[OsrsNeedsf2P]

I spent ~2 years actively editing Wikipedia for multiple hours every day. I remember taking my laptop out at airports for 20 minutes between transfers, just to tweak an article or improve a source. While I originally started because I found some articles lackluster, I quickly realized how vigorous the editing process could be on controversial topics.

For what simple HTML you see on the surface, you would be absolutely shocked to see how many hundreds of thousands of hours are spent to create an encyclopedia that, to be honest, is about as unbiased, astroturf-free, and low barrier of entry as you can get. It's not built with crappy automation but instead hand crafted with love and respect. I would bet my salary on Wikipedia turning to shit within a year if the editors who signed the Editor Strike[0] leave en masse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_...

[Wikipedianon]

From a brief skim, the list includes pretty much all active Arbitration Enforcement (AE) admins.

For those not in the loop, AE is the main mechanism to enforce civility and neutrality in contentious areas (obvious stuff like Israel-Palestine, American Politics, but also India-Pakistan, casteism, etc etc). It removes editors that are obviously only on the site to astroturf a specific belief relating to a globally controversial topic.

This requires painstaking review of one's conduct and is the main reason Wikipedia is not astroturfed in the same way Reddit or other discussion forums are.

If the strike goes forward, Wikipedia will have a massive realignment towards whatever political groups can amass the most accounts agreeing with them.

Grokipedia would unironically become more neutral in a year.

[vintermann]

Astroturf is not the right word, because appearing to be grassroots isn't how you sell your perspective on Wikipedia. Most of the people stopped from editing contentious topics on Wikipedia are in all likelihood more sincere about their beliefs than average. The more organized and professional they are about shilling, the better they do.

[Wikipedianon]

> The more organized and professional they are about shilling, the better they do.

This is incorrect.

Shills do well when they contribute outside of the topic area, memorize wiki-law, and only coordinate to !vote in contentious high-impact discussions. e.g. requested moves, reliable sources noticeboard discussions, and RfCs. They are seen as "normal" Wikipedia editors.

Professionally organized shills are unable to do this since they must ensure most of their time is "on-task" meeting a comment/karma/etc qutoa and find it difficult to justify doing non-shilling work. This works well on sites like Reddit or HackerNews. It does not work on Wikipedia.

For starters, discussion outcomes are moderated and closers do not count votes. Closers look at your history and assign lower weight to editors that appear only to be interested in a particular area.

Other mechanisms include a 500 edit minimum for certain areas + a "balanced editing restriction" (maintained by Tamzin, the same person starting the strike) which tracks %age of edits by subject area and can impose a maximum of 30% in the contentious subject.

Trying to skate under these bare minimums is similar to avoiding money-laundering by making many cash deposits of $9999. You'll be taken to Arbitration Enforcement and look even more suspicious.

You need someone who'll can non-professionally shoot-the-shit at random hours to maintain the cover story despite it not being a clear requirement.

Currently, the best shill-farm is run by the /r/Palestine subreddit. If you join their Discord, you can participate yourself! https://discord.com/invite/hhsG4QTf9n

Essentially, you're given free rein to edit as you see fit with an encouragement to make many uncontroversial edits & befriend normal editors. You do not know who else is part of the project and do not interact with them on Discord. It is very antisocial in that sense.

You are only "activated" by the Discord mod through direct messages to !vote in high-impact RfCs/discussions, e.g. officially recognizing the Gaza Genocide.

This avoids creating a clear paper trail of collusion and means it's difficult for someone to infiltrate/burn the network. It's also incompatible with the micromanagement typical of traditional influence operations.

It's been going on for a few years now as a continuation of other farms. It's one of the main reasons there's been such a slant towards Palestine onwiki lately.

Yes, it's been reported many times by many people. It is an open secret at this point and Arbitration has failed at actioning this.

So far, the only people who have been banned were the ones dumb enough to re-use the same username on Discord as Wikipedia, so now you get a warning not to do that during onboarding. Otherwise, it's too difficult to prove participation.

[vintermann]

> Professionally organized shills are unable to do this since they must ensure most of their time is "on-task"

Haha, it'd be funny if they sabotaged themselves with red tape around hours billing. I could see it happening - sometimes. But not generally. I assume professional manipulators understand that gaining trust in the Wikipedia bureaucracy is part of the job.

