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Comment by ilikehurdles | Hacker News Reader

In that time it’s become increasingly challenging to contribute anything to The People’s Encyclopedia.

I wanted to update a local wiki page with newer data from its original sources, but apparently I have become blacklisted because I use/used Apple’s private relay and safari’s privacy measures by default in all my browsing. Disabling them didn’t fix it. I would love to sign up as a fallback measure to be able to contribute, and verify my account by whatever means necessary, but apparently in the 2020s that’s just not something Wikipedia supports (as I’m also black listed from signing up despite never contributing to Wikipedia.)

Increasingly I see out of date and opinionated articles and I wonder how many of us have meaningful contributions ready but are forced to sit on the sidelines because there’s no “way in” with this product.

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It has always been like this - at least for the past 10-15 years or so it has been essentially impossible to edit wikipedia.

Basically any change you make it insta-reverted by some bot or over-zealous power-crazed editor.

I think some editors decide that they "own" certain pages or group of pages and install themselves as some sort of authority/gate keeper/moderator. If your edit does not please them, it's gone. Instantly. You only get to edit the pages if you are in the editor's cabal of friends.

If you don't have an account, or you do have an account but perhaps have only made a handful of edits, you are instantly distrusted and assumed to be malicious.

Of course, you can never prove that you are not malicious, because there is the default stance of immediate-distrust for anyone, so your edits are constantly undone and you never get to build up enough credibility to appease the editors who control who gets to edit "their" articles.

I gave up years ago after a small edit-war with someone who kept reverting changes about a UK politician who was in national news at the time. No amount of references or citations from e.g. the BBC or the Guardian was good enough as I guess the verifiable truth didn't fit with their view of what this page should selectively say about that person, and so they banned my IP as a "vandal". I gave up (but got a new IP after redialing so it was pointless)

> Basically any change you make it insta-reverted by some bot or over-zealous power-crazed editor.

You sound like someone who was pushing a particular point of view about politics, which is precisely the kind of edits that are set up for organ rejection given Wikipedia's strict stance on neutrality, sourcing, and the fact that politics are naturally contentious / prone to edit warring.

There are between 1.5 and 2 million anonymous edits to Wikipedia every month. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contrib... A lot of them are in reality vandalism, spam, and garbage by passersby, but they aren't all reverted.

Have you used Wikipedia?

It was one of the first culture war battlegrounds... And it's been owned for a while now.

Looking at these gross payments (and executive migration to think tanks), are you really pretending things aren't political?

I’m going to be honest I’ve gone to some of the more controversial articles they don’t seem far off from reality a lot of the time. They usually have citations of both pro and anti arguments on both sides of any debate. Is there something I’m missing?

Yes, the Talk and History pages on those articles.

People can play fact Monopoly behind the scenes as much as they want -- there's a reason Talk isn't displayed without clicking on it.

Sure there is a lot of spam but there is also a lot of political pressure to influence politically controversial articles. This rather old video was an eye opener for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t52LB2fYhoY

This kind of campaign is overblown.

They mention the topic of the Gaza flotilla raid in the video. If you read the actual article on this topic, it's pretty balanced, and mentions in the introduction that Israel was condemned by the UN Human Rights Council and their use of force was called excessive and unreasonable. Hardly a Zionist propaganda piece.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-eli...

'Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors Researchers found that 77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by 1 percent of Wikipedia editors, and they think this is probably for the best.'

Similar issues with stackoverflow. Entrenched systems and editors/moderators create barriers that discourage contributions.

Tried a few times and realized it wasn't worth the effort.

A weird thing about SO is that you can accumulate privileges for doing nothing. I once answered a question about Python which has accumulated thousands of votes/points over the years, and now I have been granted all these editing rights that I don't even know what to do with (nor do I use them).

I got all my SO points from answering a single question on JavaFX, which I only used for about 6 months. It is not even the accepted answer (which was, and still is, incorrect).

There is a lot of demand to control the narrative on political articles. Some political groups [1][2] have mobs of Wikipedia editors trying to influence what you read. I'd be surprised if they didn't have a few moderator roles otherwise a lot of their work would be reverted.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t52LB2fYhoY

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-edit...

Edits might be for sale for things that matter to companies.

Every Public Relations agency claims to 'manage' the content on clients' Wikipedia pages.

I would guess the pool of IP addressed used by Apple has been blocked from contributing since for any good faith editor, there is a vast amount of vandals taking advantage of the feature to deface articles en masse.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay has some context and list potential problems that might arise (and do in your case).

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Apple_iCloud_Private_Re... is the related discussion page if you want to ask more.

Back in the old days, we maintained a list of trustworthy http proxies for which we trusted the IP of their client. The community could then block the user behind the proxy. With everything behind https nowadays, that is no more possible (the intermediate proxy can not inject any header to carry the information). So the sole thing we see is the Apple relays IPs and if those are a source of vandalism for sure the community will block them from contributing.

There is a more or less similar issue with TOR exit node for which the issue is described at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editing_with_Tor

Given the relay is only enforced by Safari (as I understand it), you can use the IOS Wikipedia application for editing: https://apps.apple.com/app/wikipedia/id324715238 , though that will not pass through the Apple relays and leak your IP.

> we trusted the IP of their client. The community could then block the user behind the proxy. With everything behind https nowadays, that is no more possible (the intermediate proxy can not inject any header to carry the information).

Not exactly true - the "Proxy Protocol" [1] was invented for that purpose. Wikipedia as an entity should be large enough to ask Apple if they can implement support for it - the question is if they want to.

[1] https://www.haproxy.com/documentation/hapee/latest/load-bala...

If that protocol is a technical solution to the problem and match our requirements toward privacy, I don't see why it would not be adopted, then: - The TCP header is not encrypted and thus publicly exposes the IP address of the client - I don't see why the Apple Relays would emit that information since that would defeat its purpose of obscuring the original client IP - It looks like it is a custom protocol between two HAProxy Enterprise instances - It seems to be a feature of "HAProxy Enterprise" which sounds like it is not available under an open source license.

We do have direct point of contacts with engineers at Apple, Facebook, Google etc and do collaborate with them on a wide range of technical topics. The foundation has a dedicated team to vandalism, blocking etc https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-Harassment_Tools . I forwarded your remark and maybe they can update the wiki page at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay (it is mostly from November 2021 and looks like it might use a refresh).

HAproxy is just an implementer of this protocol, there are others as well (nginx and AWS I know support this), and IIRC also the haproxy community edition.

Note that WMF has very little relation to article editing. And login problems are likely because you are using some kind of VPN, which is also something the trolls like to use, so it frequently ends up in ban lists. It's a hard problem, because trolls are much more determined to (ab)use any privacy feature that is out there than legitimate newcomers, and unfortunately most Wiki admin teams lean towards solutions that ensure less trolls even if it means also more barriers to entry. These people are almost always volunteers, and handling trolls is not an activity they particularly enjoy, so that's the source of the bias.

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