Russia Poisons Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

Russia Poisons Wikipedia

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266 pointsexceptione195 comments

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.

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.

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.

I found it unsettling that in an article about political manipulation the author did not provide a link to the book entry

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.

the article begins like this:

> 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.

We have no idea which book that was and what was so unsettling about that entry

Ah, thanks. That makes sense.

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.

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-...

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...

That's the whole problem with Russia. They would rather spend $10 to fuck with other countries than $1 improving their own.

Resource curse

They have a 1000 year history on the former, very little experience on the latter.

Same problem with every country, check how much US is paying in foreign terrorism.

>They would rather spend $10 to fuck with other countries than $1 improving their own.

Where did you get that idea?

Consider if all the money wasted on the Ukraine invasion had been spent on (or by) the Russian people instead. Even if you won the war tomorrow, it'd take a hundred years to recover.

Ok, let's consider that money.

In 2025 Russian military spending was about 7% of GDP[0], and the GDP PPP was over 7 trillion dollars[1].

What's there to recover for hundred years?

And the US spent in 2025 five times more than Russia despite not being at war with anyone.[2] They would rather spend $10 to fuck with other countries than $1 improving their own, right?

[0] https://www.sipri.org/publications/2025/sipri-insights-peace...

[1] https://www.worldeconomics.com/GDP/Russia.aspx

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/29/five-charts-that-sh...

CIA's budget for 2026 is approximately $81.9 billion.

Where I can apply for CIA troll farm?

Pentagon employs private contractors for that, like General Dynamics IT. Maybe CIA does that too.

"By 2010, the military began using social media tools, leveraging phony accounts to spread messages of sympathetic local voices – themselves often secretly paid by the United States government. As time passed, a growing web of military and intelligence contractors built online news websites to pump U.S.-approved narratives into foreign countries. Today, the military employs a sprawling ecosystem of social media influencers, front groups and covertly placed digital advertisements to influence overseas audiences, according to current and former military officials.

...

Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using “disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”

And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign – General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military."[0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...

$493M once against $2B every year.

Thank you for the link.

That's $0.5B just for a single contract with one contractor in "growing web of military and intelligence contractors"

I’ve been watching people in /r/balticstates talk about how Russia has been actively changing the birth places of Estonian officials to say Russia instead of occupied Estonia.

https://united24media.com/latest-news/pro-russian-narratives...

https://news.err.ee/1609903256/estonian-volunteers-strugglin...

It’s rather devious

Not change to "Russia", change to "Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic"

If some force occupies and renames your country for 40+ years, seems fair to use that name in wikipedia when talking about this period

I understand invading countries is not cool, but you cannot fix crimes of USSR by retroactively renaming places

Most countries never recognized the Soviet annexation de jure, and under the legal-continuity doctrine Estonia remained an independent state under occupation throughout 1940–1991.

I wonder if French people born in Vichy France should have their Wikipedia entries changed to say that they were born in the French State and not the French Republic.

the "other countries recognition" is a valid point which I missed

Still, it kind of feels weird if (I assume) for 40 years everyone had "Estonian SSR" stamped in their birth certificates / passports, and then we say "actually they were born in Republic of Estonia (occupied)"

  > If some force occupies and renames your country for 40+ years, seems fair to use that name in wikipedia when talking about this period

"Estonia" is a distinct geographic and cultural region, the same way "Norway" is. Nobody refers to people born in Oslo during the German occupation in WWII as having been born in "Reichskommissariat Norwegen" or whatever name the Nazis invented, despite the fact that Norwegians were unable to govern their country at the time.

The same applies to Estonia. Anyone born in the geographic region of Estonia is referred to as having been born in Estonia, regardless of whether that occurred during the German occupation in World War II when German forces advanced east, or later during the Soviet occupation, which lasted until the fall of communism.

Last year, a page hidden deep in talk pages held a vote on how to name birthplaces of Estonians. 20 regular Wikipedia users participated in the vote. 12 of them voted in favor of a fringe naming convention that emphasizes the internationally unrecognized Soviet-installed authorities. Wikipedia now refers to this as a sitewide "consensus" that cannot be overturned.

The user who initiated the vote (Glebushko0703) was a Russian troll who later got banned for attempting to organize a harassment campaign against a journalist who covered the story, but the "consensus" remains. A handful of powerful administrators continue to protect an utterly fringe naming convention. Their only argument is the "consensus" itself.

