I think the article tried to refer to this link 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.
Look 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.
> They say themselves they were from US State department or CIA histories of those countries.
Given Wikipedia’s rules and origin, it’d make perfect sense if the early articles referenced the CIA World Factbook when describing countries, if that’s what you’re talking about. There was a dearth of online, open source material to draw from 25 years ago, and on the uncontroversial basic facts the factbook would be fine as an up to date online reference until something else was available.
That would be a rather different issue than CENTCOM employees altering descriptions of the history of US government atrocities.
ARIN shows that 214.0.0.0/8 CIDR is still US Department of Defense (or Department of War as Trump and Hegseth aptly call it) but reverse DNS over 20 years later does not still point to the same CENTCOM IP.
Also to a point - US military propaganda arm was doing this over 20 years ago. After getting the gift of country articles to mostly come verbatim from CIA and US State department sheets.
> The moderation of this website is downright shameful.
It's more like a series of tradeoffs compared to other platforms when it comes to features and userbase tendencies, and none are perfect. Every platform sucks in some way.
Also, users (and user bots) do the flagging here, not moderators.
Yes, the fact that the paid moderators of the site let the users do the work for them so they don’t have to work themselves is one of the shames of the moderation of this site, but there’s much more.
They shouldn’t allow users to moderate the site, even if it means longer response times to remove spam, since it very commonly leads to the users abusing that power to remove things that they do not like even if they do not break the rules. That happens very often and the moderators are okay with it because allowing users to remove other users’ content so it goes with the “editorial line” of the commenters of the site lowers dissent and therefore they have to work less.
You sure seem to have an axe to grind with this site in particular, when in reality it is not wholly better or worse than any other social media / discussion platform. In fact, in some ways it's somewhat innovative with some really simple ideas that help distinguish it from the rest.
I don't know why you think moderators should work for free. That's up to the platform to decide.
Also, I'd take the lenience found on HN any day over the ban hammer / shadow ban / user siloing approaches that others sites cave to. As we've seen, there is no perfect approach.
I'm glad we agree on the first point, and sorry if I misunderstood you on that.
As for shadow banning, yes it is employed here on occasion, but I'm speaking strictly from my own experience with the site. I regularly take large steaming shits on various capital interests in favor of the hacker ethos, and so far it has always been permitted (and is not hard to verify it isn't shadow banned). That this site is the child of SV monied interests says at least something positive about their tolerance for these things compared to other sites like X/reddit/bluesky who all have the groupthink/echo chamber concept polished quite well by now.
its a dated article, but the concept of IP spoof works, and has been modified to fit the state of tech, its more than just forging the return address in an IP header.
The term IP spoofing used to really only apply to some networking layer in my experience, placing bogus ips in headers was more likely called header forgery and happened in the application. It wouldn't make sense for wikipedia to rely on easily forged headers when they can simply examine the network connection and use that address.
Actual IP spoofing still can't really impersonate a valid tcp connection unless its all send and no read, even with your second link, both sides of the "tunnel" have to spoof the source ip in their messages so thats not likely going to happen with wikipedia unless their security gets broken somehow and in that case well all bets are off lol
Isn't an actual technique, it's describing the observed result if the server were to blindly trust some HTTP headers which is just the application payload in a TCP stream. It's not spoofing the IP at any network layer.
Requires mutually agreed spoofing on both sides... at which point it's not really spoofing and also clearly not applicable because Wikipedia will not agree to it. (It is useful in the context that they're using it, just not at all what you're talking about)
Without controling a router that's on the path or being able to publish a route that contains the IP address you're trying to spoof, there is no way to spoof an IP address in bidirectional communication.
"blindly trust some HTTP headers"
"Without controling a router"
"Requires mutually agreed spoofing on both sides"
you understand the concepts, and the requirements for POC, but you are not the only one.
and for those who want a working weapon,they will have to identify ALL the requirements and implement it themselves. im not about to leave the weapon loaded and fully assembled in a public place.
it sounds like you are fully capable of manufacturing that weapon if you really wanted to.
also people really are soft, it starts with soc eng, and goes from there.
