[mfer]

There are malicious editors out there. For example, someone repeatedly edited the Kubernetes page on Wikipedia to make some changes that were not true and contradicted by the reference that was used. This is just one example.

There is a very real problem, even in technical circles, of wrong information being put on there.

In this example, it was always by an anonymous account.

How does the Wikimedia foundation attempt to handle this? I'm not suggesting I have ideas on what to do. But, this is a real debatable question they have to wrestle with.

[KennyBlanken]

Wikipedia is dominated not by the truth, but by two things:

- people who treat articles like their own fiefdoms and have obsessively memorized every sentence of policy and can drown an edit they don't like with subjective assertions that an edit violates a particular policy

- no-life basement neckbeards who do thousands and thousands of edits on subjects they couldn't possibly have knowledge or experience on and respond instantly to edits to "their" pages

Further, in disputes, it essentially comes down to who the rest of the community likes more. The ultimate ad hominem is that some random IP address vs an established 'wikipedian', even if the 'wikipedian' is full of shit? The wikipedian wins.

The page for AA is a great example. There's a dude who is completely unhinged and suppresses any negative information about AA, such as the problems with abuse, predation, and sexual assault. Or studies showing poor efficacy compared to science-based treatment.

I posted a HN comment as such and was more than a little surprised to come across a reply made barely a few hours later, apparently from that dude, accusing me of being someone he'd had a tiff with on wikipedia.

You look at the edit history and his behavior is clearly gatekeeping and enforcing a particular viewpoint. Yet, curiously, he's never been subject to any censure?

[collegeburner]

100% this, same as you get with reddit moderators and those types of people. There are a lot of people there with agendas who use "the rules" to kill any opinions they don't like.

[uuyi]

Same as if you have above 500 karma here and someone criticised Microsoft legitimately after Nadella arrived on the scene…

I regularly throw accounts out in disgust at the political voting.

[oceanplexian]

Wikipedia was awesome some time before 2015/2016.

Look up anything even mildly controversial, e.g Gender, Marxism, Capitalism, Globalism, Election Laws, Freedom of Speech, Racism, and then compare 10 years ago to today, using archive.org or by looking at edit history. It feels like a parallel universe, as if history was totally re-written.

[xoa]

>How does the Wikimedia foundation attempt to handle this?

Add a time cost to accounts that is independent from IP or real identity. I gave a suggestion to factoring the product of primes, basically breaking crypto with far fewer bits then would ever be used in a real system to tune to time to a desired target. Another option would be to require a security key for anonymous editing of hot articles then ban the key if needed, which would essentially be a fairly anonymous proxy for money. Now attackers need to spend a key each ban. Although unlike just doing it purely for Wikipedia that might result in a market of "used, banned" keys which isn't really great. But they shouldn't do it via IP, they absolutely could do better.