Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

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.

There are counterexamples where this has failed/continues to fail, the gamergate article is famously non-neutral, only accepting primary sources from journalists directly involved in the controversy. This is rather than true secondary sources with less extreme and biased views, like is supposed to be the rules there. You can switch from the english one to other languages and get completely different content with very balanced point of views because the other languages weren't controlled by the influence campaign.

So, is it better than reddit? I agree, probably. That bar doesn't seem very high though.

Part of the issue with gamergate discussion is that there's a lot of vapid perspectives along the lines of "it's just video game journalism who cares" which allows an infinite amount of bad behavior, dishonesty and manipulation in the name of an abstract greater good. I believe it was used as a prototype for future wikipedia manipulation for "more important" topics.

Do you have any specific examples? You mentioned the Gamergate article but your assertion that it doesn’t reference non-primary sources needs some citations that all of the academic and media sources were directly involved. Since it was a harassment campaign involving journalists, there’s a big question about what a policy would need to look like to prevent someone from attacking a journalist and then saying Wikipedia can’t use their work because they’re involuntarily involved.

Anecdote != evidence.

Also, your anecdote is specifically about a social media article about an attempt to use social media spaces to harass people.

Seems extra “special case” to me.

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.

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.

> You'll get a bunch of leftist (because they don't have jobs) volunteer moderators with an agenda.

What do you consider a leftist? Why do you think they don't have jobs?

A month after that article was published (and shortly after the article was posted on Wikipedia), the Arbitration Committee opened a sua sponte case to review the topic area despite the substance of that article being "Icewhiz was right".[1] It resulted in bans of Icewhiz' enemies for distorting the Holocaust topic area. I think moderators on pretty much any other website would laugh and ignore an article like that as being whining from a user they banned.

I agree that Icewhiz is an Emmanuel Goldstein-like figure at this point who's used by pro-Hamas editors/ultranationalists. A bunch of those pro-Palestinian editors that loved to complain about Icewhiz to deflect from their own behaviour were topic-banned from Israel-Palestine area a few months ago in January.[2]

It's challenging to deal with the Israel-Palestine conflict on any website that allows for user contributions. There's astroturfing and nation-state backed influence operations from probably a dozen countries. I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.

There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to. After Wikipedia went big in the 2000s it was for a very long time a de-facto monopoly for people seeking out reference information on the Internet. Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years. Same goes for Everipedia as well.

> only accepting primary sources from journalists directly involved in the controversy

This is false. The talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gamergate_(harassment_cam... lays it out clearly: because of the nature of Gamergate (misogynist harassment campaign), the page about Gamergate is heavily scrutinized in order to make sure that all source cites follow the same reliable-source rules that are in force across all of Wikipedia. Please don't lie about Wikipedia.

The infamous "Philip Cross" always comes to mind.

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

Right. The fact that someone so terrible got 99% approval and only one anonymous investigator was able to stop them makes me think that it's likely a lot of other terrible admins who didn't have an anonymous investigator go after them probably go through the process.

And the times I've brought up the fact that Wikipedia can be unreliable before, I've had numerous editors come in and claim that wasn't true and that people could rely on the claims they find in Wikipedia. This runs counter to the claim that Wikipedia editors know about these influence campaigns and openly fight about them. A lot of the active and vocal editors are openly dismissing such concerns.

Did you read this post?

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

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...

I wonder if there's room in using AI to gather past edits of someone, as part of vetting, and use the sentiment analysis to check how neutral their biases are.

This is the ideal picture of Wikipedia. In reality they are also used to spread propaganda and are happy about it as long as it fits certain naratives.

Wikipedia is, today, a pale shade of what it once was, a source of information.

To me those links you provided, indicate a lot, of what is wrong for me with wikipedia.

Because it is extremely hard to figure out what is going on. Lots of mysterious abbreviations. Unclear timeline.

I still don't really know it, it seems the scandal is, that he had a sockpuppet account? And there is only "private" evidence (meaning not public)?