Overall, the push is a very characteristic example of a Russian assault on indigenous identities. Every opportunity is used to replace ethnic naming conventions with Russian imperial designations. "Estonian" writers and artists become "Soviet-Estonian", or better yet, simply "Soviet". The more they manage to litter Russian imperial language everywhere, the more likely LLMs are to use it for describing persons and events. It's the good old keyword spam in a new dressing, and Wikipedia is bogged down by administrators who are average Joes, often from the other side of the planet and with very little first-hand knowledge, who try to play "reasonable impartial observers" in situations where a subject-matter expert would immediately recognize partisan astroturfing and nuke it.

Thank you for the context

I personally would prefer "Reichskommissariat Norwegen" and "Estonian SSR" right on the person's page in wikipedia. Then I don't have to navigate to another page to learn who was in power that time.

That leads to absurd situations where three brothers born in the same maternity ward, one year apart, are listed as having been born in the "Republic of Estonia" (1939), the "Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union" (1940), and the "Reichskommissariat Ostland, Germany" (1941).

In general-purpose biographies written for a global audience, this level of detail is unnecessarily confusing. "Estonia" itself is obscure enough.

If one certainly wants to emphasize the fact that Estonia was occupied at the time, a reasonable short-form compromise is something like "Estonia (then under Soviet occupation)". Russian trolls on Wikipedia are categorically against it, because their aim is to obscure the fact of occupation and foreign rule, not to emphasize it.

A long list of controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...

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.

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.

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.

>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

It's possible for both to be bad and yet one to be worse

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.

> some IP at CENTCOM

How was this determined?

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.

An Introduction to IP Spoofing (and How to Prevent It)

https://kinsta.com/blog/ip-spoofing/

That doesn’t work for an HTTP request (or any stateful communication that requires return traffic)

its a dated article, but the concept of IP spoof works, and has been modified to fit the state of tech, its more than just forging the return address in an IP header.

https://owasp.org/www-community/pages/attacks/ip_spoofing_vi...

https://github.com/ParsaKSH/spoof-tunnel

The term IP spoofing used to really only apply to some networking layer in my experience, placing bogus ips in headers was more likely called header forgery and happened in the application. It wouldn't make sense for wikipedia to rely on easily forged headers when they can simply examine the network connection and use that address.

Actual IP spoofing still can't really impersonate a valid tcp connection unless its all send and no read, even with your second link, both sides of the "tunnel" have to spoof the source ip in their messages so thats not likely going to happen with wikipedia unless their security gets broken somehow and in that case well all bets are off lol

"unless their security gets broken somehow"

yup you get the idea, but you dont have to break security, you can can settle for convincing him to break his own security.

sure, but if your objective is to post from an ip other than your own, your second link would compare poorly against just renting some compromised host or cell phone from your friendly anonymous proxy black market. why try to shoehorn some wierd tunnel into wikipedias web server infrastructure when you can just post your propoganda with a genuine tcp/ip connection from a hacked cell phone lol

Did you read the things you're linking?

> https://owasp.org/www-community/pages/attacks/ip_spoofing_vi...

Isn't an actual technique, it's describing the observed result if the server were to blindly trust some HTTP headers which is just the application payload in a TCP stream. It's not spoofing the IP at any network layer.

> https://github.com/ParsaKSH/spoof-tunnel

Requires mutually agreed spoofing on both sides... at which point it's not really spoofing and also clearly not applicable because Wikipedia will not agree to it. (It is useful in the context that they're using it, just not at all what you're talking about)

Without controling a router that's on the path or being able to publish a route that contains the IP address you're trying to spoof, there is no way to spoof an IP address in bidirectional communication.

"blindly trust some HTTP headers" "Without controling a router" "Requires mutually agreed spoofing on both sides"

you understand the concepts, and the requirements for POC, but you are not the only one.

and for those who want a working weapon,they will have to identify ALL the requirements and implement it themselves. im not about to leave the weapon loaded and fully assembled in a public place.

it sounds like you are fully capable of manufacturing that weapon if you really wanted to.

also people really are soft, it starts with soc eng, and goes from there.

>it sounds like you are fully capable of manufacturing that weapon if you really wanted to.

