I do not find state sponsored activity on Wikipedia unlikely, but I am not convinced there is clear evidence that Russia poisoned wikipedia succesfully.
Yesterday, I read a Wikipedia page for a book I’m about to review. I am still unsettled.
The page was stripped of reality, and in its place was a sanitized fairytale where Putin is good and the book — a brutal and damning historic account of Soviet abuses — is subtly and not so subtly undermined from every direction.
Once I got over the shock of what I had just read — it was like being forced into an alternate reality — I began investigating Russia’s relationship to Wikipedia. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Russian state has been steadily distorting truth, exploiting the platform’s crowd-sourcing architecture to influence public knowledge.
Take a look at this article, for example: "Child abductions in the Russo-Ukrainian war"[0].
It retranslates Ukrainian propaganda about 20 thousand children in the first sentence, but buries the objective fact that the Ukraine only produced the list of 339 children in the section "Russian reaction".
I'd wager that only 5% of readers would read past the summary and that most of them will just skip the section with documentation of "Russian propaganda".
I haven't bothered to try, but good luck trying to integrate this fact into the summary.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abductions_in_the_Russo-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abductions_in_the_Russo-...
>[According to] Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, Russia spends some $2bn a year on cognitive warfare https://ecfr.eu/publication/from-shield-to-sword-europes-off...
I was editing a page on the US massacre of civilians in No Gun Ri, Korea with some IP at CENTCOM removing my edits. I spend my off tine trying to send in facts of what happened, my taxes from my on time pay for some propaganda arm of the US armed forces to remove it.
As the US kidnaps the president of Venezuela and his wife, blockades Cuba, bombs Iran and on and on, great to know someone else is smearing Russia to further my tax dollars funding the endless war on their borders too.
Especially with LLMs being trained on Wikipedia (probably pretty extensively), the impact of these edits should not be dismissed.
Given Wikipedia’s rules and origin, it’d make perfect sense if the early articles referenced the CIA World Factbook when describing countries, if that’s what you’re talking about. There was a dearth of online, open source material to draw from 25 years ago, and on the uncontroversial basic facts the factbook would be fine as an up to date online reference until something else was available.
That would be a rather different issue than CENTCOM employees altering descriptions of the history of US government atrocities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/214.13.2...
ARIN shows that 214.0.0.0/8 CIDR is still US Department of Defense (or Department of War as Trump and Hegseth aptly call it) but reverse DNS over 20 years later does not still point to the same CENTCOM IP.
Also to a point - US military propaganda arm was doing this over 20 years ago. After getting the gift of country articles to mostly come verbatim from CIA and US State department sheets.
How was this determined?
More info on this in my other reply.
I think this is not really connected to Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a quality-control problem; even if all state-actors were not to try to ruin Wikipedia, that quality-control issue would still persist. Wikipedia needs to improve its intrinsic quality. Instead what it seems to do as of late, is make pointless UI changes. I hate this "you can hide the toolkit here" - that simply should not be on by default. I only want the content as-is, not side bars with useless things I am never going to use anyway.
And in turn abuse even smaller nations like Georgia abused South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And these tiny nations abused their Georgian minorities
We should not be living in some perpetual Gell-Mann Amnesia state where we just react to the current news report in whatever appropriate manner while forgetting all of the old news, history, and so on around it.
That it doesn't lead to mass action and the end of the current state of the American regime is a domestic American population problem, not a missing information problem.
There is no poverty of information. The fact of the matter is a powerful section of the US population benefits from the current situation.
I actively browse Wikipedia in English, Polish and Russian, and see a lot of traces of government efforts.
For example in Poland related topics:
- Russian articles usually have negative stance, and articles have a lot of very strange quotes like wiki editor interviewed some person from 1920 in a bar with a drink. Most of these quotes are either folk anecdotes or made up by author.
Not related to Polish topic – Russian editors are also dominating Russian Wikipedia, and significantly affect important articles for other russian-spoken countries like Belarus, Ukraine and countries of post-soviet east.
