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pet_the_bird
mmooss
The article is not about that link. Here's what it says:
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.
p91paul
I found it unsettling that in an article about political manipulation the author did not provide a link to the book entry
mmooss
What book entry are you referring to? What book? The paper - not a book entry or book - cited in the GGP was linked to and reviewed in detail by the OP.
mmooss
To partly correct myself, among the many reports OP cites and reviews, it directly refers and links to the following:
> In a report titled Characterizing Knowledge Manipulation in a Russian Wikipedia Fork, ...
The OP describes and quotes the report for 5 paragraphs. I don't understand the GP's claim that,
> I think the article tried to refer to this link https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10663 As I understand from scanning the paper ...
That link is to a paper by the same name. I don't understand why the GP says 'tried' - the authors provide a link to the paper and describe it in detail - or why the GP would think critique based on "scanning the paper" is valid when, again, the OP authors clearly read and review it for readers in far more detail.
Also, the GP leave the impression, maybe unintentionally, that the OP is based only on that report; the OP reviews many reports in detail.
kakaz
[dead]
Pay08
Wikipedia is full of state-sponsored activity, and even fuller of useful idiots for those states. Russia might not be doing it in particular, though.
drysine
The situation may very well be reverse - "West" and the Ukraine manipulate content of the Wikipedia articles and ordinary Russians who see that try to make the articles more balanced.
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-...
tim333
A problem with Russia in particular is they put so much money into that stuff. Estimate here
>[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...
CamperBob2
That's the whole problem with Russia. They would rather spend $10 to fuck with other countries than $1 improving their own.
afroboy
Same problem with every country, check how much US is paying in foreign terrorism.
theshrike79
They have a 1000 year history on the former, very little experience on the latter.
dzhiurgis
Resource curse
yencabulator
CIA's budget for 2026 is approximately $81.9 billion.
oneshtein
Where I can apply for CIA troll farm?
the-mitr
A long list of controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...
regularization
Look back to the earliest version of the history and information of various countries on Wikipedia. They say themselves they were from US State department or CIA histories of those countries.
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.
stingraycharles
Seems like the original skepticism about a public, “everyone can edit” Wikipedia is taking shape as international information warfare intensifies.
Especially with LLMs being trained on Wikipedia (probably pretty extensively), the impact of these edits should not be dismissed.
justin66
> They say themselves they were from US State department or CIA histories of those countries.
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.
hhh
Link to the edit removing your changes?
regularization
They removed changes and added their own stuff
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.
swed420
Gotta love your informative comment was flagged with no explanation or rebuttal.
rpdillon
> some IP at CENTCOM
How was this determined?
regularization
Because the IP is in the edit, and the reverse DNS went back there (and ARIN did not disagree)
More info on this in my other reply.
rolph
An Introduction to IP Spoofing (and How to Prevent It)
cmrdporcupine
It's almost like both imperialist powers could be problematic and awful and we don't have to pick a side or excuse the actions of the one because the other does the same.
ascorbic
It's possible for both to be bad and yet one to be worse
shevy-java
In general imperalism is annoying to no ends. Smaller countries get abused.
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.
drysine
>In general imperalism is annoying to no ends. Smaller countries get abused.
And in turn abuse even smaller nations like Georgia abused South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And these tiny nations abused their Georgian minorities
kelipso
The fact that the bad actions of only one of the sides is so widely broadcasted must be explicitly noted though.
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.
cmrdporcupine
I mean that's clearly not the case. I'm swimming in anti-imperialist anti-US content.
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.
Permit
[flagged]
jampekka
Seems to be very critical of western, and especially American, foreign policy. Reasonably well argued and factual, although a bit edgy at times. A decent read.
undefined
Chinjut
What about it?
elzbardico
Yes, it seems to be critical of American policies. so what?
9879875665876
[flagged]
pphysch
I remember a time when Western civilization meant at least a patina of "civilization", and now it's all brazen savagery like this. Cui bono?
brachkow
I believe it is common for governments to do wiki editing as PR strategy.
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.
recursivedoubts
Thank goodness my government would never stoop to such levels.
piskov
This one was deleted from wiki :-)
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...
fl1po
There's literally a whole block about this on the main page:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%95%D0%B2%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC...
piskov
Compare the content and the sheer volume
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...
the_why_of_y
Did that article also mention how Nuland gave cookies to the riot police on Maidan square?
https://archivist.substack.com/p/in-kyiv-nuland-handed-cooki...
piskov
Yes. It also mentions quite a lot of other things
ghusto
You're right. This excuses everything Russia is doing.
jszymborski
Irrelevant whataboutism.
grafmax
In fact the commenter’s point is quite relevant. A central characteristic of the information war is to dismiss the “other side”’s POV as propaganda. This works to prop up one’s own propaganda.
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.
Levitz
The problem is this goodwill seemingly never works both ways.
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.
jszymborski
First of all, I'd like to thank you for a more nuanced and substantial comment. It stands in stark difference from the one I responded to.
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.
recursivedoubts
au contrare, extremely relevant whataboutism
"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"
nmbrskeptix
[dead]
cpursley
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Isamu
Genuinely interesting strategy, the term “poison” should really apply more to AI that depend on Wikipedia for training
>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.
ku-man
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esbranson
Too bad they can't really remove entrenched information about their government systems, which are becoming easier to gain understanding of, often with official assistance. It is only going to increase despair in their country and without as knowledge of its formal descriptions get more detached from knowledge of actual federal subject governance, with no democratic outlets for change. Though I'm sure in the central okrug, and even in the Pecherskyi raion, they don't realize this.
lpcvoid
Russia is, as usual, a burden on humanity.
jancsika
> Yesterday, I read a Wikipedia page for a book I’m about to review.
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.
tim333
All Wikipedia pages have a full record of past versions if you click view history,
scoofy
Wikipedia is useful because of the citations. We don’t teach philosophy in school, so people don’t have an actual conception of what truth even means.
britta
I want the equivalent of Mythos for Wikipedia - I want world-class tooling that helps human editors efficiently find, prioritize, and mitigate attempts to add deceptive and low-quality content - and I know it's possible to build this kind of thing. A whole bunch of long-time editors, including myself, are excited about building better tools, trying a range of experiments. This is one of the really fun parts about a community-built encyclopedia: you can help build tools too! A few interesting experiments - you can also use these as a Wikipedia reader (some require logging in):
* 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...
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I think the article tried to refer to this link https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10663 As I understand from scanning the paper, the authors attempt to determine differences between the Russian wikipedia articles and the articles on the Russian fork. They show that articles on the fork that were that differ from RU wikipedia have a significantly higher number of edits on RU wikipedia. The authors suggest that these may be signs of manipulations, however, it may not have affected the quality negatively (as stated in the discussion).
I do not find state sponsored activity on Wikipedia unlikely, but I am not convinced there is clear evidence that Russia poisoned wikipedia succesfully.