"The Arbitration Committee has determined through private evidence, including evidence from the checkuser tool, that Eostrix (talk · contribs) (a current RfA candidate) is a sockpuppet of Icewhiz (talk · contribs). Accordingly, the Committee has resolved that Eostrix be indefinitely blocked."

So having a sockpuppet account is the reason for indefinite ban? Or that in combination with edits he made? Really, really hard to figure out for someone just having a quick look into the topic. And this is what prevented me since the beginning to participate in Wikipedia. I always got this impression. I made some edits here and there, but I think was mostly reverted/deleted/ignored - but no idea, I never felt like making the investment to really dive into it - and that seems required to contribute. Casual contribution seems pointless - and they likely miss out a lot through this.

"But the only reason you know about them is because Wikipedia openly fights them instead of covering them up."

So it seems good if wikipedia is more open - but from this story I just take "private evidence" with me and lots of questions about the whole process.

Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a source, so "reliable" here has to mean "reliably presenting a full range of notable sources". No editor should be saying you can rely on claims found in Wikipedia, except in the sense of relying that the claims are in the sources.

(Except the claim as stated isn't always in the source anyway. Best to check.)

"Really, really hard to figure out for someone just having a quick look into the topic."

Sometimes things are genuinely complicated. If you want to understand the hardest, most elaborate forms of Wikipedia community management you're going to need to work really hard at figuring out what's going on.

Community dynamics at this scale, and with this level of bad actors, are not something that can be explained in a few paragraphs.

I found Molly White's video here really useful for helping me understand the Reliable Sources policy: https://blog.mollywhite.net/become-a-wikipedian-transcript/

> The way we determine reliability is typically based on the reputation for editorial oversight, and for factchecking and corrections. For example, if you have a reference book that is published by a reputable publisher that has an editorial board and that has edited the book for accuracy, if you know of a newspaper that has, again, an editorial team that is reviewing articles and issuing corrections if there are any errors, those are probably reliable sources.

> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.

I don't believe this is the case, the Israeli/Palestine are restricted to long-time contributors, so the articles are either messy and unmaintained due to lack of editors, or worse, edited only by members of influence campaigns who have scared away everyone else

Oh in general for sure, but my first (attempted?) edit for Wikipedia was 20 years ago so I am not a completely newb.

And this is kind of like a court decision.

But in a real court, I can see the verdict and the laws that were broken. All in complicated, but readable english. Which makes it clear (usually). But in wikipedia to understand a indefinite ban, I have to understand global wiki community dynamics first? I am a bit reminded of Kafka - The Trial.

Thank you.

More and more, especially in engineering, I am in contact with people who just want everything to be easy to understand in TikTok length video clips or short posts.

Some things are hard to understand, dynamic systems especially, black or white answers do not exist.

(Sorry for the slightly off-topic/meta rant. This hit a nerve by me.)

Yeah. Also, if a specific source is used a lot, it often gets put on a discussion where people vote on how reliable it is. If it's considered unreliable, the use of it will be banned.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/P...

Well, I believe things with serious consequences like banning someone permanently - should indeed be presented clearly. Exactly because I know some organisations like to shield themself from criticism, by having a intransparent process.

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"

AI is itself biased because the training data is.

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.

This is a lie. Wikipedia directly excluded reliable sources that countered and only cites sources that are as biased as possible for that article. Like i said, literally just switch the language to japanese, translate back to english and you will get a completely different set of information that is far less biased.

Gamergate is also not a misogynist harassment campaign. Please don't spread lies and misinformation, thanks and try to be more honest and less of an idealogue.

Neutrality != necessarily accurate or useful. And the most neutral thing to say is nothing.

And most LLMs probably have Wikipedia as a significant part of their training corpus, so there is a big ouroboros issue too.

The entire story of gamergate was a campaign where the ethical problems of the gaming journalism were exposed.