It'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.
In general imperalism is annoying to no ends. Smaller countries get abused.
I think this is not really connected to Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a quality-control problem; even if all state-actors were not to try to ruin Wikipedia, that quality-control issue would still persist. Wikipedia needs to improve its intrinsic quality. Instead what it seems to do as of late, is make pointless UI changes. I hate this "you can hide the toolkit here" - that simply should not be on by default. I only want the content as-is, not side bars with useless things I am never going to use anyway.
The fact that the bad actions of only one of the sides is so widely broadcasted must be explicitly noted though.
We should not be living in some perpetual Gell-Mann Amnesia state where we just react to the current news report in whatever appropriate manner while forgetting all of the old news, history, and so on around it.
I 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.
Quite the opposite, in fact. But there’s a difference between the information being present somewhere, and a reasonable way to get that information in front of people in an actionable form.
We’re drowning in “information,” at present. But the mass media narratives that are most readily available distort things quite a bit for a lot of reasons. (Ratings, owner bias/interference, format.)
See, from my perspective, that is exactly the problem. The people pushing said "anti-imperialist, anti-US" content are often the same people that defend Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The reality however, is that these are niche bubbles empowered by the internet. Once we realise how harmful they are, they'll be moderated or cut off.
Like god frobid you will know about McCain, Nuland and what have you changing the Kiev regime in 2013 despite literal photos. Imagine the shitstorm if Russian state department officials were giving out food to guys that were attacking Capitol in 2021
The thing you are referencing says US reconsidered the support in the end of 2023 yet here is a happy photo of McCane from the deleted article from december 2023:
In 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.
First of all, I'd like to thank you for a more nuanced and substantial comment. It stands in stark difference from the one I responded to.
While I agree the author of the article is either ignorant of or conveniently ignoring the fact that the West has certainly done plenty to "...fight on the battlefield...[of] the internet", I also think it's a mistake to simply refer to Pravda-fr.com or Storm-1516 as merely "the other side". It's manifestly propaganda.
I have lots of energy for talking about all the messed up things the US government has and continues to do, esp. in the information space. I just don't know why we can't talk about Russian or Chinese imperialism or propaganda without doing so. It's not zero-sum; saying bad things about Russia is not saying great things about its enemies, and vice-versa.
I never said this was zero sum game. I just think its humorous when folks get spun up about russian or chinese propoganda, as if our own intelligence agencies aren't actively managing (to a far greater degree, I assume, due to their location in western datacenters) online sources like wikipedia.
It's all propaganda. They even wrote a book (the book) about it:
The 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.
> 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.
Genuinely 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.
Too 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.
I 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):
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
Because 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.
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.
I’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.
Most 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.
the "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)"
> 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.
I personally would prefer "Reichskommissariat Norwegen" and "Estonian SSR" right on the person's page in wikipedia. Then I don't have to navigate to another page to learn who was in power that time.
That leads to absurd situations where three brothers born in the same maternity ward, one year apart, are listed as having been born in the "Republic of Estonia" (1939), the "Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union" (1940), and the "Reichskommissariat Ostland, Germany" (1941).
In general-purpose biographies written for a global audience, this level of detail is unnecessarily confusing. "Estonia" itself is obscure enough.
If one certainly wants to emphasize the fact that Estonia was occupied at the time, a reasonable short-form compromise is something like "Estonia (then under Soviet occupation)". Russian trolls on Wikipedia are categorically against it, because their aim is to obscure the fact of occupation and foreign rule, not to emphasize it.
Wikipedia 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.
The 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.
I've heard this a number of times, but how do you imagine this working?
For every legitimate case of a "diverse set of viewpoints" on some hot-button political issue, you have hundreds of crackpots and trolls who want to talk about free energy, telekinesis, chemtrails, and so on. Do you really want to have 50 versions of the article on gravity to choose from, most of them abject nonsense? Who gets to choose which one is given more prominence? If they're given equal weight, then the crackpots win the numbers game because there might be only 1-2 articles representing mainstream scientific thought versus dozens of "here's what I came up with in the shower".