- English articles about PLC are actively edited by Lithuanian editors. Polish nobles are renamed into Lithuanian manner, despite they definitely didn't knew Lithuanian and had absolutely slavic names, only by the fact they had any position on territory of modern Lithuanian or participated on event that considered "good" by Lithuanian historicans
While I annoyed by these events, I think it's big win for a country if it can do that. Being able to shape opinions via "neutral" source is a big PR win. And country PR is very important – just look at "nice" Switzerland or Japan, catastrophic PR failure of Israel in recent years, or what oil-rich Arabic world does right now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240630174704/https://ru.wikipe...
Like god frobid you will know about McCain, Nuland and what have you changing the Kiev regime in 2013 despite literal photos. Imagine the shitstorm if Russian state department officials were giving out food to guys that were attacking Capitol in 2021
https://web.archive.org/web/20240630174704/https://ru.wikipe...
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%95%D0%B2%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC...
The thing you are referencing says US reconsidered the support in the end of 2023 yet here is a happy photo of McCane from the deleted article from december 2023:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240630174704/https://ru.wikipe...
https://archivist.substack.com/p/in-kyiv-nuland-handed-cooki...
The article makes this quite clear:
> Those words — foreign digital interference — are very important.
> The West has neglected to fight on the battlefield that has been right in front of them the entire time — the internet.
It’s remarkable that the author thinks this is true. The issue is the foreign source of the propaganda, not the propaganda itself, and in fact the solution is more propaganda, according to them.
By limiting our focus to pro-Russia edits, and refusing to acknowledge the larger context, we let ourselves become unwitting dupes, casualties in this information war.
When the western side of things does something bad or controversial, it's all about how the west is bad and any comment on other actors is deflecting.
When the eastern side of things does something bad though, we must never stop reflecting on how the west is also bad, and also be aware of how our biases might actually paint an unfairly worse picture of the east.
Which, funny enough, would be an ideal result of western propaganda.
While I agree the author of the article is either ignorant of or conveniently ignoring the fact that the West has certainly done plenty to "...fight on the battlefield...[of] the internet", I also think it's a mistake to simply refer to Pravda-fr.com or Storm-1516 as merely "the other side". It's manifestly propaganda.
I have lots of energy for talking about all the messed up things the US government has and continues to do, esp. in the information space. I just don't know why we can't talk about Russian or Chinese imperialism or propaganda without doing so. It's not zero-sum; saying bad things about Russia is not saying great things about its enemies, and vice-versa.
"For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history"
>This strategy, in a likely attempt to evade global sanctions on Russian news outlets, is now poisoning AI tools and Wikipedia. By posing as authoritative sources on Wikipedia and reliable news outlets cited by popular large language models (LLMs), Russian tropes are rewriting the story of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The direct consequence is the exposure of Western audiences to content containing pro-Kremlin, anti-Ukrainian, and anti-Western messaging when using AI chatbots that rely on LLMs trained on material such as Wikipedia.
Without buying a new copy of that Wikipedia page on Amazon and comparing it to an old copy from Ebay, there's just no easy way to verify this.
It'd be neat if there were a way to take every letter of these different versions of the Wikipedia articles and pretend they are numbers. Then subtract them from each other, and collate all the ones that don't come out zero.
The author would still have to publish this "difference article" to Amazon so we could universally locate the resource. So I totally understand why they didn't do that expensive work. It's just frustrating nobody has solved this rocket science-level problem in 2026.
* Cite Unseen (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cite_Unseen): show icons in an article's References section that indicate what the Wikipedia community knows about that source, such as whether a website is a known unreliable source - such as whether a source is banned on Russian and/or Ukrainian Wikipedia. [https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/kevinpayravi/cite-unseen]
* AI Source Verification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alaexis/AI_Source_Verific...): use LLMs to help check whether the citations in an article support the claims, providing a summarized report. [https://github.com/alex-o-748/citation-checker-script]
* Suggestion Mode (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Suggestion_Mode): provide automatic in-line edit suggestions, including using small language models to detect potential tone issues. Demo: https://www.tiktok.com/@wikipedia/video/7634591061553237266?...