Why would the journalists directly involved in that campaign be allowed to just directly malign and smear their critics and then have that be taken as fact, with no comment whatsoever to their involvement or other sources that disagreed or commented on this? Because that article stands as a beacon of unfairness and misinformation.

The idea that it's impossible to solve this problem is false. Like i mentioned, just check other languages for that article, they were not as completely destroyed by bias.

I am not a right ring perspective, i'm left, but because i'm an honest person i'm simply able to point out an article that is composed solely of extremist lies and misinformation. Wikipedia is not the only source and if you fully research the topic you will quickly realize how bad that article is.

The pro-gamergate editors were completely shut out of that article eventually and the article doesn't even mention any perspectives from the other side, it's an obviously biased on it's face article and i'm not sure why you can't just acknowledge that this system is flawed sometimes.

I agree with your premise that WMF has far better anti bias processes than reddit, reddit is a literal worst case scenerio for bias. I disagree with the idea that it's perfect though so i brought up a clear example of an extremely biased article that is still messed up to this day. I do suggest swapping to the japanese wiki article and just comparing the quality of information, it's really cool.

Also i vouched for your post, not sure why it was flagged, mine was as well.

how do you know he scared off 24 contributors?

But there is a survivorship bias because doing what Wikipedia does is almost impossible.

> There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to.

It is not survivorship bias to point out that the survivor survived.

> Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years.

Not “faltering after a few years” is part of “succesfully navigating that minefield”. If you fall out of the “race” no matter how good your policies would be otherwise you won’t be a reliable source of information. Because your can’t be if you no longer exists.

This is not a statement about what could have worked, this is a statement about what did work. And there survival is a necessary ingredient of success.

I think your view of gamergate is absolutely fucking delusional. I watched it all go down in real time like many of us did. Saying Gamergate was about ethics in games journalism is roughly as accurate as saying the US Civil War was about "states rights". In that it is kinda sorta technically true if you ignore 99% of what was actually happening.

That list is fascinating. Like the obscure Canadian illustrator [1] who for a decade has been repeatedly trying to put herself into Wikipedia despite being told she's a "non-notable" artist.

I'm frankly amazed that enough people have the time to track this nonsense and stamp it out that it ends up being self-correcting. It's not just about time, either; chasing bad edits and prosecuting bad users must be a huge chore in terms of the sheer amount of work needed. I always find it amazing how horrible the tools are (like how almost anything, including having discussions, is done by editing pages; how can anyone have a discussion in such a disorganized way?), which surely must be a hindrance to productivity or to the ability to detect and deal with constant abuse. But seemingly it works. Maybe there are better tools that pro-level admins know about?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Anan...

We can't acknowledge it because we think you are 100% dead wrong and you're trying to retroactively gaslight us into believing Gamergate wasn't primarily toxic far right-wing trolling, which it was. I don't need to base my opinion on what Wikipedia says because I was there and you are delusional.

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.

Wikipedia's value isn't that it's perfect, it's that it shows its work

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.

She tried to add herself to a list called “professional Canadian painter”, and from what I see, she is a professional Canadian painter for 10+ years.

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.

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.

There are a whole bunch of little utilities like browser extensions and bookmarklets and even an entire in-house cloud infrastructure that is used for hosting various kinds of bots and web-based tools for automating workflows. It's all very ad-hoc, crude and not very well organized or publicized. There have been a few efforts over the years to create a repository for all of the little tools to help with exposure and some level of vetting for security risks. I'm not sure any of those projects were ever successful (or even made it past the planning stage) but there has been some appetite for improving that ecosystem.

what does that have to do with tax classification

But not notable. Unless notable for long-term Wikipedia abuse. Maybe eventually she gets mentioned on a news site for that, and then she can finally have an article.

> But in a real court, I can see the verdict and the laws that were broken. All in complicated, but readable english.

