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Comment by AlecSchueler | Hacker News Reader

Government just needs to hire a mechanical turk to play out an edit war.

Wikipedia isn't a one person one vote type of thing. Its not that simple to just hire mechanical turk.

Details are wrong, but the general point is: given design decisions in Wikipedia having article take specific form is a matter of making correct person/people make it so, meaning it is something one can buy (with some extra steps of buying access to those people yada yada, nowhere near limits of state actors powers).

Its not like wikipedia is a strict hierachy either, where there is a single or small group of people you can just bribe who can't be overriden.

... and? I'm really not sure what your point is. Bribing more than one person/group and dealing with probabilities is a normal state of affairs, what about it?

Bribing something like 500 people can get expensive, but more importantly its hard for 500 people to keep a secret. I don't think its a practical strategy or at least not an easy one.

Admittedly even with 5-10 accounts per employee that isn't general-purpose-small-PR-agency stuff, but on a state levels it's nothing. For reference, quick google says slightly over 1 million people in USA hold top security clearance.

Bribing 500 people is easy when you can choose your targets. Bribing a large specific group of diverse people with full secrecy, is a different story.

The moment someone leaks the jig is up, and at least some of the bribed group would probably be very ideologically opposed which makes them difficult to bribe.

It's not to vote for it to be locked, rather just to create so much maintenence overhead that keeping it open is no longer tenable.

Chinese Wikipedia used to be like that until a WMF intervention happened -- over off-site canvassing and doxxing. Now important decisions like admin elections go in a special secret ballot system.

Not sure what's happening with the more usual discussions. Too tired to keep up with whatever's happening there.

I think what they’re suggesting is using Turk to perform an edit war causing the article to be locked.

I assume with the goal of the article being locked to before information you want to suppress got added, but that seems difficult to control. Unless you also identify and subvert moderators.

Not to mention - locked doesn't mean no edits, just you have to jump through hoops on the talk page first.

If there is a time-sensitivity component to the information (such as an election the next day or so) the slowdown from the talk page is likely sufficient, especially if you can move some of the mess over there.

Can you find an example of an article where this happened?

No, I was just presenting a theoretical alternative to explicit state intervention.

Erdoğan would be smarter to outsource his mechanical edit war so it look like it's coming from another country.

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