A significant portion of the HN population could probably jury rig something up, it just has no value in the wikipedia case when you can simply hop on a compromised internet device, no spoofing needed. In the context of "foreign country posts lies with bogus ip", ip spoofing just can't compete when you can get the real deal full on two way functional tcp/ip connection from any acquired proxy device legal or not.

Look you're trying to make believe you have a secret weapon on a website where most folks know how computers work lol quit trying to make secret weapon happen when you don't actually have one.

Link to the edit removing your changes?

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.

> 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.

Thank goodness my government would never stoop to such levels.

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...

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...

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...

Looks like the it was removed because it was mostly opinion-based and didn't reflect the "engagement" word in the title:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF...

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...

Yes. It also mentions quite a lot of other things

You're right. This excuses everything Russia is doing.

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.

Disinformation isn't about convincing you that something is true; it's about convincing you that nothing is true. If information is considered to be unreliable, you are less likely to act on it decisively.

It also seems to have the effect of encouraging you to latch on to whatever "truth" you fancy, providing tools to dismiss any contradictions.

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.

And the next question is who's to blame?

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.

Replacing the question of truth vs. falsehood is the question of effective influence. What is the influence of a message on its audience?

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.

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.

> 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.

All Wikipedia pages have a full record of past versions if you click view history,

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...

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.

You would think they'd run out of money. They are, but clearly this sort of thing is economical, especially in the age of AI: you don't even need banks of cellphones on little stands anymore, that was years ago.

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?

Russia is hardly the only one trying to put propaganda into Wikipedia.

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.

Come help! When you come across a math article on Wikipedia that you find difficult to understand, consider writing a talk page comment with specific, polite, constructive feedback. That can help other editors figure out how to improve the article. We have a goal of making articles understandable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_technical_artic...

Wikipedia should be more like Github, such that topics can be forked ad hoc, and we can get a truly diverse set of viewpoints on everything. Then auto-generate a summary page that highlights the agreements and disagreements.

Or someone else should do it. If you build it I will come.

Wikipedia's license allows you to fork the articles and take them in any direction you like. They just wont host it for you.

Yep, the open data makes it possible. The unified UI is the key feature here, so that we can contrast and compare the various takes from one place. It doesn't work if they are spread and unlinked, across the web. Basically, take every article in the corpus and make it one leaf in a bush. The Wikipedia version can remain canonical for those who want it to.

In many ways Wikipedia is more like Reddit, in which taste making influence gets concentrated into cliquey power users.

Reading the Talk page for any contemporary culture war stuff makes it clear Wikipedia’s not really a place for diverse thinking.

The more political a page becomes the greater the temptation to abandon a neutral viewpoint (consciously or unconsciously) and to limit the number of people making edits.

When it comes to politics Feyman's line about "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool" is times 10.

The average of a bunch of lies is not truth, and the median of things that people have made up is not worth one source.

Nobody suggested calculating the average of all opinions.

Huh ?

This context of the conversation is Wikipedia, an encyclopedia with a responsibility to verify and attribute its content.

"Auto-generating a summary page" would come pretty close.

I've heard this a number of times, but how do you imagine this working?

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.

Organizations editing Wikipedia like this want to suppress any other viewpoints, not present their own as another one.

Well, back to Britanica!

Well, not only Russia, there is a number of other countries that also do this. So don't count on wikipedia on any topic that might be politically difficult for someone.

Can someone do another research article of similar nature for Wikipedia articles in any way related to Israel? There is a similar disinformation campaign happening there.

I've seen claims about Wikipedia pushing both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine agenda, depending on who you ask. Which only makes me think that the real bias lies in the reader.

That's because apparently adhering to Wikipedia's own policies is a "pro-Israel" agenda. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (the founders of Wikipedia) have both called out the site/foundation on this, but I can't find the one on Sanger from a more trustworthy source than the New York Post.

https://www.theverge.com/news/813245/wikipedia-co-founder-ji...

https://nypost.com/2025/03/10/business/wikipedia-disrupted-b...

On the current events page, yes there is a bias. It will take time for them to be ironed out. I was referring to misinformation and disinformation on historical events. I have seen two parallel articles, the second created to give an incorrect narrative, of an event.

Nation states have been editing history related pages on Wikipedia for ages, it has never been a reliable source of information on some topics.

What an interesting article that definitely isn't pulling incredibly obvious red scare tactics. I'd be quite interested to know what damn article it was that was apparently so out of touch with reality that it left this author reeling in shock and horror.

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!