Thats not really true either. There is a lot to unpack to understand court cases. Just the hearsay rule and its exception would fill a book. Jurisdiction, double jeopardy, means rea, “reasonable man”, Brady disclosure, fruit of poisonous tree, presumption of regularity, habeas corpus, SLAP, reasonable doubt, writ of mandamus, motion to dismiss, motion to supress, motion for change of venue, motion in limine, amicus curiae, consideration. Just to unpack the latin terms makes your head spin, and then you will be caught out by some term with some seamingly easy to understand common meaning used in surprising ways.

One can almost say it is a whole profession to understand what is going on in court. We could call them lawyers or something if we want to be fancy about it. And then turns out even those specialist further specialise in narrower areas.

I'd interpret it as a bit of Hyperbole, I don't think the specific number is significant. Perhaps "several" would be a better choice of a quantifier.

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.

On articles that are either controversial or cover some kind of current events, I often find more value from reading the edit history and the discussions than from the article itself.

Perhaps it is your perspective which is biased and that leads you to project that accusation towards the wiki (and the gp commenter here)

They have excess money as an org, why don’t they hire SWEs to improve it?

What is SJW? Please avoid using unclear acronyms.

Social Justice Warrior. The acronym has been around for a long time.

Social Justice Warrior but it’s worth noting that actually the acronym has cultural connotations that the words alone do not

> Q1: Can I use a particular article as a source? > A1: What sources can be used in Wikipedia is governed by our reliable sources guideline, which requires "published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy". If you have a question about whether or not a particular source meets this policy, a good place to ask is the Reliable sources noticeboard.

Skimming this: https://www.kerismith.net/

and seeing some of the people she proudly mentions - it seems like she's just switched cults.

It's pretty straightforward but nothing on Wikipedia is really black-and-white. Most decisions are made through a consensus process. It's really quite different from what most people are used to.

A good place to start for information about how user blocking is done would be the following links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guideli... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppetry

In this case I think that a sock puppet account can be trivially blocked without much process as long as it can be proved that it is operated by someone who is already blocked for some violation. The sock puppet is an attempt at evading the block that was placed on that user's other account.

They're constantly hiring engineers.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/jobs/#section-8

for those doubting this claim, the secret mailing list "GameJournoPros" used by journalists to collude is not even mentioned once, and is akin to scrubbing the holocaust article of the word "jew"

That doesn’t mean what everyone is familiar with it. For example I’ve been around since internet slang first developed a life of its own. And yet I wasn’t immediately familiar with SJW either.

While this is true, I don't think I have heard/read it once in more than a year, maybe five, actually. It's not used anymore. Pretty much anyone not MAGA has become "leftist", these days.

My impression has been that the project has never been fully scoped and kind of bounced around between teams with nobody ever fully dedicated to seeing it through to completion. Scope creep and a whole lot of competing ideas, on top of a genuinely hard to solve set of problems has caused it to get put on the back burner more than once.

Sometimes perfect is the enemy of good enough.

Neutrality? I’ve never seen an English language wikipedia article on a politically controversial topic that wasn’t the DC establishment/State Dept official take.

They listed Greyzone as an unreputable new source because it’s pro-Palestinian. When you Google the usernames of those who voted to ban them pro Israeli think tanks from DC come up. Wikipedia is a joke when it comes to politics. If you’re lucky you can find the real contours of an issue by seeing who’s been censored and silenced out of the article on the Talk page.

It's the word for "woke activist" from 10 years ago.

In my experience (of also roughly 20 years ago), the German Wikipedia is as dysfunctional as it gets.

The primary goal of the admins seemed to be to gatekeep, in particular to keep “unencyclopedic” content out at all cost, e.g. by contesting the very existence of articles on individual episodes of TV shows, software, or video games, which are all completely uncontroversial on the English one.

“Just because it’s relevant on en.wikipedia.org doesn’t mean it’s relevant over here” is a sentence I heard frequently. Keeping the number of articles down was seen as an active ideal.

