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754 points coloneltcb | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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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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bjourne ◴[] No.43799996[source]
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.
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gonzobonzo ◴[] No.43800601[source]
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.

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1. chii ◴[] No.43801435[source]
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.
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2. sunaookami ◴[] No.43801787[source]
AI is itself biased because the training data is.
3. lazide ◴[] No.43802035[source]
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.