I don't disagree that Wikipedia has some regrettable biases, but the solution probably isn't "allow all viewpoints". Look at the thread you're commenting on and the amount of whataboutism from single-issue accounts who seem to argue that the US is no different from murderous dictatorships.
Yep, 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.
Disinformation 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.
It 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.
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.
Every 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.
"Protection restricts the modification of pages to specific groups of users. Pages are protected when there is disruption that cannot be prevented through other means, such as blocks. Wikipedia is built on the principle that anyone can edit, and therefore aims to have as many pages open for public editing as possible so that anyone can add material and correct issues. This policy states in detail the protection types and procedures for page protection and unprotection, and when each protection should and should not be applied."
My understanding which could be misinformed is that this tool is selectively applied to articles that parties are not interested in. Of course this could be meant to make people distrust the platform but it could also be true.
I for one will always assume the site is entirely fan fiction unless I can prove otherwise much like the SteamPunk artwork that people keep calling quantum computers.
How 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
Familiar 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.
Russia 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.
Come 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_artic...
Well, 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.
You 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?
Can 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.
I'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.
That'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.
It 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.
They'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.
Even 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).
I 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.
OK, 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.
What 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.
Most people lack principles and act purely emotionally. It is wicked and evil and vile if Russia does something because it is Russia doing it. It is good and right and true if “Western” powers do a thing because it is Western powers doing it. To a principled observer, they’re all evil regardless of which country is doing the thing.
Wikipedia 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.
Why wouldn't they be doing it? They are actively engaged in such campaigns in various other media for foreign audiences. Wikipedia being blocked for the Chinese general population doesn't mean The Party isn't targeting it to influence opinions of non-Chinese in exactly the same way, since it's a fantastic platform with incredible reach and an unrivaled level of trust from the public.
Anyone that does business with China understand that VPN usage is rampant (generally Shadowsocks with V2Ray and the likes, it's plug and play, ton of local companies sell it, on every markets you can buy as well), companies and people aren't actually limited by it, the people that don't circumvent it are often the ones not talking english, there is a huge tolerance as well for businesses, gov is completely aware of the mass "VPN" usage, lot of hotels as well provide you with solutions if you just ask and so-on.
That'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.
Citizens do/can have access to Wikipedia, that's also very naive, estimations range from 15-35% of the population using VPN but in practice, any IT business and all their staff are behind VPNs and it's completely tolerated.
Almost all street markets sell those USB/QRcode to access unrestricted internet.
Most people don't need a VPN as well, similarly to the US population not accessing much of the content from let say Austria, France, Germany... due to language barrier or just not caring at all.
If 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.
All of them, I dislike how people seem to perceive it, while most of the time, politician job is "damage-control" (which practically means pushing an agenda by ensuring the discourse goes the way they want).
And then, we have the international brainwashing, which is where we think we understand a nation we've never even stepped-in but we don't. Anyone that has been in Shenzhen suddenly can see for themself, most US news don't talk about all the greatness in China, literally majority it is to denigrate the country, news are just so annoying in general and people just love to parrot non-sense (or incomplete non-sense, which is the same thing as not understanding at all), politicians understand that, news understand that.
We can observe Google Trends with Ukraine as an example, when the news and politicians switch-up the topic, then most people just stop caring altogether and move-on and go to the next "big thing", all over again.
Not on Wikipedia sure, but they do with many different type of media or local ways which is then translated into the "international news" (with a big sprinkle on top of non-sense and unqualified opinion).
On the contrary, injecting your own views/propaganda in Wikipedia is a great way for your content or your version of history to be included in the outputs of LLMs since they all rely more or less on it during their training phase.
That's the US government and Israeli POV, but the reality is that it is full of large, medium, small and micro manipulation campaigns backed from everybody from nation-states, to video game publishers, to political parties up for reelection defending cuts they made to heating oil subsidies, to people trying to bring up property values in a town in Ohio with a 16K population, all the way down to a guy applying to jobs trying to associate himself with a project that he put on his resume and a guy in an argument on twitter who added something that he needed to win.
