| 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. |