For me, it was a great motivator to improve my English, and I’ve only ever looked back when the English version didn’t have a lot of information on some Germany-specific topic. Last time I checked, they only just accepted the redesign (the one that greatly improves legibility), after vetoing it for years. What a psychotic way to run an encyclopedia…

Nah she's just going where the money is. Look at how that page is all about telling her core market what they want to hear, and that she's happy to accept their money for a speaking engagement.

Love the use of the "we" word here. :) What is counted as a reliable source is voted on on one of Wikipedia's meta pages. So "reliability" is not based on any factual circumstances, but on whether the vote is won or lost. And you can trivially game that using sock/meat puppetry. Notwithstanding, White's claimed policy heavily favors Western media giants such as The New York Times and The Washington Post which many editors know about. However, the actual information they publish are often much less accurate than what is published in specialized trade magazines or even activist blogs.

They spent basically two years rejecting the renaming of "Israel-Hamas war" into "Gaza war" (it has now been renamed) even though the full scope of the war was apparent after just a few months. It was very important to maintain the narrative that the only victims were Hamas. They protected the page so you couldn't request a rename without being a verified user.

I think their comment is fair.

Wikipedias policies to promote neutrality are often counter productive.

Because neutrality is hard to define, what these policies actually do is progressively raise the effort required to keep or remove a particular point of view. Unfortunately, requiring more effort also means substituting the point of view of knowledgeable but time poor and inexperienced contributors, with the point of view of time rich chronic contributors and admins. The result is that instead of neutrality, you actually select for the strongest held points of view of a small ingroup of chronic users. The viewpoint diversity of such users is extremely low, which is why you’ll notice all controversial topics tend to lean a certain way.

By the time you commented you could have at least searched for the acronym or asked AI.

Link [2] doesn't appear to say what someone did wrong but you cite it as evidence for some people doing something wrong

Wikipedia presents consensus as a proxy for the truth. Pretty sure the consensus on GamerGate is that it was a misogynistic harassment campaign.

You’re telling me there was a secret… listserv?! Truly, this conspiracy goes all the way to the top.

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

This is my favorite:

> ... also known for hoaxing at List of Crayola crayon colors. Obsessed with inflatable, bursting, popping, and bouncing objects

You may believe your position is: > should indeed be presented clearly. Exactly because I know some organisations like to shield themself from criticism, by having a intransparent process

but

> Because it is extremely hard to figure out what is going on. Lots of mysterious abbreviations. Unclear timeline.

> But in a real court, I can see the verdict and the laws that were broken. All in complicated, but readable english. Which makes it clear (usually). But in wikipedia to understand a indefinite ban, I have to understand global wiki community dynamics first?

your position aligns with someone who desires decision with serious consequences to be easy to understand.

Right: and at least in the court system a whole lot of people are being paid a whole lot of money to help move that progress along.

Almost all of Wikipedia's community administration is done by volunteers working for free!

> So "reliability" is not based on any factual circumstances, but on whether the vote is won or lost.

Those voters (with the exception if bad actors) are working on the basis of "factual circumstances", which they debate extensively before voting.

> by contesting the very existence of articles on individual episodes of TV shows, software, or video games, which are all completely uncontroversial on the English one.

In the first year or so of the english Wikipedia, I was very engaged in adding content but never really tried to engage with the community. I started adding articles about my topic of interest at the time, which was New York 80s punk and hardcore bands. Soon, I had the lot of my articles deleted for "lacking relevance".

I haven't been contributing much since.

In 2025, most online users have learned how to look things up using.. the internet.

> 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.

Yeah, Palestinians are indeed Semites, however, the word antisemitism (for historic reasons) is used to refer specifically to hatred of Jews. It makes historical sense that Germans are afraid to criticize the Jews.

I probably disagree with your opinions, but the debate would likely be useless.

The "Findings of Fact" section has a bunch of examples: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Reques...

Of course, but if everyone does it, it is very inconvenient to read and in some case leaves unnecessary space for misunderstanding. Usually, acronyms are followed by the full wording the first time they are mentioned.

Thanks. Seems to be a US-centric word from my understanding then.