If we don’t assume the world revolves around the USA for just one minute, how might the fine people of Poland and Estonia interpret this comment?

One wonders.

It seems everything online, including the HN comments section, has become corroded by information warfare.

No link to edits or specific article. Disappointed. This shouldn't be front page as it contains no substance besides speculation

Every site that can be random-user-edited or allow comments are infested with shills, grifters, astroturfers, scammers, spammers, propagandists within minutes. This only increases as the site gains popularity. What each site turns into depends on how it was engineered, how it is moderated and actively managed it is. To me personally I think that Wikipedia may have been purpose designed to let this happen or it would have stopped happening a long time ago. I am certain everyone here could each think of a dozen ways to minimize this behavior.

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.

How familiar are you with Wikipedia processes? Asking because they are very sophisticated and definitely not « anyone’s can do anything unchecked », unless it is a page that isn’t visited much

Familiar enough I have seen organizations and companies gripe for its entire existence that they can't keep topics related to them accurate because there are non-stop edit wars. I also remember when Stephen Colbert mass edited and resurrected an extinct animal out of extinction using his audience on Wikipedia. There are plenty of examples of this being a disinformation platform that people can find if they look.

Yeah, there is for sure a lot of misinformation and drama. One of my favorite is this one: https://youtu.be/A48oR4Zc9ik?is=s3wjS0uFYZCI8xbC

Wikipedia has a range of protective mechanisms that admins can apply to high-traffic or frequently vandalized articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy

"Protection restricts the modification of pages to specific groups of users. Pages are protected when there is disruption that cannot be prevented through other means, such as blocks. Wikipedia is built on the principle that anyone can edit, and therefore aims to have as many pages open for public editing as possible so that anyone can add material and correct issues. This policy states in detail the protection types and procedures for page protection and unprotection, and when each protection should and should not be applied."

These mechanisms do include a "Pending changes" mode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes

My understanding which could be misinformed is that this tool is selectively applied to articles that parties are not interested in. Of course this could be meant to make people distrust the platform but it could also be true.

I for one will always assume the site is entirely fan fiction unless I can prove otherwise much like the SteamPunk artwork that people keep calling quantum computers.

I, uh, read the title as 'Russian poisons wikipedia', as if there is a list of poisons Russia uses...

Why hone in on Russia, when practically every country does it?

Because they suck at it, would by guess. And other countries are honed in on in other HN topics (even within this one), this is one of the few for the Russian SFSR/F.

Maybe because they've started the WWIII that's simmering on as these words are written.

Don't panic.

The regional conflict in Ukraine is no more a world war than the US attacking Iran is a world war...well, aside from the US being half a world away from Iran and being threatened by Iran like a little girl is threatened by a spider.

This is the shit LLMs are trained on.

It is unfortunate that they can't think for themselves during the training process itself. The think-mode might help in training too if used correctly.

They're not trained on a raw feed of the internet. They are given curated and synthetic data. The curation and synthesis of new data is done by existing LLMs.

Even if you're given the perfect textbook to read, it still helps you to take notes. Notes serve multiple purposes -- they help add clarity where it is needed, and more importantly, they help integrate new info (the current batch) with prior info (previous batches).

OK, but, as far as I know, there isn't a technology to allow that, yet. LLMs don't work like human brains.

Huh. The tech is what you make it. With your limiting logic, you would've said the same thing for thinking models at inference time too. There is nothing logically, mathematically, or physically prohibiting using thinking at training time too.

I don't doubt this happens, but given all the wolf crying about clandestine Russian operations, it's hard to assess what the scale and influence of these are. Especially as this is based on an analysis by Atlantic Council, which is essentially a NATO think tank.

This will probably read to many as me being a useful idiot for Putin or something. And maybe I am, hard to say definitely.

Give some examples of prominent wolf-crying that wasn't eventually substantiated.

Some major ones that come to mind:

- Russia blowing up Nordstream

- "Havana syndrome"

- The Steele dossier

OK, those are interesting choices that are outside of the realm of stuff that I was thinking about. What I was thinking about is that the Russians have been working the American people via the media for decades.

What public state speculation about Russian interference in anything ever was substantiated?

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.

> What public state speculation about Russian interference in anything ever was substantiated?

Tenet Media

> What public state speculation about Russian interference in anything ever was substantiated?

Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election

https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/dl

Immigrants eating dogs? If you think about it, most wolf-crying is completely unsubstantiated.

Most people lack principles and act purely emotionally. It is wicked and evil and vile if Russia does something because it is Russia doing it. It is good and right and true if “Western” powers do a thing because it is Western powers doing it. To a principled observer, they’re all evil regardless of which country is doing the thing.

Ehh, Wikipedia is already poisoned already

Wikipedia is full of various large disinformation campaigns. Not just Russia, but Iran, Qatar, North Korea, etc. Unless I'm looking at the history of DB-9 connectors or early Simpsons episode summaries, etc, it's not a reliable source.

What about the USA, or China?

That's not a sentence. What do you mean with ", ..."?

I've edited the comment

If you learn to read, the fragments "not just" and "etc" clearly answer your question.

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.

China is likely not doing it. Wikipedia is blocked by the great firewall.

That's awfully naive. China's cyber units or state actors most likely have access to Wikipedia and are not bothered by the Great Firewall. The citizens on the other hand, I agree with you.

Citizens do/can have access to Wikipedia, that's also very naive, estimations range from 15-35% of the population using VPN but in practice, any IT business and all their staff are behind VPNs and it's completely tolerated.

Almost all street markets sell those USB/QRcode to access unrestricted internet.

Most people don't need a VPN as well, similarly to the US population not accessing much of the content from let say Austria, France, Germany... due to language barrier or just not caring at all.

Anyone that does business with China understand that VPN usage is rampant (generally Shadowsocks with V2Ray and the likes, it's plug and play, ton of local companies sell it, on every markets you can buy as well), companies and people aren't actually limited by it, the people that don't circumvent it are often the ones not talking english, there is a huge tolerance as well for businesses, gov is completely aware of the mass "VPN" usage, lot of hotels as well provide you with solutions if you just ask and so-on.

Why wouldn't they be doing it? They are actively engaged in such campaigns in various other media for foreign audiences. Wikipedia being blocked for the Chinese general population doesn't mean The Party isn't targeting it to influence opinions of non-Chinese in exactly the same way, since it's a fantastic platform with incredible reach and an unrivaled level of trust from the public.

Chinese is one of the most popular languages on Wikipedia

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5

US Army openly advertises pyops work:

https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/specialty-careers/sp...

So, what country doesn't try to inject its own agenda in it?

All of them, I dislike how people seem to perceive it, while most of the time, politician job is "damage-control" (which practically means pushing an agenda by ensuring the discourse goes the way they want).

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.

Many countries simply don't care about imprinting their official narrative on Wikipedia.

Not on Wikipedia sure, but they do with many different type of media or local ways which is then translated into the "international news" (with a big sprinkle on top of non-sense and unqualified opinion).

On the contrary, injecting your own views/propaganda in Wikipedia is a great way for your content or your version of history to be included in the outputs of LLMs since they all rely more or less on it during their training phase.

Certain taboo subjects are also heavily misrepresented, e.g. in intelligence research: https://quillette.com/2022/07/18/cognitive-distortions/

I looked at the 5 examples for a bit. Reading the Wikipedia talk pages, I'd tend to agree that the sources removed are representing a fringe idea and that the Wikipedia process has been followed normally. You'd find lots of sources for every fringe idea, but that doesn't mean those sources are good.

But surely there are people who edit things about intelligence and race due to non-scientific reasons like their beliefs, politics or emotions. I think people from both sides of the issue/argument/debate are making such edits, like with every issue.

> I'd tend to agree that the sources removed are representing a fringe idea and that the Wikipedia process has been followed normally

I agree with the article which made the case that they are not "fringe", if you mean "unreliable" with "fringe". If you mean "unpopular", then yes, they are, but opinions can be unpopular despite strong evidential support, as we have seen in the history of science.

> I think people from both sides of the issue/argument/debate are making such edits, like with every issue.

There is strong political polarization among the most active Wikipedia editors, meaning that people from one side are overwhelmingly more likely to win such a disagreement: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2024/09/wikipedia-editors-and-p...

> I looked at the 5 examples for a bit. Reading the Wikipedia talk pages, I'd tend to agree that the sources removed are representing a fringe idea and that the Wikipedia process has been followed normally.

Your comment is contradicted by this direct quote from the article:

> In the rejected New York Times articles, Wade was not presenting any controversial hypotheses, but simply reporting the findings of various genetics studies published in mainstream journals.

