Wikipedia: Long-Term Abuse | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia: Long-Term Abuse

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195 points_ktx286 comments

Some of these are hilarious.

Favourite so far is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Chip...

> The Chipmunks vandal, also known as the Alvin vandal, adds trivial detail about the Chipmunks fictional musical group's cover versions to song articles, for instance adding a Chipmunks cover version to the Rolling Stones' song "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". Not only the Chipmunks but the vandal also targets the Chipettes and other fictional bands. He also adds trivial detail about Glee TV performances.

If I was this vandal I'd be quite stoked that Wikipedia has a shrine to this absolute nonsense I wrote.

Other than the death threats, most of them that I've read have been hilarious.

> now adds cryptic rants centered around the number 7 to pages related to the Bible and ancient Egypt.

> Usually editing anonymously from IPs around London, the editor will regularly remove the phrase "best known for" or other superlatives

> Vandalism on articles related to the television show Friends. Persistently introduces factual errors regarding the relationship statuses of the characters.

> In addition, the user changes date formats without a valid reason.

> will begin to insert fake contents en masse on Singaporean television drama pages [...] although it is normally restricted to reverting the page back to its vandalized version

> On 30 June 2015, this person began using IP addresses in Greece. A discussion was raised at ANI. They returned to the UK after two weeks.

> The hoax is that a person named Geraldine Edwards was the last girlfriend of singer Robert Palmer, despite the fact that all the newspapers reported Palmer's last girlfriend to be Mary Ambrose, a living person. Part of the hoax is to insult or diminish Ambrose as much as possible.

> a vandal who uses IPs that geolocate to Indiana to persistently disrupt articles related to the Muppets

> Usually editing anonymously from IPs around London, the editor will regularly remove the phrase "best known for" or other superlatives

That sounds like a useful contribution?

When "Best Known For" gets reverted they start vicious edit wars and harass other editors. That's the abusive behavior. Wiki editors are quite tolerant of different viewpoints on editing as long as those views get arbitrated correctly when editors differ. Edit wars and harassment aren't the golden path.

My favorite is when editors don't get their way and use things like "better source needed" or "dubious" as passive aggressive tactics.

Since this seems to be the curated "hilarious ones" thread, I'll throw in my favorite:

"Prolific sockpuppeter with over 500 socks which inserts hoaxes about lions existing in Montana."

Hah! Well, we do have cougars / mountain lions

...according to Wikipedia, that is

;)

Saw the following warning on that page and it sounded so silly I thought it had also been vandalized (before realizing its a real thing):

Suspected socks should be tagged and reported to sockpuppet investigations

> Obsessed with inflatable, bursting, popping, and bouncing objects.

I wonder how long it took to figure this out.

I mean, who isn't?

My favourite is the name: "Hong Kong Geography Warrior" ... that should be an album name :)

> Techno genre warrior from Greece

The "ceiling fan vandal" has always been one of my favourites, although it seems he has stopped now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Davi...

  Habitual behavior
    - He inserts random images of ceiling fans into any articles.
    - He links to YouTube videos of ceiling fans.
    - He engages in random thanking to certain users.

  Other notes
    Based on his edits, he seems to have an interest in ceiling fans.

The first thing I did was look at their long page to see if I'm still on there.

I'm not. I suppose it's a good and a bad thing that my once-legendary trolls have been forgotten, but back before many of y'all were born, I was a god of trolling. The whole internet quivered when I swung my hammer.

Now I'm a boring normie: married, medicated, with two cats.

The vandal may have a point. The Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(I_Can%27t_Get_No)_Satisfactio... ) is missing any mention of the Chipmunks cover (https://youtu.be/MwmVkQtEzFI?t=9 ). The Chipmunks must be avenged!

Today I learned, while reading about "fancruft"[1], that there are 500 Wikipedia pages devoted to individual Simpsons episodes.[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fancruft

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Simpsons_episodes

500 is too many but the Simpsons at it's prime really was that good

See also: Pokemon test[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pok%C3%A9mon_test

And thanks to Wikipedia culling all the fancruft (including pokemon articles), we now have 10,000 ad-ridden wiki clones, one for each fandom.

I REALLY can't imagine this was the best decision in the long term.

