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

There's certain individual or group that edited under the name "Icewhiz", was banned, and now operates endless sockpuppet accounts in the topic area to influence Wikipedia's coverage on the Middle East. One of them was an account named "Eostrix", that spent years making clean uncontroversial edits until one day going for adminship.

Eostrix got 99% approval in their request for adminship. But it didn't matter, because an anonymous individual also spent years pursuing Eostrix, assembling evidence, and this resulted in Eostrix's block just days before they became a Wikipedia administrator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> But it didn't matter, because an anonymous individual also spent years pursuing Eostrix, assembling evidence

Wait, why? If the edits were so clean and uncontroversial, what was suspicious?

Sorry for asking, the wiki talk-page links very chaotic to read.

Wikipedia has been captured by special interests.

I recently watched The Silence of the Lambs, an Academy Award winning movie from the early 90s. Afterward, I skimmed the Wikipedia article to see if I missed any plot details.

There is a whole section on how the movie is considered transphobic by some nobodies, how the director defends that it isn't, blah blah blah. Having just watched the film, the thought didn't even enter my mind. I realized that the entire section is irrelevant to someone seeking information about the movie and at its worst, an opinion piece or cleverly disguised political shit-stirring.

Wikipedia is full of stuff like this. As a comparison I checked a 'real' encyclopedia (with editors) and of course not a mention of this, just the facts. Any attempt to delete irrelevant stuff from Wikipedia is closely guarded by self-appointed article gatekeepers because it has 'sources'.

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.

> There have been several major pro-Palestinian ones recently, which is probably why this letter has been sent.

I suspect the real reason is more likely due to Trump not liking pages related to himself, including the page on the Jan 6 attack.

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.

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"

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.

Did you read this post?

"Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record"

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

what does that have to do with tax classification

The infamous "Philip Cross" always comes to mind.

https://www.wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross

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.

[flagged]

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.

Did you read this post?

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

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.