Maybe Wade put his own spin on the findings in his book/in the articles but does that undermine the credibility of the papers published in the mainstream journals?

In many subjects where we don't have a clear answer, we have different theories, some are bogus and others will eventually be disproved until we finally reach a consensus.

Until such time, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that all points of view are represented.

> When Wade is “the only science journalist to cover a study” [...] around six paragraphs of text were removed from this article

The fact that they removed a point of view/theory on a subject because there are no other competing theories is simply wrong.

Imagine if we applied the same rule to physics. We don't know why the universe is expanding faster than anticipated. It could be dark matter, it could be something else.

Until such a time as we can prove one of the other, then all theories should be presented with caveats/warnings that these findings are not definitive and will most likely change in the future.

Instead of doing that in this case, it was decided that some theories should simply be removed because they do not fit with the conventional wisdom of what we consider acceptable or believable.

But science does not care about what is believable or acceptable. You gather evidence, you create a theory and you or someone else proves your it or disproves it. You don't simply sweep things under the rug because they make you uncomfortable.

And before you take this comment as supporting all fringe theories, we are not talking here about the flat Earth or that vaccines cause autism. Both of these theories have been disproved extensively.

Heck, there is even a Wikipedia page that was created just for this purpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccines_and_autism

So in conclusion, if there were multiple theories on this subject, I would expect them to be presented on Wikipedia warts and all so that the readers can see where we stand on the subject. Instead what we got is simple one sided censorship.

This is the same exact playbook used by the Church when Galileo came out with his theory of Heliocentricism. His idea made the Church uncomfortable and instead of trying to disprove him, they simply decided to silence him. Maybe we should avoid repeating the same mistakes?

> In many subjects where we don't have a clear answer, we have different theories, some are bogus and others will eventually be disproved until we finally reach a consensus.

> Imagine if we applied the same rule to physics. We don't know why the universe is expanding faster than anticipated. It could be dark matter, it could be something else.

There is consensus around the topic discussed in the article. There is no consensus about why the universe is expanding faster than anticipated.

A consensus doesn't obviously mean 100% of people agree. For the physics example, where we don't have a consensus of opinion, we don't have to mention all alternative theories, as some will be ridiculous or fabricated. Like with the racialist people - most of the scientists and their studies have been discredited, so why put any weight on what they publish?

> And before you take this comment as supporting all fringe theories, we are not talking here about the flat Earth or that vaccines cause autism. Both of these theories have been disproved extensively.

So there is a line we can draw, you just think we should draw it elsewhere.

> Heck, there is even a Wikipedia page that was created just for this purpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccines_and_autism

For the Vaccine article, there are 2 sentences about the autism claims even though lots of people still believe in this bullshit. But you don't see any mention in most (as I can't check all of them) articles about types of vaccines like "Subunit vaccine" as it's not a real alternative theory.

There is an article about Time Cube, but it's not mentioned in the Day or Earth articles.

There are a couple of paragraphs about religion and creationist bullshit at the end of the Evolution article because a huge part of the world is stupid, naive, brainwashed and uneducated enough to believe in such bullshit.

There is an article called "Scientific racism", as well as articles for most of the famous scientists the article about censorship mentions. It's not referenced in every article about race and intelligence because it doesn't have to. If there are several big, important, influential studies that aren't flawed or misrepresented, they will be added sooner or later. But what we have so far is people clinging at straws, from what I gather.

> This is the same exact playbook used by the Church when Galileo came out with his theory of Heliocentricism. His idea made the Church uncomfortable and instead of trying to disprove him, they simply decided to silence him. Maybe we should avoid repeating the same mistakes?

I get that some editors are motivated by their beliefs, but I don't agree they suppressed or silenced anything.

Disclaimer: I have edited Wikipedia only 2 or 3 times in my life and have never made an account. I don't follow their dramas.

That's the US government and Israeli POV, but the reality is that it is full of large, medium, small and micro manipulation campaigns backed from everybody from nation-states, to video game publishers, to political parties up for reelection defending cuts they made to heating oil subsidies, to people trying to bring up property values in a town in Ohio with a 16K population, all the way down to a guy applying to jobs trying to associate himself with a project that he put on his resume and a guy in an argument on twitter who added something that he needed to win.

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.

BTW, the page about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war in russian wikipedia was surprisingly good. No "special military operation" crap

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