It's not a source at all. It should be designed as a guide to sources - one that will allow you to get accurate information about both official statistics and wacky conspiracy theories (which are as important to be accurate in discussing as anything else.) Instead it prefers to be a voice of God, egotistical narcissistic middle-class Western elites, intelligence agencies, and any random manipulator who wants to juice up some stock.
edit: the people trying to get the truth stated plainly (whatever that is to them) into Wikipedia require exactly the same skills as the people who are trying to get consciously deceptive information into Wikipedia. The problem with Wikipedia is that it is a pseudo-government built out of Confucianist aphorisms rather than rules, so instead of being directed by reason, it is ultimately directed by authority. Authority comes from strength, not justice or truth.
The Russian government is so all powerful that they control the minds of the majority of Americans and their leaders. I applaud the brave windmill fighters.
What 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!
Pretty silly to point the finger at Russia when their firepower is obviously much smaller than Western state actors such as the United States and Britain.
This 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.
It 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.
I think the article tried to refer to this link 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.
Wikipedia is full of state-sponsored activity, and even fuller of useful idiots for those states. Russia might not be doing it in particular, though.
A 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-off...
A long list of controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...
Look 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.
> They say themselves they were from US State department or CIA histories of those countries.
Given Wikipedia’s rules and origin, it’d make perfect sense if the early articles referenced the CIA World Factbook when describing countries, if that’s what you’re talking about. There was a dearth of online, open source material to draw from 25 years ago, and on the uncontroversial basic facts the factbook would be fine as an up to date online reference until something else was available.
That would be a rather different issue than CENTCOM employees altering descriptions of the history of US government atrocities.
Seems like the original skepticism about a public, “everyone can edit” Wikipedia is taking shape as international information warfare intensifies.
Especially with LLMs being trained on Wikipedia (probably pretty extensively), the impact of these edits should not be dismissed.
Link to the edit removing your changes?
They removed changes and added their own stuff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/214.13.2...
ARIN shows that 214.0.0.0/8 CIDR is still US Department of Defense (or Department of War as Trump and Hegseth aptly call it) but reverse DNS over 20 years later does not still point to the same CENTCOM IP.
Also to a point - US military propaganda arm was doing this over 20 years ago. After getting the gift of country articles to mostly come verbatim from CIA and US State department sheets.
Gotta love your informative comment was flagged with no explanation or rebuttal.
Agents and government aligned bots curate content here too. Nowhere on the web is safe.
There are gradations between platforms, but I'd generally agree with you.
It's the whataboutism.
The moderation of this website is downright shameful.
> The moderation of this website is downright shameful.
It's more like a series of tradeoffs compared to other platforms when it comes to features and userbase tendencies, and none are perfect. Every platform sucks in some way.
Also, users (and user bots) do the flagging here, not moderators.
Yes, the fact that the paid moderators of the site let the users do the work for them so they don’t have to work themselves is one of the shames of the moderation of this site, but there’s much more.
This is a free to use site. How many moderators do you think they would have to hire to do the work you think they should be doing?
They shouldn’t allow users to moderate the site, even if it means longer response times to remove spam, since it very commonly leads to the users abusing that power to remove things that they do not like even if they do not break the rules. That happens very often and the moderators are okay with it because allowing users to remove other users’ content so it goes with the “editorial line” of the commenters of the site lowers dissent and therefore they have to work less.
A perfectly secure system is one you can’t use.
Another version is:
The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero.
You sure seem to have an axe to grind with this site in particular, when in reality it is not wholly better or worse than any other social media / discussion platform. In fact, in some ways it's somewhat innovative with some really simple ideas that help distinguish it from the rest.
I don't know why you think moderators should work for free. That's up to the platform to decide.
Also, I'd take the lenience found on HN any day over the ban hammer / shadow ban / user siloing approaches that others sites cave to. As we've seen, there is no perfect approach.
First, nowhere in my comment did I say I wanted moderators to work for free.