>Generally speaking, the perception that an article is fancruft can be a contributing factor in its nomination and deletion, but it is not the actual reason for deletion. Rather, the term fancruft is a shorthand for content which one or more editors consider unencyclopedic, possibly to the extent of violating policies on verifiability, neutrality, or original research.

I think wiki clones have more to do with people wanting to run their own advertising.

Advertising is why people want to run/host wiki clones.

Not having the complete timeline/backstory/abilities/etc of every One Piece character/Pokemon/Simpsons episode is why people want to use wiki clones.

> Prolific sockpuppeter with over 500 socks which inserts hoaxes about lions existing in Montana.

I am in awe.

Edit: it seems there actually are lions in Montana: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/mountain-lions-montana

So why the hoaxes?

Mountain lions are not lions.

Mountain lions are not mountains either.

This would be enough to give mountain lions an existential crisis

Embarrassing mistake on the name then

The user was replacing the term "mountain lion" with "lion."

With 500 sock puppet accounts!?!

That part baffles me just as much as you.

Not sure if English is your native language, but in the US at least, a mountain lion (a.k.a puma and cougar) is never referred to as just a “lion”. A “lion” is the thing in the zoo with a big mane that sprays pee on people and appears in broadway plays and documentaries narrated by David Attenborough

And now I want to see a broadway play narrated by David Attenborough.

I’m a native English speaker, but this is one of the quirks I’ve never learned.

I guess it’s like how naked mole rates are neither moles nor rats.

they are, at least, naked

This inspires me to go meta and become a sockpuppet obsessed with sockpuppets!

Here's a weirdo who's got about 150 sock puppets, and is making many more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by-GH0J4ZV8

I've never found editing Wikipedia to be a pleasant experience. Unless it's a totally obscure topic, there are just too many people who feel entitled ownership to the page and will fight you on every edit. This isn't exactly the abuse described here, but it feels bad when you just want to help. I tried adding the marriage of a celebrity couple once on the day it happened and someone was there to make sure THEY got to add it by reverting my changes until I just gave up.

I think this is a problem with wikis in general. The idea is great, but the execution is 50/50.

How is this behavior suboptimal?

In the end, the article gets the right information. One issue could be that it prevents broad participation.

Russia has also applied aggressive information warfare to Ukrainian pages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Azov_Regiment#No,_the_Azo...

Claims that "The Azov Battalion itself declares that the "Azov Movement" indoctrinates its soldiers: "The Ideology bloc explored the struggle of Ukrainian nationalists. "

Actual translation from the cited article: "explored the way Ukrainian nationalists fought. "

In general, the system supports perseverance over any sort of ostensible values like veracity or brevity.

I think this is what OP finds frustrating.

There may be a way to get truth in the end, but it's often more work than many people are willing to provide. Especially since most edit wars are so much smaller in attention than something like the Azov Battalion.

Can't believe this ends up as my first HN post, but

http://www.everytopicintheuniverseexceptchickens.com/

<3 Ryan North, creator of [Dinosaur Comics](https://qwantz.com).

HN doesn't use Markdown: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

From here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

These... are subpages. Every one of these people/groups has a dedicated Wikipedia page about why they're banned. There's probably a "notability" joke in here.

Isn't this glorifying the abuse? If I were a troll I would strive to make this list.

There are websites dedicated to techniques and strategies for evading blocks.

Mass shooting motivation.

They will never surpass this guy:

https://nypost.com/2020/08/26/most-of-scottish-wikipedia-is-...

Except, perhaps:

Opening paragraph of article [1] linked below (full version is worth a read - sort of redefines the concept of dedication):

>For over a decade, a Chinese woman known as “Zhemao” created a massive, fantastical, and largely fictional alternate history of late Medieval Russia on Chinese Wikipedia, writing millions of words about entirely made-up political figures, massive (and fake) silver mines, and pivotal battles that never actually happened. She even went so far as to concoct details about things like currency and eating utensils.

[1] https://lithub.com/a-chinese-borges-wrote-millions-of-words-...

It’s sad that Wikipedia volunteers have to put up with such crap. My sincere thank you to all the well-meaning volunteers out there who help improve this wonderful resource.

I feel like for every good wiki mod there's another one that's awful and draconian

I'll share my story with a long-term abuse case.

It started on the Simone Biles article. An editor kept trying to question whether or not she had attended University of the People. There were numerous media accounts where she reported or was reported as doing such, but he would dismiss these all on the claim that they were "promotional."