* Microtask Generator (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Micro-task_Generato...): provide a list of prioritized edit suggestions based on the editor's choice of category. [https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/toolforge-repos/microtask-gener...]
* WikiTask Pro (https://nethahussain.github.io/wikitask-pro/ + https://github.com/nethahussain/wikitask-pro) - another approach to integrating signals to recommend potential edits to editors.
There are also interesting conversations happening about developing and maintaining better data about questionable sources - check out this amazing compilation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kuru/fakesources
Some places to stay in touch with these things if you're interested: https://www.wikicred.org/ + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AI_Tools (not all of these kinds of tools involve AI, but it's a component of various things people are working on). If you’re in the SF Bay Area, come to our meetups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bay_Area_Wikipedians...
https://united24media.com/latest-news/pro-russian-narratives...
https://news.err.ee/1609903256/estonian-volunteers-strugglin...
It’s rather devious
If some force occupies and renames your country for 40+ years, seems fair to use that name in wikipedia when talking about this period
I understand invading countries is not cool, but you cannot fix crimes of USSR by retroactively renaming places
I wonder if French people born in Vichy France should have their Wikipedia entries changed to say that they were born in the French State and not the French Republic.
Still, it kind of feels weird if (I assume) for 40 years everyone had "Estonian SSR" stamped in their birth certificates / passports, and then we say "actually they were born in Republic of Estonia (occupied)"
> If some force occupies and renames your country for 40+ years, seems fair to use that name in wikipedia when talking about this period
The same applies to Estonia. Anyone born in the geographic region of Estonia is referred to as having been born in Estonia, regardless of whether that occurred during the German occupation in World War II when German forces advanced east, or later during the Soviet occupation, which lasted until the fall of communism.
Last year, a page hidden deep in talk pages held a vote on how to name birthplaces of Estonians. 20 regular Wikipedia users participated in the vote. 12 of them voted in favor of a fringe naming convention that emphasizes the internationally unrecognized Soviet-installed authorities. Wikipedia now refers to this as a sitewide "consensus" that cannot be overturned.
The user who initiated the vote (Glebushko0703) was a Russian troll who later got banned for attempting to organize a harassment campaign against a journalist who covered the story, but the "consensus" remains. A handful of powerful administrators continue to protect an utterly fringe naming convention. Their only argument is the "consensus" itself.
Overall, the push is a very characteristic example of a Russian assault on indigenous identities. Every opportunity is used to replace ethnic naming conventions with Russian imperial designations. "Estonian" writers and artists become "Soviet-Estonian", or better yet, simply "Soviet". The more they manage to litter Russian imperial language everywhere, the more likely LLMs are to use it for describing persons and events. It's the good old keyword spam in a new dressing, and Wikipedia is bogged down by administrators who are average Joes, often from the other side of the planet and with very little first-hand knowledge, who try to play "reasonable impartial observers" in situations where a subject-matter expert would immediately recognize partisan astroturfing and nuke it.
I personally would prefer "Reichskommissariat Norwegen" and "Estonian SSR" right on the person's page in wikipedia. Then I don't have to navigate to another page to learn who was in power that time.
Or someone else should do it. If you build it I will come.
This context of the conversation is Wikipedia, an encyclopedia with a responsibility to verify and attribute its content.
Reading the Talk page for any contemporary culture war stuff makes it clear Wikipedia’s not really a place for diverse thinking.
When it comes to politics Feyman's line about "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool" is times 10.
For every legitimate case of a "diverse set of viewpoints" on some hot-button political issue, you have hundreds of crackpots and trolls who want to talk about free energy, telekinesis, chemtrails, and so on. Do you really want to have 50 versions of the article on gravity to choose from, most of them abject nonsense? Who gets to choose which one is given more prominence? If they're given equal weight, then the crackpots win the numbers game because there might be only 1-2 articles representing mainstream scientific thought versus dozens of "here's what I came up with in the shower".
