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Discussion (153 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
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 do not find state sponsored activity on Wikipedia unlikely, but I am not convinced there is clear evidence that Russia poisoned wikipedia succesfully.
>[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...
"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"
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.
>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.
* 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...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
https://united24media.com/latest-news/pro-russian-narratives...
It’s rather devious
Context and understanding the situation to make better decisions? WHATABOUTISM!
The West has suffered enormously from this deliberate myopia.
^ A teacup defence of whataboutism.
If one Scott Aaronson permits himself to write publicly something like (as far as I recall) "it was Alan Turing who won the second world war", one can only imagine the amount of poison that goes into your heads, and of course not only through wikipedia.
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.
Tenet Media
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.
Self-appointed arbiter of truth. Got it.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor...
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-grayzone/
If you had said “the US and Britain also does this, we need ways to combat state propaganda on wikipedia” it would be a helpful addition to the conversation.
I don't believe there is a solution to state propaganda on Wikipedia. There is good, bad, and biased (which can be useful for analysis) information there, and the "solution" is to read things critically.
“Pretty silly to point the finger at Russia”
But you have a point - “both bad” can be used to hide one really-bad thing by putting it next to a kinda-bad thing.
I don’t believe there is a solution per se, but there are ways to combat it beyond just reading critically.