Over the ensuing weeks, I engaged him in discussion on the talk page along with the article and talk page of the university. He eventually shared a website to bolster his claims. The website was called "UoPeople review" which is literally a website attacking the school.

This led me to dig deeper and what I found was fascinating.

This person has been using Wikipedia to promote himself and attack his targets for at least a decade. He's been blocked for sockpuppetry numerous times. He's adept enough to switch between accounts and IPs. He'll change his IP address often to stay ahead of the CheckUser tools. He knows Wikipedia pretty well, so that's why he's still active today despite being blocked.

The abuse started, as far as I could find, with the IP editor who created the ACM ICPC article on Italian Wikipedia (itwiki). He used the article to promote himself and his achievements in the competition.

He continued use itwiki Wikipedia to promote his book and two academic articles on Second Life. The academic articles may well be fraudulent. They only appear on Wikicommons and one has a claimed author who is unlikely to have worked on it. Both articles have been cited in real academic research.

He started to promote himself on English Wikipedia (enwiki) and other Wikimedia properties in 2014-2015. He attempted several times to create articles about himself and his Second Life institute.

He wrote several articles through LinkedIn Pulse and worked to integrate them as sources on articles like Dating (enwiki) and Ripoff Report (enwiki).

He secured a volunteer instructor position at University of the People in 2015. You see this appear on the Simple English Wikipedia article for the university where one of his socks created the page and later added himself as faculty.

Per online reports, he lasted about a month before he was let go for fake academic credentials. You see a marked change in his behavior on Wikipedia following that. He started edited the university's article on enwiki. He got a previous version on itwiki deleted. And he works to slant the existing articles in a negative light. He wants the university to be seen as an "Israeli diploma mill".

He started promoting his Italian NGO/political party on Wikipedia at the end of 2015/2016. He attempted to create several articles over two years. When these failed, he tried to integrate the website in other articles. This is an attempt to boost the SEO of the site. My personal favorite in the "memorial service" for TWA Flight 891 (enwiki).

He finally utilized his political party to run for office in 2018. His campaign was questioned by several in the Italian media like Selvaggia Lucarelli and La Voce di New York. For this, Ms. Lucarelli earn on-going attack site called "Selvaggia Lucarelli blog." (She is aware of it.) He also managed to trim out enough of the sources from the itwiki and enwiki La Voce di New York articles to get the articles deleted. Of course, they reported on this as well.

More recently, he has taken to shoring up articles on suspect higher ed institutions like Supdi, Yorker International University, and Università Popolare degli Studi di Milano. I've spoken to one which took legal action against him.

He runs an attack website for the latter which he tried to incorporate into the list of Wikipedia forks and mirrors articles. This is the third known website setup for attacking that university.

While he was connected to University of the People and for a while after, he ran an academic cheating service which offered to help students circumvent anti-plagiarism tools. You can find evidence of this in the history of both Turnitin (enwiki) and Rogeting (enwiki).

I've been currently watching the articles for LUMSA. It seems he was attending the university and had some issues. Thus, he's turned to attacking the academics and school as frauds. He setup an attack website for them. He has some past activity on the articles, but nothing extreme yet. I'm sure he'll attempt to integrate his website in the future.

And this is just a taste of everything I've uncovered. I attempted to report the behavior to the administrators via email, but it fell on deaf ears. I finally settled with satisfaction of getting one of his socks blocked a few months ago and called out another which tried to integrate the "UoPeople review" website into the UoPeople itwiki article. He's since abandoned that account.

I am specifically using a throwaway account because this guy is relentless. He seeks to destroy lives of those who are seen to have crossed him.

Kudos for working so hard on this and keeping Wikipedia great!

> I am specifically using a throwaway account because this guy is relentless. He seeks to destroy lives of those who are seen to have crossed him.

Isn’t your opening paragraph enough to trace to you? Might want to remove the reference to you talking with the author on that article.

Is there a point at which Wikipedia can or should seek restraining orders against some of the more egregious offenders?

Like, editing "farts" into articles is one thing, but some of these people sound seriously dangerous.