> Usually, acronyms are followed by the full wording the first time they are mentioned.

I'm sure they did at the time this (SJW) acronym got popular. That was maybe 10-15 years ago.

One of the obstacles to getting that point of view across is that very few of the people in countries with a majority religion (which is most countries) see criticism of their government's history as criticism of their religion. I've never really heard a Christian complain about the treatment of the thirty years war in history books, and that's presented in an extremely negative light. The equation you're making doesn't have a lot of traction in the broader world.

Usually hijacked and paid by quatar, russia or china. Its always fascinating how fast that im against injustice at home chute leads to "i support a monstrous regime abroad".

"Gamergate was actually 8chan communists fighting sensasionalist journalism but their message was then twisted and used against them to push people into far-right MAGA."

Amazing... I can't tell if you are trolling or seriously think this.

Unavoidably, some of the administration is probably done by undisclosed paid editors who administer to gain goodwill as a defense against allegations of paid editing.

> Wikipedia is a joke when it comes to politics.

What isn't a joke when it comes to politics? The only way to be informed about politics I have found is to regularly read news from several different media sites paying careful attention when they talk about the same issue. This way you learn their biases and how to interpret their news articles, you get the ability to guess what really happens, not just their takes on it.

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.

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'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SJW redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior

The cognitive dissonance can be disturbing. A frightening number of people never grew past a child's logic of "X has problems -> X is the worst thing ever -> if I hate X then that must mean I love the opposite of X" and suddenly they're a trans activist (which is a good thing, to be clear) frothing at the mouth in absolutist terms to defend people who want them dead..

Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can appraise the situation, Israel sucks and has a somewhat higher incidence of committing war crimes than other western countries, but Palestine would suck even worse if you switched their places around, the only thing holding them back from committing much worse atrocities being lack of resources, going by their human rights record and direct statements from their leadership. Israel isn't executing anyone for being gay for example. But out of many factors, one being some left leaning people taking the mental shortcut that the anti-American option is always more intellectual and "owns the conservatives", we've ended up in this nonsense scenario.

That doesn't have anything to do with special interests.

Literally nearly every Wikipedia page for a fictional work or creator will have a section on "controversies" or similar, if there have been any. Regardless of which political direction they go in. If it's been covered in the media or a book or whatever, it tends to be included.

This is a good thing. It helps situate everything in a broader cultural context. When I look something up on Wikipedia, I want to know these things. It's not irrelevant and it's not an opinion piece.

It's not like the articles takes sides. They just objectively describe the controversies which are real objective things which exist.

I find it curious that you seem to want to be shielded from the existence of these controversies. Nobody is forcing you to read them. But many people do genuinely find them useful and informative.

The problem is controversies can be embellished. In this case, the controversy focused on a minor detail among hundreds of others in a nearly two hour long film.

Is there guidance on what makes a controversy 'notable', or can anything be listed there? E.g. "Nobody blogger and her Twitter army were upset about $thing" - does that qualify? Nearly anything can be controversial, or have fabricated controversies. You see this a lot on political articles.

I don't know what you mean by "embellished". Are you saying the statements in Wikipedia are false?

And yes, obviously controversy will focus on the one controversial detail. There are hundreds of other details that are not controversial, so they aren't mentioned.

I don't understand why this bothers you. The world is a controversial place. It's good to document these things.

The great thing about SJW is it tells you even more about the person using the term that the target. It’s your grandparents’ equivalent of “woke mind virus”.

> 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.

Is the eV still in that renovated building near the Chinese embasy, playing cards every Wednesday near the river?

It's not documenting historical facts about Israel that's problematic, it's using that history to justify calls for the destruction of Israel. Does anyone cite the Thirty Years' War to advocate for the destruction of Germany?

Can you tell us more about these pro-Hamas editors?

It pretty much just says people did bad stuff.

Is that like a secret Signal chat for the defense secretary's family?