I don't disagree that Wikipedia has some regrettable biases, but the solution probably isn't "allow all viewpoints". Look at the thread you're commenting on and the amount of whataboutism from single-issue accounts who seem to argue that the US is no different from murderous dictatorships.
https://www.theverge.com/news/813245/wikipedia-co-founder-ji...
https://nypost.com/2025/03/10/business/wikipedia-disrupted-b...
I don't quite get how that keeps people from applying those critical tools to their own beliefs, but we certainly see that a lot. People show up with a Gish gallop attack, without considering the sources that they're using for it.
Regardless, the effect is that in a world that has deliberately deprived people of certainty, they'll defend their own personal domains literally to the death.
News organizations each push their own agendas by misrepresenting facts or present rumors or second comments as certainty. Then months later, we finally learn really what happened and realize that a lot of the context of story was missing or completely fabricated.
Then we lament at the death of democracy.
Just as one example if it were up to me the edited version invisible until a panel of moderators gives the edit a +1. If a sub-set of moderators give it a +2 (override) everyone can see who did that. Moderators would have to show real names and their country of origin and current country of residence. A watchdog group must be able to vote out moderators. If users try to overwhelm the moderators then they get perma-banned. I would probably not allow edits from wireless devices. Edits must be treated like changes to the Linux kernel and I want the original abrasive version of Linus back for this but that's just my personal preference.
"Protection restricts the modification of pages to specific groups of users. Pages are protected when there is disruption that cannot be prevented through other means, such as blocks. Wikipedia is built on the principle that anyone can edit, and therefore aims to have as many pages open for public editing as possible so that anyone can add material and correct issues. This policy states in detail the protection types and procedures for page protection and unprotection, and when each protection should and should not be applied."
These mechanisms do include a "Pending changes" mode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes
I for one will always assume the site is entirely fan fiction unless I can prove otherwise much like the SteamPunk artwork that people keep calling quantum computers.
Perhaps they neglected to mention what Wikipedia article it was, because they knew that if people were able to visit the page, look through its edit history, and inspect the content of its talk page, they would be able to come to their own conclusion that the author's claims are overstated, sensationalist fearmongering? In a time where the US federal government is trying its hardest to undermine the freedoms of its own people, I find any accusations of foreign actors to be laughable.
You know its funny, I think I'm less worried about people on the other side of the planet stealing my personal data and trying to influence the way I think than I am about the people in the same country as me. Since, you know, not only would it be easier for them to, since we are in the same country, but also they stand to gain a lot more from it as well!
One wonders.
It seems everything online, including the HN comments section, has become corroded by information warfare.
The regional conflict in Ukraine is no more a world war than the US attacking Iran is a world war...well, aside from the US being half a world away from Iran and being threatened by Iran like a little girl is threatened by a spider.
Wikipedia is great in general, but the quality of articles often is lacking. And some do have a lot of details and, to some extent, quality, but Average Joe - including me - often does not understand anything. I have this issue with mathematics on Wikipedia; on other websites it is often better explained. Wikipedia needs to improve here.
Technology evolves. The interesting part is not that this is happening, but the means and extent to which it happens. Who expects Wikipedia to be more resilient than, say, network television?
^ A teacup defence of whataboutism.
The fact that you live in an apartheid state is bad, but it has nothing to do with the restriction of economic liberties in my country. I am just trying to distract you by reminding you of how disgustingly you behave, rather than defending my system on its own terms.
The dumb lib version of this is when you tell me that I stole my watch, I point out that you already stole three watches and are currently slipping off my watch.
"Whataboutism!"
This will probably read to many as me being a useful idiot for Putin or something. And maybe I am, hard to say definitely.
- Russia blowing up Nordstream
- "Havana syndrome"
- The Steele dossier
As far as I can tell, nothing that has been said about Russian intelligence operations in the West (over the past decade or so) has ever been substantiated. That's why everybody started blaming every single problem or disagreement in the West on Russia, because you wouldn't be asked to or expected to be able to substantiate it.
I've been called Russian or Chinese more times since 2015 than I've ever been called anything else other than my name. I was usually called that by people when I was denying something that those same people now say nobody ever really believed or insisted was true.
Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
Tenet Media
https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/specialty-careers/sp...