I have a low opinion of spy agencies - but not THAT low. I have an even lower opinion of open Reddit communities ability to get anything done.

[Wikipedianon]

Wikipedia bureaucracy is unlike other bureaucracies because there's accountability and it is decentralized.

On Wikipedia, the possibly Israeli intelligence operative known as "Icewhiz" spent years cultivating an account known as "Eostrix" that operated entirely out of Israel-Palestine. They were one day from passing their admin election* before getting banned. A member of the committee that oversees allegations of misconduct against admins analyzed patterns in Eostrix's writing/behaviour to discover the ruse.

This was presented to the committee and resulted in a ban of Eostrix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Com...

If this were a Reddit, Discord, or even a government employee, banning Eostrix would've been a discretionary act of the top moderator/manager, who would've also been the person to have vetted Eostrix.

This is embarrassing and creates an incentive to cover up the scandal. In real life, Aldrich Ames was able to spend years avoiding scrutiny from the CIA because the CIA's management didn't follow-up on reports he was suspicious.

But because the committee is a group ultimately elected by the community, the individual incentive is to take action against, because any member of the committee could betray a cover-up and fuck over everyone else. If ArbCom did not take action, the information that they ignored a serious report would become public and lead to an even bigger scandal.

This is the same reason why even weak democracies are harder to emplace spies into than strong authoritarian regimes.

*technically not an election but they were almost guaranteed a win by that point

[maccard]

> Essentially, you're given free rein to edit as you see fit with an encouragement to make many uncontroversial edits & befriend normal editors. You do not know who else is part of the project and do not interact with them on Discord. It is very antisocial in that sense.

Genuine question - where does the line between “group of people who are interested in a topic” and “shilling” lie? I don’t envy the arbitration group for having to try answer that.

[Wikipedianon]

Here's the applicable policy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing

Generally, it is unacceptable to notify people of a structured discussion in a non-neutral manner to get them to advocate a specific point of view in that discussion.

This can be applicable to notifying specific groups of people if only groups likely to have a specific viewpoint were notified.

It's also generally considered worse to give these notifications secretly or off of Wikipedia.

In this case, it would be acceptable to notify a project related to Israel and a project related to Palestine of discussions related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

But its not acceptable to only notify the project related to Palestine.

It's also not acceptable to instruct people in your notification to vote in a certain way. r/Palestine giving these instructions is a big problem.

The fact it's "secret" and offsite also plays a role. Collaboration on Wikipedia itself shows you didn't have malicious intent, so unintentional violations usually result in warnings the first few times it happens. The fact you need to join a Discord server hidden from others is a clear signal to any reasonable person that the group is against the rules.

The line is clear and the arbitration group has banned some participants, the challenge is detecting who participated.

[BobaFloutist]

I think the answer is that neither is an appropriate way to contribute to Wikipedia, and so a group of people interested in a topic who, knowing that their intent (politicizing controversial articles, rather than their particular valence) is unwelcome, take steps to avoid being recognized as part of that group, is pretty clearly not acting in good faith.

[im3w1l]

A shill gets a paycheck. Without one, I would call it activism or something.

[maccard]

So the /r/palestine group are paid but not actually told what to do?

[pazimzadeh]

> the best shill-farm is run by the /r/Palestine subreddit

you mean the best one that you know of

[Wikipedianon]

I know of most of them, at this point. I was heavily involved in that segment of Wikipedia including Sockpuppet Investigations.

The pro-Israel ones have been around for decades. Icewhiz, NoCal100, etc. They are easy to spot because they are tightly regimented and run a volume game of many accounts. They are obviously billing by the hour to a nation-state level actor that is not demanding a clear ROI on their investment and is instead using shitty KPIs.

There are also commercial sock farms. They are easy to spot because their income is "clients that want Wikipedia articles and don't qualify for one". Any account who spends all their time writing articles on small market cap companies without news coverage is a paid shill.

They are meaningless to target because Wikipedia has a bureaucratic process called "Articles for Creation" where these shills can submit the same crap endlessly for years and bill the client for time spent without impacting the encyclopedia.

[asixicle]

Just want to express gratitude for you and all who contributed to a Wikipedia "hand crafted with love and respect". Your contributions will last-- some of us set up Kiwix and a local copy of pre-AI Wikipedia that we'll keep forever, GFS style. No matter what happens your work will be preserved and used.

