be 100% perfect at all because stylometries can be obfuscated (see https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7345380/) and there are tools like VNC and residential proxy applications to evade IP-based tracing and detection.
You may believe your position is:
> should indeed be presented clearly. Exactly because I know some organisations like to shield themself from criticism, by having a intransparent process
but
> Because it is extremely hard to figure out what is going on. Lots of mysterious abbreviations. Unclear timeline.
> 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?
your position aligns with someone who desires decision with serious consequences to be easy to understand.
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.
> But in a real court, I can see the verdict and the laws that were broken. All in complicated, but readable english.
Thats not really true either. There is a lot to unpack to understand court cases. Just the hearsay rule and its exception would fill a book. Jurisdiction, double jeopardy, means rea, “reasonable man”, Brady disclosure, fruit of poisonous tree, presumption of regularity, habeas corpus, SLAP, reasonable doubt, writ of mandamus, motion to dismiss, motion to supress, motion for change of venue, motion in limine, amicus curiae, consideration. Just to unpack the latin terms makes your head spin, and then you will be caught out by some term with some seamingly easy to understand common meaning used in surprising ways.
One can almost say it is a whole profession to understand what is going on in court. We could call them lawyers or something if we want to be fancy about it. And then turns out even those specialist further specialise in narrower areas.
Unavoidably, some of the administration is probably done by undisclosed paid editors who administer to gain goodwill as a defense against allegations of paid editing.
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_investiga...
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.