It is indeed a survivorship bias since we have no good other sample in the form of competitor to compare to, like how Pepsi is to Coca-Cola. Which part of my statement you find difficult to understand?

It's going to be a Achilles heel for Wikipedia one day, mark my words. Those LTA pages often contains a lot of personal information which would violate GDPR in Europe, at least based on what I've heard from NOYB so far. Some editors have expressed their concerns about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Long-term_abuse...?

As a long-term editor, this is pretty off base. The discussion [1] that led to Grayzone being deprecated had almost nothing to do with Israel/Palestine. Meanwhile most Israel/Palestine articles are driven by Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and similar sources, while many Jewish sources (ADL, Jewish Chronicle, NGO Monitor, etc) are banned or restricted.

One example of a heavily debated neutrality issue was the opening paragraph of the Zionism article, which ended up like this. Surely noone would call this remotely pro-Israel? "Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...

That's right. Often due process is skipped even if the blocks turn out to be errors or collateral damages later. It's not going to be 100% perfect at all because stylometries can be obfuscated (see https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7345380/) and there are tools like VNC and residential proxy applications to evade IP-based tracing and detection.

That's right. They only survived because competitions were crushed out with both network effects, and the help of Google which reportedly prioritizes Wikipedia in search results while downranking any others which could challenge Wikipedia.

These debates are done in public, and we see how bad they are. It's wonderful that they're done in public, though.

It’s a post facto embellishment for modern times. When that movie came out, no one was saying that nor is it relevant or correct. We might as well put a controversy template on every Wikipedia page and wait for someone to invent a perceived injustice.

If something is controversial to an insignificantly small number of people, is it by definition a controversy?

Hypothetically speaking, let's say you were a famous or notable person. Your Wikipedia article would probably have a controversy section with a vague statement like, "Some people find crazygringo's feet objectionable."

The citation would be a podcast where a guest told the host in an offhand comment, "I went on a date with crazygringo once and thought he had oddly-shaped feet."

Any attempt to delete this statement, even by you with full knowledge of your own feet, would be reverted as 'vandalism'.

This is Wikipedia in a nutshell.

Articles for celebrities and political figures are full of this garbage, which merely 10 years ago we would consider exclusively tabloid fodder.

I've read articles on complete nobody actresses with a controversy section that listed any and every political opinion she's ever said. It's a lame attempt to extrapolate (or reimagine) someone's entire personality from a few offhand statements made once in her life.

It's low quality content like this that undermines Wikipedia. Unfortunately it's all over the site and growing by the day.

Can you point out any factual errors in the article, with sources that demonstrate the error?

> The pro-gamergate editors were completely shut out of that article eventually and the article doesn't even mention any perspectives from the other side

The "pro-gamergate" perspective is described in the very first sentence under "Purpose and goals":

    The most active Gamergate supporters or "Gamergaters" said that Gamergate was a movement for ethics in games journalism, for protecting the "gamer" identity, and for opposing "political correctness" in video games and that any harassment of women was done by others not affiliated with Gamergate.

It's a term for anyone from a centrist liberal to a Greenpeace activist, with the implication that having left-of-median politics and understanding race and demography as anything other than biological essentialism makes you an utter loon. It is really only used by people who would describe themselves as "anti-woke".

The person he's referencing, specifically, got really pilled by evangelical Christianity and believes that anyone advocating for liberal causes has created a religion out of nebulous cultural values, unmoored from god. She blames the "cult of SJW" for the kind of character assassination she claims to have done, that it was the force of rootless bolshevism that was responsible for her supposedly destroying lives and careers by making up(?) relationships and cultural crimes on whole webs of Wikipedia articles.

One issue that occurs is when person A is criticized for documenting historical facts on the basis that since person B has in other contexts used them as a pretext for something wrong, person C, after finding out about the historical facts, might independently come to the same conclusion as person B. The effect is to treat person A's documentation activity with the same approach as person C's eventual choices.

I’m calling Frank Abnagale on this woman until proven otherwise.

