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767 points coloneltcb | 12 comments | | HN request time: 1.218s | source | bottom
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jjmarr ◴[] No.43799721[source]
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.

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1. kurtreed2 ◴[] No.43799949[source]
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.
replies(2): >>43800109 #>>43804740 #
2. jjmarr ◴[] No.43800109[source]
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...

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3. kurtreed2 ◴[] No.43800500[source]
> 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.

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4. breppp ◴[] No.43801715[source]
> 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

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5. santoshalper ◴[] No.43802170{3}[source]
But there is a survivorship bias because doing what Wikipedia does is almost impossible.
6. krisoft ◴[] No.43802177{3}[source]
> 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.

replies(1): >>43804829 #
7. immibis ◴[] No.43803140[source]
Link [2] doesn't appear to say what someone did wrong but you cite it as evidence for some people doing something wrong
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8. nulld3v ◴[] No.43803765{3}[source]
The "Findings of Fact" section has a bunch of examples: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Reques...
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9. immibis ◴[] No.43804740[source]
Can you tell us more about these pro-Hamas editors?
10. immibis ◴[] No.43804747{4}[source]
It pretty much just says people did bad stuff.
11. kurtreed2 ◴[] No.43804829{4}[source]
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?
12. kurtreed2 ◴[] No.43804961{3}[source]
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.