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853 points coloneltcb | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.206s | 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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ralfd ◴[] No.43803493[source]
> 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.

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1. jjmarr ◴[] No.43805709[source]
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.