Second, HN shadowbans all the time - they shadowban so much that regular bans do not even exist here. If they ban you, it will be a shadow ban.
I'm glad we agree on the first point, and sorry if I misunderstood you on that.
As for shadow banning, yes it is employed here on occasion, but I'm speaking strictly from my own experience with the site. I regularly take large steaming shits on various capital interests in favor of the hacker ethos, and so far it has always been permitted (and is not hard to verify it isn't shadow banned). That this site is the child of SV monied interests says at least something positive about their tolerance for these things compared to other sites like X/reddit/bluesky who all have the groupthink/echo chamber concept polished quite well by now.
> some IP at CENTCOM
How was this determined?
Because the IP is in the edit, and the reverse DNS went back there (and ARIN did not disagree)
More info on this in my other reply.
An Introduction to IP Spoofing (and How to Prevent It)
https://kinsta.com/blog/ip-spoofing/
That doesn’t work for an HTTP request (or any stateful communication that requires return traffic)
its a dated article, but the concept of IP spoof works, and has been modified to fit the state of tech, its more than just forging the return address in an IP header.
https://owasp.org/www-community/pages/attacks/ip_spoofing_vi...
https://github.com/ParsaKSH/spoof-tunnel
The term IP spoofing used to really only apply to some networking layer in my experience, placing bogus ips in headers was more likely called header forgery and happened in the application. It wouldn't make sense for wikipedia to rely on easily forged headers when they can simply examine the network connection and use that address.
Actual IP spoofing still can't really impersonate a valid tcp connection unless its all send and no read, even with your second link, both sides of the "tunnel" have to spoof the source ip in their messages so thats not likely going to happen with wikipedia unless their security gets broken somehow and in that case well all bets are off lol
Did you read the things you're linking?
> https://owasp.org/www-community/pages/attacks/ip_spoofing_vi...
Isn't an actual technique, it's describing the observed result if the server were to blindly trust some HTTP headers which is just the application payload in a TCP stream. It's not spoofing the IP at any network layer.
> https://github.com/ParsaKSH/spoof-tunnel
Requires mutually agreed spoofing on both sides... at which point it's not really spoofing and also clearly not applicable because Wikipedia will not agree to it. (It is useful in the context that they're using it, just not at all what you're talking about)
Without controling a router that's on the path or being able to publish a route that contains the IP address you're trying to spoof, there is no way to spoof an IP address in bidirectional communication.
"blindly trust some HTTP headers" "Without controling a router" "Requires mutually agreed spoofing on both sides"
you understand the concepts, and the requirements for POC, but you are not the only one.
and for those who want a working weapon,they will have to identify ALL the requirements and implement it themselves. im not about to leave the weapon loaded and fully assembled in a public place.
it sounds like you are fully capable of manufacturing that weapon if you really wanted to.
also people really are soft, it starts with soc eng, and goes from there.
It'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.
It's possible for both to be bad and yet one to be worse
In general imperalism is annoying to no ends. Smaller countries get abused.
I think this is not really connected to Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a quality-control problem; even if all state-actors were not to try to ruin Wikipedia, that quality-control issue would still persist. Wikipedia needs to improve its intrinsic quality. Instead what it seems to do as of late, is make pointless UI changes. I hate this "you can hide the toolkit here" - that simply should not be on by default. I only want the content as-is, not side bars with useless things I am never going to use anyway.
>In general imperalism is annoying to no ends. Smaller countries get abused.
And in turn abuse even smaller nations like Georgia abused South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And these tiny nations abused their Georgian minorities
The fact that the bad actions of only one of the sides is so widely broadcasted must be explicitly noted though.
We should not be living in some perpetual Gell-Mann Amnesia state where we just react to the current news report in whatever appropriate manner while forgetting all of the old news, history, and so on around it.
I 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.
“There is no poverty of information.”
Quite the opposite, in fact. But there’s a difference between the information being present somewhere, and a reasonable way to get that information in front of people in an actionable form.