[shrubby]

Wikipedia is a threat to the technofeodalist AI mind shaping consortium.

As long as it's reasonably decent, the AI can't go full biased without consequences, but once it's gone there's nowhere normal people can easily to go and get a good enough sanity check.

[slg]

If I saw this comment 5 years ago, I would have thought you were some crazy conspiracy nut. Today I read it and worry that you might be right. I wonder what I will think seeing this sentiment 5 years from now.

I personally don't know if the world is on some sort of precipice. It seems like that's possibly the case. The strongest piece of evidence is that many of the rich and powerful, including those big tech leaders, are behaving like it is and that they think they're close to some sort of victory.

[datsci_est_2015]

Power has always tried to shape the perception of reality: kings, feudalists, slavers, industrialists, etc.

What’s novel isn’t that powerful people are trying to shape the perception of reality, it’s that who is powerful and what makes them powerful may be rapidly changing. I think it’s something that our “big tech leaders” are primarily concerned with, over everything else. Fundamentally evil, imo.

[shrubby]

I see this as a line.

Other end is concentrated power (via money, violence, manipulation,...) so something like a dollar per universal vote.

Other end is one vote for each, including the future generations.

Wikipedia is an obstacle for the first one that must be taken down. Perhaps one of the last barriers before the endgame.

And there's no fuzzy middle option, we've (me included) have thought in our comfort for too long that us vs. them scenario that both the left and the right (at least mainstream ones) is possible. But it's now clear that there's no lukewarm at-right or green social democrat version. Only full fascism or full democracy.

We might still have the time but one by one the platforms that would enable this (wiki included) keep being ingested thus making it less and less likely.

But like you said five years ago this level of consciousness would have been out of the question for us both so perhaps there are more of us?

[shrubby]

https://youtu.be/TaKrm5txGCQ?si=VQ3R64fSeQ9Xv_Rr this is something I keep coming back to. It doesn't seem so fictional anymore.

[RobotToaster]

It's certainly not unbiased, it's IMCO very prone to a pro-western bias.

That said it's still the best we have for most things.

[866-RON-0-FEZ]

> an encyclopedia that, to be honest, is about as unbiased, astroturf-free, and low barrier of entry as you can get.

I recently read an article about a notable person. The article attacked her personal appearance as having "Mar-a-Lago Face". I'm certain it was backed up with quality "sources".

The outrageous part is that description linked to a deranged multi-page article explaining what that is, written by who I assume must be the most terminally-online basement-dwelling losers on planet Earth.

So I'm going to disagree with you.

[thrance]

Surely, you must have taken on yourself to correct this blatant mistake (that you curiously won't link to)? Can you name this "notable person"?

[wlonkly]

I was also curious. It looks like it's probably Kristy Noem[1], and the citations are to The Week and the NYT:

> Noem has since become one of the most prominent examples of so-called "Mar-a-Lago face", a cosmetic surgery trend among conservative women,[370][371] also known as "Republican makeup".[372]

Is [370] pushing it for a biography of a living person? Yeah, probably, especially with the "one of the most prominent" and "so-called" in there. But since "Mar-a-Lago face" has its own, cited Wikipedia entry... maybe not? It's not like Wikipedians made up the term, they're citing that _others_ use that term for her.

I'm not sure how I'd phrase it to say that she is a prominent example of the plastic surgery common to the Republican inner circle, and reference the "Mar-a-Lago Face" article, without attributing the phrase to her plastic surgery.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristi_Noem#Religion_and_publi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar-a-Lago_face

[370] https://theweek.com/health/mar-a-lago-face-the-hottest-maga-...

[371] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/style/kristi-noem-teeth-t...

[372] https://www.thelist.com/1796655/politicians-reporters-republ...

[bad_username]

> honest, unbiased, astroturf-free

That is not the case, sorry. Pre-2015 Wikipedia was as honest and unbiased as we can get. Now the political, historical, philosophical segments of English Wikipedia is very biased and I cannot recommend or support it.

[thrance]

In what ways? Provide examples.

[ssl-3]

> I spent ~2 years actively editing Wikipedia for multiple hours every day. I remember taking my laptop out at airports for 20 minutes between transfers, just to tweak an article or improve a source. While I originally started because I found some articles lackluster, I quickly realized how vigorous the editing process could be on controversial topics.