Nikita: Persistent edits and edit requests related to certification and sales inflation of Green Day and The Who articles. Lol

I have always been amazed by how Wikipedia resists, in general, so well to coordinated, long-term vandalism while keeping essentially any IP able to edit most voices without login, a trust/feedback system or such. I guesss the secret is in its very active moderator community, which is often not seen?

I was heavily involved with Wikipedia during the mid-2000s. The truth is, it was a very toxic community back then. (I have no idea if it's better now.) However, the product itself was (and is) quite good. Even for all the nonsense, it's still a marvel how high the quality of most of the articles is.

Wikipedia is mostly useless as a reliable source of information. There are exceptions but for anything beyond superficial information you really have to look elsewhere. I generally block it from results.

One of the biggest problems is the broken links issue. Supposedly all information on Wikipedia is sourced to newspaper articles, books, research reports etc. but more often than not those source links are broken. It would seem to be a relatively simple task to write some kind of bot that would check Wikipedia links and report the number of broken ones at the top of each Wikipedia page.

> mostly useless

that's a bit overstated, it's fine to get started on a topic and about broken links, you do realize you can help fix them as well right

Wikipedia is something of a propaganda circus. Anything related to prominent politicians or other public figures, or governmental activities, is heavily edited by anonymous persons, most like part of their 'media image management consultant teams' or whatever they're calling PR monkeys these days.

Generally the more obscure the topic, the more reliable the information, so there's that.

This reads like an SCP article.

I am dizzy to see Justin Knapp, the first wikipedia editor to make more than one million edits -- to be clear, real edits; he is mentioned as a target of one of the banned ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Knapp

A real rogues' gallery.

Many of the users are described as IP hopping. I wonder how that is determined. Probably just a guess based on common patterns of vandalism?

Surprised I couldn't find a single example related to cryptocurrencies. Surely there is a strong incentive for vandalism there?

The list isn't maintained basically at all. Around fifty edits since 2011.

That is intentional. At some point the sense grew that abusers liked the attention they were getting through the page. So their antics mostly stopped being recorded there. In princple only a small group of editors (the arbitration committee, and the checkusers, totalling a few dozen people) are allowed to maintain and share info about wikipedia stuff with each other confidentially. If you have some issue that you don't want to discuss in public, you are supposed to email it to one of those groups. So I suspect that a fair amount of LTA tracking happens on the arbcom wiki (yes they have a special one) or on the checkuser mailing list.

In practice I suspect a lot of regular wiki admins do similar on the quiet.

The most obvious and relevant targets seem to at least be semi-protected articles, some of them being extended-protected.

For a while, I enjoyed changing the photo of Jesus Christ on Wikipedia to Vin Diesel.

Where do people find the time and motivation to do this? I’m amazed

The time and motivation to abuse Wikipedia, or the time and motivation to document the abuse?

Based on the topics I’d bet a lot of these are Joe Rogan listeners

Interesting that they have a public webpage like that, with real names, locations, IP addresses, and other data that clearly falls under gdpr protection.

Boy band category adder abuser

how does ipv6 change things

I dunno, I'm under the impression that v4 already sucks, just that the pain is felt on the other end - users who are IP-banned because their ISP does Carrier-grade NAT, cellphone users who randomly cycle through banned IPs as their phone changes addresses, that kind of thing.

I'm impressed that someone managed to get my ISP's entire IPv6 address range banned indefinitely from editing Wikipedia.

Didn't the entire nation of Qatar get blocked at one point?

Edit: lol yep https://techcrunch.com/2007/01/01/wikipedia-bans-qatar

> Apparently Qatar has a single ISP, Qtel, with a single IP address shared by the entire country.

Wut?

https://superuser.com/questions/1013630/why-does-qatar-use-a...

Probably not, Wikipedia will ban /48s or similar.

For the most devoted trolls, it doesn't. It's possible to "rent" residential IPs. One guy I tracked for about a year would somethings use such IPs. I knew they were him because he was too sloppy to change his behavior and language.

Not much. Ip addresses are longer. You are more likely to get a range block due to the practise of individual customers getting a range of ips.

But really, not much is very different.

Speaking of Wikipedia abuse Larry Sanger just blocked me on Twitter

Larry Sanger hasn't been associated with wikipedia for more than a decade.

Two decades even; he left in 2002. He was involved from 2000 until 2002.

My point exactly. He was mouthing off about how bad Wikipedia is and then said or let slip that he in fact does browse it through a proxy.

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