I agree. The pages on Brazilian politics are often grotesque propaganda. There was even a famous case in which a slanderous and fraudulent edit on two journalists' pages was traced back to an IP address in Dilma's Presidential Palace (Dilma was Lula's hand-picked successor).

Have you actually tried to tag, edit, or leave comments when you come across questionable content?

I’ve found that the system works pretty well. It’s not perfect, but I can’t think of a better solution.

So don’t use Wikipedia then. Problem solved.

The German Wikipedia is the main reason I keep my country setting on DDG off. That way I get en.wikipedia.org results first.

> Last time I checked, they only just accepted the redesign (the one that greatly improves legibility), after vetoing it for years. What a psychotic way to run an encyclopedia

I once asked on (then) Twitter why they kept that crappy design, and got the most depressing NIMBY answers on even making the new design optional. That really killed any rest of hope I had for the German Wikipedia. Glad to hear that at least that tiny improvement made it.

It reminds me a bit of campus preachers. They would go to great lengths to describe just how fallen they were before they found Jesus. By inflating how fallen they were, it made for a more dramatic, and to some people, more affirming message of the power of the Gospel. I don't doubt the people felt transformed, but they were motivated my narrative purpose as much as by factual history.

I saw horrendous violations to related to Bolsonaro related politicians. Seems like everybody does it then.

In my case I saw that they even invent new rules if needed to remove things. Completely compromised.

They sure do, it's still those who amass the most votes who gets to decide. And it leads to clownish ridiculous results. ADL is listed three times as green, yellow, and red. Comment says "There is consensus that the ADL is a generally unreliable source for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, due to significant evidence that the ADL acts as a pro-Israeli advocacy group and has repeatedly published false and misleading statements as fact, un-retracted, regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict." So an organization that has "repeatedly" been caught spreading false and misleading statements is still a reliable source. LOL

On Wikipedia, every edit can be hidden so that even admins can't access it.[1]

Therefore, if legal problems arise with these pages, they probably will just delete the legally problematic info and hide every edit done before.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Oversight

I wasn’t the one who asked.

But even if I were, you’re not accounting for the cumulative benefit saving others from having to research the same acronym.

SWJ wasn’t a popular acronym 10 years (let alone 15) ago in the online communities I hung around in. ;)

There are little behavioural nuances in your writing or the timezones/subjects in which you edit. Using multiple accounts is mostly forbidden by Wikipedia policy, unlike most websites, so just proving the link can be enough.

Icewhiz is a bad example because a lot of the evidence is non-public now (there's a cabal of CheckUsers approved by the Wikimedia Foundation who deal non-public cases). A simpler one is Lieutenant of Melkor/CaradhrasAiguo. Lieutenant of Melkor was banned in 2014, CaradhrasAiguo was made in 2015, and in 2020 someone linked the two accounts:

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

> Editor interaction tool shows 2691 common pages. This is because both have been AWB power users in several same topic areas. However, there are numerous specific commonalities with extreme detail related to American cities, Chinese cities, weather templates and airports.

> Both used navigational popups to revert edits which resulted in a non-standard date format in the edit summary.

> LoM created many US city weatherbox templates. CA has been the only editor to do major updates in many of them.

> Both have done major work with pushpins related to Chinese maps. 'Pushpin' is found in many edit summaries of both editors.

> Both often removed bold text from non-English words. Both used edit-summaries with "debold" which I don't think is a real word.

> Both updated snow days and precipitation days in US city infoboxes with almost identical edit summaries.

> Both have an interest in classical music. CTRL+F for Beethoven, Mozart or Chopin in the editor interaction tool.

They're also both named after Lord of the Rings characters. "Caradhras" is a mountain, "Melkor" was the most powerful Valar and later went by the name "Morgoth". Sauron, the antagonist of LotR, was his lieutenant.

Let’s get real, they can search. HN doesn’t have a repo of acronyms and this isn’t a technical document where you need to spell out the acronym on first use