That brings to mind an interesting parallel: I spent over ~2 years actively editing Waze for multiple hours every day. I don't fly much, but I remember taking notes about changes and taking my laptop out when I had a chance (wherever I was) to correct the map to better-match reality. While I originally started because the area I edited had way too much basemap[1], I quickly realized how vigorous the editing process could be when the end goal was to provide a map of driveable roads.

In some cases, the signal-to-noise ratio was so bad that I selectively nuked large parts of whole cities just to redraw them more-correctly.

I was producing good results that unambiguously had better validity than what I started with. The flurry of activity had me rise up quickly through both the editor ranks, and also the role-rankings.

It felt good.

But eventually, I got to see my careful well-researched edits be reverted by either stupid people or stupid bots. I didn't like this; I started editing Waze to make better maps of my area so I could have better maps with which to navigate with. That was awesome, but I finished those maps. So I branched out to improve adjacent areas and finished those maps, too. That also felt awesome.

I was motivated by improvement, not by competition.

When the competition showed up to re-arrange my work in ways that didn't make sense, I dropped out of editing maps on Waze as a serious pastime. I don't want to actively compete; I just want to passively fix.

I still fix things here or there, but months (instead of hours) will go by between edits.

And that's OK, I think: It still works better than it did before I put the effort in.

[1]: Oh, right. Basemap. We don't really have a single, official, freely-usable/government-supplied road map source in the US. We instead have counties doing their things with their formats, and 50 differnt states doing whatever they do, and sometimes cities with their own ways, with only the US Census Bureau's old TIGER database covering the whole gamut.

That conglomerate dataset is a damned mess, and that damnednness of that mess varies from place to place, but that damned mess is what Waze had to work with for the initial map import.

That initial import is known as "basemap."

And TIGER is cool and all (I remember an Internet where online census-provided TIGER maps were the only online maps), but it's really geared towards census-takers. It can include every private driveway, and every cowpath -- and it can include them as regular roads. I've cleaned up thousands of square miles of basemap in my area.

[Doctor_Fegg]

Please consider diverting your efforts to OpenStreetMap! The TIGER-derived basemap still needs fixup, but your work will benefit everyone, not just the Google shareholders who ultimately own Waze.

[ssl-3]

I would love do that. OSM is awesome, and basemap is a problem that I think I am good at solving.

But AFAIK OSM still has no mechanism that helps me get from A to B with dynamic and otherwise-unforeseeable roadway conditions. Waze still provides that, and improving the utility of a system that provides this kind of navigation aid has always been a primary motivation for working on Waze.

So my personal reward/payoff was/is high with Waze, because I could put those edits to use. It's not very good at all with OSM.

Besides. OSM seems to get bogged down in weird shit, like: Who cares how wide a public street is, in fractional meters? Maybe someone cares, but that someone isn't me: I drive a fairly large vehicle with fairly low ground clearance, but I've never had any difficulty driving it on urban roads in my neck of the woods. Those details don't matter to me.

So I'm not motivated to go out and measure these things like road width, and I'm also not motivated to provide assumed data as a presumed source of truth.

Falsification is bad. That's lies.

Superfluously-precise extrapolation is also bad. That's also lies.

[bberenberg]

I have a hard time with the idea that Wikipedia is unbiased when the main source in most cases is news reporting. Wikipedia is a societal form of Gell-Mann Amnesia.

[hsuduebc2]

This is not entirely fair. The overwhelming majority of Wikipedia is not meaningless politics, but stated facts backed by decent sources.

The phenomenon you are referring to usually happens in areas where there is ideological or political friction. Sure, some articles can be biased, because staying perfectly factual in the middle of an active political debate or social change is difficult for most people. But in that case, there is still the option to edit the page or start a discussion.

If something is created by a community and editable by anyone, then yes, you can safely assume that certain topics will not be perfectly unbiased. But the fact that you can see the sources, edit history, and discussions that led to a given decision is already a major advantage.

Personally, I do not know a better alternative. I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.”

[skissane]

> But in that case, there is still the option to edit the page or start a discussion.

Honestly, I think on any politicised topic, that’s a waste of time - there’s a large contingent of Wikipedia editors with a shared deeply ingrained perspective that will reliably back each other up. There are better uses of one’s time than fighting such a losing battle.

