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 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.
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.
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.
Every site that can be random-user-edited or allow comments are infested with shills, grifters, astroturfers, scammers, spammers, propagandists within minutes. What each site turns into depends on 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 and edit makes 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 it.
I’ve been watching people in /r/baltic states talk about how Russia has been actively changing the birth places of Estonian officials to say Russia instead of occupied Estonia.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 analysis of 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.
If some entity is stating themselves to be an arbiter of truth, it's not unfair to critique other actions by that party, even if it's not directly relevant to the topic. Whataboutism can provide an indication of the underlying process/affiliation of that party.
The propagandist author is complaining about how come the Russians are using counter-propaganda measures against a book published by the fricking Atlantic Council, this has to be a joke, right?
> In a report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue
From here [1]:
> Sasha is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Global Internet Forum on Counter-Terrorism, the Christchurch Call and the Global Partnership for Action against Tech Facilitated Gender Based Violence. She is a founding board member of the Forum on Information and Democracy and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Coalition on Internet Safety.
Also from here [2]:
> European Commission (EC Horizon, DG-CNECT, DG-JUST, FPI) (...)
> US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
> US Department of Justice (DOJ)
> [A litany of US embassies from around the world]
These atlanticist ghouls still think that the world has remained stuck back in 2018, it hasn't.
I'm unsure what the controversy is that you are pointing out. I clicked on the links you provided but don't see a reference to Atlantic Council. Can you point me to a summary of what atlanticist ghouls means? What happened in 2018 that relates to her claims made in her article?
The Russian government is so all powerful that they control the minds of the majority of Americans and their leaders. I applaud the brave windmill fighters.
Russia has minor influence. You, on the other hand, is a totally different story, and the amount of disinformation about Russia, China etc injected by the west is orders of magnitude more, and it is in today's lingua franca, to make matters worse.
If one Scott Aaronson permits himself to write publicly something like (as far as I recall) "it was Alan Turing who won the second world war", one can only imagine the amount of poison that goes into your heads, and of course not only through wikipedia.
1. The article looks LLM-assisted, if not LLM-generated.
2. The Western "left" have been trying to write Wikipedia articles in a way that promotes their point of view in a much subtler, but also much more persistent way. The Western "right" have been complaining about this at least since 2009.
While I'm not happy about the Russian disinformation campaign, it is a guilty pleasure seeing "Western left" taste their own medicine.
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.
A long list of controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank goodness my government would never stoop to such levels.
Irrelevant whataboutism.
Every site that can be random-user-edited or allow comments are infested with shills, grifters, astroturfers, scammers, spammers, propagandists within minutes. What each site turns into depends on 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 and edit makes 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 it.
I’ve been watching people in /r/baltic states 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...
It’s rather devious
Ehh, Wikipedia is already poisoned already
> "Please take out a membership to support the light of truth."
Self-appointed arbiter of truth. Got it.
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.
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?
China is likely not doing it. Wikipedia is blocked by the great firewall.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 analysis of 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
That half these comments are whataboutism related is disappointing but unsurprising.
If some entity is stating themselves to be an arbiter of truth, it's not unfair to critique other actions by that party, even if it's not directly relevant to the topic. Whataboutism can provide an indication of the underlying process/affiliation of that party.
^ A teacup defence of whataboutism.
The propagandist author is complaining about how come the Russians are using counter-propaganda measures against a book published by the fricking Atlantic Council, this has to be a joke, right?
> In a report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue
From here [1]:
> Sasha is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Global Internet Forum on Counter-Terrorism, the Christchurch Call and the Global Partnership for Action against Tech Facilitated Gender Based Violence. She is a founding board member of the Forum on Information and Democracy and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Coalition on Internet Safety.
Also from here [2]:
> European Commission (EC Horizon, DG-CNECT, DG-JUST, FPI) (...)
> US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
> US Department of Justice (DOJ)
> [A litany of US embassies from around the world]
These atlanticist ghouls still think that the world has remained stuck back in 2018, it hasn't.
[1] https://www.isdglobal.org/team-member/sasha-havlicek/
[2] https://www.isdglobal.org/partnerships-and-funders/
I'm unsure what the controversy is that you are pointing out. I clicked on the links you provided but don't see a reference to Atlantic Council. Can you point me to a summary of what atlanticist ghouls means? What happened in 2018 that relates to her claims made in her article?
The Russian government is so all powerful that they control the minds of the majority of Americans and their leaders. I applaud the brave windmill fighters.
The article is very one-sided and emotionally charged. The usefulness of it drops significantly because of that.
Russia has minor influence. You, on the other hand, is a totally different story, and the amount of disinformation about Russia, China etc injected by the west is orders of magnitude more, and it is in today's lingua franca, to make matters worse.
If one Scott Aaronson permits himself to write publicly something like (as far as I recall) "it was Alan Turing who won the second world war", one can only imagine the amount of poison that goes into your heads, and of course not only through wikipedia.
“No, you!” would have been more efficient and equally insightful. You used so many words to say nothing more specific than that.
1. The article looks LLM-assisted, if not LLM-generated.
2. The Western "left" have been trying to write Wikipedia articles in a way that promotes their point of view in a much subtler, but also much more persistent way. The Western "right" have been complaining about this at least since 2009.
While I'm not happy about the Russian disinformation campaign, it is a guilty pleasure seeing "Western left" taste their own medicine.
Fighting poison with poison still leaves you with poison.