Yes, China and the US also participate in this. Everyone knows this. You are not clever or special for pointing it out, you're just being stupid and trying to distract from the conversation.
Literally whataboutism. Classic FUD and distraction technique. Go somewhere else with this nonsesne.
And then, we have the international brainwashing, which is where we think we understand a nation we've never even stepped-in but we don't. Anyone that has been in Shenzhen suddenly can see for themself, most US news don't talk about all the greatness in China, literally majority it is to denigrate the country, news are just so annoying in general and people just love to parrot non-sense (or incomplete non-sense, which is the same thing as not understanding at all), politicians understand that, news understand that.
We can observe Google Trends with Ukraine as an example, when the news and politicians switch-up the topic, then most people just stop caring altogether and move-on and go to the next "big thing", all over again.
It's not a source at all. It should be designed as a guide to sources - one that will allow you to get accurate information about both official statistics and wacky conspiracy theories (which are as important to be accurate in discussing as anything else.) Instead it prefers to be a voice of God, egotistical narcissistic middle-class Western elites, intelligence agencies, and any random manipulator who wants to juice up some stock.
edit: the people trying to get the truth stated plainly (whatever that is to them) into Wikipedia require exactly the same skills as the people who are trying to get consciously deceptive information into Wikipedia. The problem with Wikipedia is that it is a pseudo-government built out of Confucianist aphorisms rather than rules, so instead of being directed by reason, it is ultimately directed by authority. Authority comes from strength, not justice or truth.
But surely there are people who edit things about intelligence and race due to non-scientific reasons like their beliefs, politics or emotions. I think people from both sides of the issue/argument/debate are making such edits, like with every issue.
I agree with the article which made the case that they are not "fringe", if you mean "unreliable" with "fringe". If you mean "unpopular", then yes, they are, but opinions can be unpopular despite strong evidential support, as we have seen in the history of science.
> I think people from both sides of the issue/argument/debate are making such edits, like with every issue.
There is strong political polarization among the most active Wikipedia editors, meaning that people from one side are overwhelmingly more likely to win such a disagreement: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2024/09/wikipedia-editors-and-p...
Your comment is contradicted by this direct quote from the article:
> In the rejected New York Times articles, Wade was not presenting any controversial hypotheses, but simply reporting the findings of various genetics studies published in mainstream journals.
Maybe Wade put his own spin on the findings in his book/in the articles but does that undermine the credibility of the papers published in the mainstream journals?
In many subjects where we don't have a clear answer, we have different theories, some are bogus and others will eventually be disproved until we finally reach a consensus.
Until such time, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that all points of view are represented.
> When Wade is “the only science journalist to cover a study” [...] around six paragraphs of text were removed from this article
The fact that they removed a point of view/theory on a subject because there are no other competing theories is simply wrong.
Imagine if we applied the same rule to physics. We don't know why the universe is expanding faster than anticipated. It could be dark matter, it could be something else.
Until such a time as we can prove one of the other, then all theories should be presented with caveats/warnings that these findings are not definitive and will most likely change in the future.
Instead of doing that in this case, it was decided that some theories should simply be removed because they do not fit with the conventional wisdom of what we consider acceptable or believable.
But science does not care about what is believable or acceptable. You gather evidence, you create a theory and you or someone else proves your it or disproves it. You don't simply sweep things under the rug because they make you uncomfortable.
And before you take this comment as supporting all fringe theories, we are not talking here about the flat Earth or that vaccines cause autism. Both of these theories have been disproved extensively.
Heck, there is even a Wikipedia page that was created just for this purpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccines_and_autism
So in conclusion, if there were multiple theories on this subject, I would expect them to be presented on Wikipedia warts and all so that the readers can see where we stand on the subject. Instead what we got is simple one sided censorship.
This is the same exact playbook used by the Church when Galileo came out with his theory of Heliocentricism. His idea made the Church uncomfortable and instead of trying to disprove him, they simply decided to silence him. Maybe we should avoid repeating the same mistakes?
Edit: ah, account few days old and this is your first comment. Hello, Ivan, nice social influencing campaign you're running there.