> Personally, I do not know a better alternative. I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.”

I tend to use AI to surface sources and concepts, and then go read the sources for myself to verify the AI’s claims. AI has a strong tendency to e.g. misrepresent what journal articles say, but (if they are open access or otherwise available-and they generally are if an AI is citing them) you can then read them yourself and make up your own mind.

AI has genuinely taught me things I didn’t know before about topics of interest to me-e.g. Islamic history-but I’m careful to verify its claims with reliable sources rather than just trusting them-which of course one should do with Wikipedia too

[rob74]

>I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.”

I guess that was a few years ago? Because now he also has Grokipedia ("from the guy that brought you X")...

[hsuduebc2]

It was few years ago indeed. I honestly do not give Grokipedia much credibility because it was created solely after Musk got political and someone edited wiki saying that he aligned with "right" or "far-right" politics. He saw that and created it as an "facts based" alternative purel out of spite.

[skissane]

To what extent does Grokipedia reflect Musk's personal ideological biases?

I haven't paid that much attention to it, to be honest.

[rob74]

According to https://www.npr.org/2025/10/29/nx-s1-5588695/wikipedia-groki...

> Musk is positioning Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia, which he called "Wokepedia" in an X post last December.

> Grokipedia also says Wikipedia is the subject of "persistent criticisms regarding factual reliability, susceptibility to vandalism and hoaxes, and systemic ideological biases — particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics.

...which is consistent with what the right side of the US political spectrum keeps saying about media outlets that dare to disagree with them.

[ytoawwhra92]

> The overwhelming majority of Wikipedia is not meaningless politics, but stated facts backed by decent sources.

This is true of good articles, but the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia tends to lack citations or, worse, cites sources that don't actually support the stated facts.

If an account in good standing adds a cited sentence the likelihood that anyone will actually go and check the source to confirm it supports the sentence is low. It's more likely that the edit will be reverted for other reasons.

Citogenesis is also a real problem, and wildly under-documented.

And most people who read Wikipedia do not take the time to examine all of the sources (if they're even able to - just cite a book if you want to make something up), read through the edit history, and get up to speed on the article-specific politics playing out on the talk page.

Still, it's better than everything else out there.

[lacewing]

> Personally, I do not know a better alternative.

For a long time, traditional encyclopedias had a much better track record on topics related to politics and society, simply because their editor selection process largely eliminated single-issue crusading. You wouldn't be picked to lead a particular domain unless your academic track record made it clear that you're level-headed.

But I think that AI, just like your X friend anecdote, actually illustrates an interesting point: most of the time, when we consult some sort of an online reference, we're not doing anything important, so the accuracy is not critical. Quite often, we're just trying to validate our beliefs or win online arguments. An LLM that's 90% accurate but sounds 120% authoritative (and almost always willing to support your priors) is perfect for that.

[bawolff]

> For a long time, traditional encyclopedias had a much better track record on topics related to politics and society, simply because their editor selection process largely eliminated single-issue crusading

That's a bit debatable. Traditional encyclopedias also had articles that were far from perfect, some of which had biases (not to mention there wasn't just one traditional encyclopedia. Different ones were of different quality). I think more research would be needed to figure out which is better.

[hulitu]

> stated facts backed by decent sources.

Like WW2-era articles backed by books wtitten in 2003 from an obscure author. And only this author.

[fsflover]

Where did you find that?

[account42]

Articles where almost everyone agrees on the facts are not interesting for discussing whether a particular encyclopedia is unbiased - it's precisely the contented topics where that distinction matters.

[doctorpangloss]

i'm not sure you're why you're being downvoted, relying on journalism is the weakest part of wikipedia, far and away, because it affects accuracy, which is what gell man amnesia is about, not bias. in comparison bias, in general, seems to happen regardless of sourcing.

[onel]

He got done voted because that's an exaggerated claim. With no proof. Most of the articles on Wikipedia are just facts about nature, geography, history, etc and they don't need a newspaper as a source.

[bberenberg]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Use_of_primary_sourc...

It’s their official policy.

[dingaling]

"Gell-Man" is an unfounded toy theory invented by an author without any research, using a colleague's name without permission to make it sound more authorative. It's hokum.