We’re drowning in “information,” at present. But the mass media narratives that are most readily available distort things quite a bit for a lot of reasons. (Ratings, owner bias/interference, format.)
There is no poverty of information depending on your news bubble.
Everything is a news bubble though. People incur bias from anywhere. Wikipedia just, in general, has less spin usually than some private media outlet.
See, from my perspective, that is exactly the problem. The people pushing said "anti-imperialist, anti-US" content are often the same people that defend Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The reality however, is that these are niche bubbles empowered by the internet. Once we realise how harmful they are, they'll be moderated or cut off.
Thank goodness my government would never stoop to such levels.
This one was deleted from wiki :-)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240630174704/https://ru.wikipe...
Like god frobid you will know about McCain, Nuland and what have you changing the Kiev regime in 2013 despite literal photos. Imagine the shitstorm if Russian state department officials were giving out food to guys that were attacking Capitol in 2021
https://web.archive.org/web/20240630174704/https://ru.wikipe...
There's literally a whole block about this on the main page:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%95%D0%B2%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC...
Compare the content and the sheer volume
The thing you are referencing says US reconsidered the support in the end of 2023 yet here is a happy photo of McCane from the deleted article from december 2023:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240630174704/https://ru.wikipe...
Looks like the it was removed because it was mostly opinion-based and didn't reflect the "engagement" word in the title:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF...
Irrelevant whataboutism.
In 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.
First of all, I'd like to thank you for a more nuanced and substantial comment. It stands in stark difference from the one I responded to.
While I agree the author of the article is either ignorant of or conveniently ignoring the fact that the West has certainly done plenty to "...fight on the battlefield...[of] the internet", I also think it's a mistake to simply refer to Pravda-fr.com or Storm-1516 as merely "the other side". It's manifestly propaganda.
I have lots of energy for talking about all the messed up things the US government has and continues to do, esp. in the information space. I just don't know why we can't talk about Russian or Chinese imperialism or propaganda without doing so. It's not zero-sum; saying bad things about Russia is not saying great things about its enemies, and vice-versa.
I never said this was zero sum game. I just think its humorous when folks get spun up about russian or chinese propoganda, as if our own intelligence agencies aren't actively managing (to a far greater degree, I assume, due to their location in western datacenters) online sources like wikipedia.
It's all propaganda. They even wrote a book (the book) about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)
Goose, gander. A shame both sides can't lose.
The 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.
au contrare, extremely relevant whataboutism
"For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history"
> 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.
All Wikipedia pages have a full record of past versions if you click view history,
Genuinely 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.
Too 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.
Well, back to Britanica!
Nation states have been editing history related pages on Wikipedia for ages, it has never been a reliable source of information on some topics.
I 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): 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]
* 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]
* 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?...
* Microtask Generator (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-gener...]
* WikiTask Pro (https://nethahussain.github.io/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
Some places to stay in touch with these things if you're interested: https://www.wikicred.org/ + 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...
Why hone in on Russia, when practically every country does it?
Because 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.
Maybe because they've started the WWIII that's simmering on as these words are written.
Don'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.
I’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...
https://news.err.ee/1609903256/estonian-volunteers-strugglin...
It’s rather devious
Not 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
Most 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.
the "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)"
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.
Thank you for the context
I personally would prefer "Reichskommissariat Norwegen" and "Estonian SSR" right on the person's page in wikipedia. Then I don't have to navigate to another page to learn who was in power that time.
That leads to absurd situations where three brothers born in the same maternity ward, one year apart, are listed as having been born in the "Republic of Estonia" (1939), the "Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union" (1940), and the "Reichskommissariat Ostland, Germany" (1941).
In general-purpose biographies written for a global audience, this level of detail is unnecessarily confusing. "Estonia" itself is obscure enough.
If one certainly wants to emphasize the fact that Estonia was occupied at the time, a reasonable short-form compromise is something like "Estonia (then under Soviet occupation)". Russian trolls on Wikipedia are categorically against it, because their aim is to obscure the fact of occupation and foreign rule, not to emphasize it.
Wikipedia 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.
The average of a bunch of lies is not truth, and the median of things that people have made up is not worth one source.
Nobody suggested calculating the average of all opinions.
"Auto-generating a summary page" would come pretty close.
Huh ?
This context of the conversation is Wikipedia, an encyclopedia with a responsibility to verify and attribute its content.
In 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.
The 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.
I've heard this a number of times, but how do you imagine this working?
For every legitimate case of a "diverse set of viewpoints" on some hot-button political issue, you have hundreds of crackpots and trolls who want to talk about free energy, telekinesis, chemtrails, and so on. Do you really want to have 50 versions of the article on gravity to choose from, most of them abject nonsense? Who gets to choose which one is given more prominence? If they're given equal weight, then the crackpots win the numbers game because there might be only 1-2 articles representing mainstream scientific thought versus dozens of "here's what I came up with in the shower".
I don't disagree that Wikipedia has some regrettable biases, but the solution probably isn't "allow all viewpoints". Look at the thread you're commenting on and the amount of whataboutism from single-issue accounts who seem to argue that the US is no different from murderous dictatorships.
Organizations editing Wikipedia like this want to suppress any other viewpoints, not present their own as another one.
Wikipedia's license allows you to fork the articles and take them in any direction you like. They just wont host it for you.
Yep, 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.
Disinformation 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.
Replacing the question of truth vs. falsehood is the question of effective influence. What is the influence of a message on its audience?
It 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.
And 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.
BTW, the page about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war in russian wikipedia was surprisingly good. No "special military operation" crap
No link to edits or specific article. Disappointed. This shouldn't be front page as it contains no substance besides speculation
I, uh, read the title as 'Russian poisons wikipedia', as if there is a list of poisons Russia uses...
Every 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.
Wikipedia has a range of protective mechanisms that admins can apply to high-traffic or frequently vandalized articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy
"Protection restricts the modification of pages to specific groups of users. Pages are protected when there is disruption that cannot be prevented through other means, such as blocks. Wikipedia is built on the principle that anyone can edit, and therefore aims to have as many pages open for public editing as possible so that anyone can add material and correct issues. This policy states in detail the protection types and procedures for page protection and unprotection, and when each protection should and should not be applied."
These mechanisms do include a "Pending changes" mode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes
My understanding which could be misinformed is that this tool is selectively applied to articles that parties are not interested in. Of course this could be meant to make people distrust the platform but it could also be true.
I for one will always assume the site is entirely fan fiction unless I can prove otherwise much like the SteamPunk artwork that people keep calling quantum computers.
How 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
Familiar 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.
Yeah, there is for sure a lot of misinformation and drama. One of my favorite is this one: https://youtu.be/A48oR4Zc9ik?is=s3wjS0uFYZCI8xbC
Russia 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.
Come 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_artic...
Well, 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.
You 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?
Can 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.
I'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.
That'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-ji...
https://nypost.com/2025/03/10/business/wikipedia-disrupted-b...
This is the shit LLMs are trained on.
It 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.
They'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.
Even 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).
OK, but, as far as I know, there isn't a technology to allow that, yet. LLMs don't work like human brains.
I 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.
Give some examples of prominent wolf-crying that wasn't eventually substantiated.
Some major ones that come to mind:
- Russia blowing up Nordstream
- "Havana syndrome"
- The Steele dossier
OK, 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.
Immigrants eating dogs? If you think about it, most wolf-crying is completely unsubstantiated.
What 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.
> What public state speculation about Russian interference in anything ever was substantiated?
Tenet Media
Most people lack principles and act purely emotionally. It is wicked and evil and vile if Russia does something because it is Russia doing it. It is good and right and true if “Western” powers do a thing because it is Western powers doing it. To a principled observer, they’re all evil regardless of which country is doing the thing.
Wikipedia 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.
What about the USA, or China?
US Army openly advertises pyops work:
https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/specialty-careers/sp...
China is likely not doing it. Wikipedia is blocked by the great firewall.
Why wouldn't they be doing it? They are actively engaged in such campaigns in various other media for foreign audiences. Wikipedia being blocked for the Chinese general population doesn't mean The Party isn't targeting it to influence opinions of non-Chinese in exactly the same way, since it's a fantastic platform with incredible reach and an unrivaled level of trust from the public.
Anyone that does business with China understand that VPN usage is rampant (generally Shadowsocks with V2Ray and the likes, it's plug and play, ton of local companies sell it, on every markets you can buy as well), companies and people aren't actually limited by it, the people that don't circumvent it are often the ones not talking english, there is a huge tolerance as well for businesses, gov is completely aware of the mass "VPN" usage, lot of hotels as well provide you with solutions if you just ask and so-on.
Chinese is one of the most popular languages on Wikipedia
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5
That'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.
Citizens do/can have access to Wikipedia, that's also very naive, estimations range from 15-35% of the population using VPN but in practice, any IT business and all their staff are behind VPNs and it's completely tolerated.
Almost all street markets sell those USB/QRcode to access unrestricted internet.
Most people don't need a VPN as well, similarly to the US population not accessing much of the content from let say Austria, France, Germany... due to language barrier or just not caring at all.
That's not a sentence. What do you mean with ", ..."?
I've edited the comment
If 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.
So, what country doesn't try to inject its own agenda in it?
All of them, I dislike how people seem to perceive it, while most of the time, politician job is "damage-control" (which practically means pushing an agenda by ensuring the discourse goes the way they want).
And then, we have the international brainwashing, which is where we think we understand a nation we've never even stepped-in but we don't. Anyone that has been in Shenzhen suddenly can see for themself, most US news don't talk about all the greatness in China, literally majority it is to denigrate the country, news are just so annoying in general and people just love to parrot non-sense (or incomplete non-sense, which is the same thing as not understanding at all), politicians understand that, news understand that.
We can observe Google Trends with Ukraine as an example, when the news and politicians switch-up the topic, then most people just stop caring altogether and move-on and go to the next "big thing", all over again.
Many countries simply don't care about imprinting their official narrative on Wikipedia.
Not on Wikipedia sure, but they do with many different type of media or local ways which is then translated into the "international news" (with a big sprinkle on top of non-sense and unqualified opinion).
On the contrary, injecting your own views/propaganda in Wikipedia is a great way for your content or your version of history to be included in the outputs of LLMs since they all rely more or less on it during their training phase.
Certain taboo subjects are also heavily misrepresented, e.g. in intelligence research: https://quillette.com/2022/07/18/cognitive-distortions/
That's the US government and Israeli POV, but the reality is that it is full of large, medium, small and micro manipulation campaigns backed from everybody from nation-states, to video game publishers, to political parties up for reelection defending cuts they made to heating oil subsidies, to people trying to bring up property values in a town in Ohio with a 16K population, all the way down to a guy applying to jobs trying to associate himself with a project that he put on his resume and a guy in an argument on twitter who added something that he needed to win.
It's not a source at all. It should be designed as a guide to sources - one that will allow you to get accurate information about both official statistics and wacky conspiracy theories (which are as important to be accurate in discussing as anything else.) Instead it prefers to be a voice of God, egotistical narcissistic middle-class Western elites, intelligence agencies, and any random manipulator who wants to juice up some stock.
edit: the people trying to get the truth stated plainly (whatever that is to them) into Wikipedia require exactly the same skills as the people who are trying to get consciously deceptive information into Wikipedia. The problem with Wikipedia is that it is a pseudo-government built out of Confucianist aphorisms rather than rules, so instead of being directed by reason, it is ultimately directed by authority. Authority comes from strength, not justice or truth.
Ehh, Wikipedia is already poisoned already
The Russian government is so all powerful that they control the minds of the majority of Americans and their leaders. I applaud the brave windmill fighters.
What 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!
If 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.
Pretty silly to point the finger at Russia when their firepower is obviously much smaller than Western state actors such as the United States and Britain.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor...
Might as well cite a used piece of TP:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-grayzone/
This 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.
It 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.
Pretty 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.