[I don't know how to properly title this item. The first paragraph:
I’m Maggie Dennis, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability.[1] I’m reaching out to you today to talk about a series of actions the Foundation has recently taken to protect communities across the globe.]
So the TL;DR is that there were some sysops from Mainland China who abused their privileges (CheckUser allows one to find any user's IP) and were banned, and as a result the process of signing NDA's for those who could have access to private information has been changed? And that change was unannounced to reduce risk of infiltration?
> We have banned seven users and desysopped a further 12 as a result of long and deep investigations into activities around some members of the unrecognized group Wikimedians of Mainland China
and 12 warned [2]
> I believe it was 12 other users who were contacted and asked to adjust their behavior to work within community policies, especially regarding "canvassing" and good faith collaboration with other users.
To put it in perspective, Chinese Wikipedia has 65 sysops (excluding the ones that have been removed).
"A group of Croatian language Wikipedia (Hr.WP) admins held undue de-facto control over the project at least from 2011 to 2020. During that time, the group intentionally distorted the content presented in Croatian language Wikipedia articles in a way that matched the narratives of political organisations and groups that can broadly be defined as the Croatian radical right. The group systematically produced and edited articles containing unencyclopaedic content and overt historical revisionism. The content became so pervasive and remained online for so long that it created a web of deception to influence the reader's moral or value judgement in a way that corresponded to the group’s ideological views. More recently, after 2020, the local community has made tangible improvements to some of the most sensitive and most disputed articles. However, it is too early to say if this will be enough to put the project firmly back into alignment with the five pillars."
Apparently, an encylopaedia anyone can edit anonymously is susceptible to disinformation authored by ideologically driven editors. Who would have thought? :) It's stunning that the Wikipedia administrators still treat uncovered infiltrations as "isolated incidents" despite all evidence to the contrary.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 22.9 ms ] threadI’m Maggie Dennis, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability.[1] I’m reaching out to you today to talk about a series of actions the Foundation has recently taken to protect communities across the globe.]
> We have banned seven users and desysopped a further 12 as a result of long and deep investigations into activities around some members of the unrecognized group Wikimedians of Mainland China
and 12 warned [2]
> I believe it was 12 other users who were contacted and asked to adjust their behavior to work within community policies, especially regarding "canvassing" and good faith collaboration with other users.
To put it in perspective, Chinese Wikipedia has 65 sysops (excluding the ones that have been removed).
[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... [2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... [3] https://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:用户列表&grou...
"A group of Croatian language Wikipedia (Hr.WP) admins held undue de-facto control over the project at least from 2011 to 2020. During that time, the group intentionally distorted the content presented in Croatian language Wikipedia articles in a way that matched the narratives of political organisations and groups that can broadly be defined as the Croatian radical right. The group systematically produced and edited articles containing unencyclopaedic content and overt historical revisionism. The content became so pervasive and remained online for so long that it created a web of deception to influence the reader's moral or value judgement in a way that corresponded to the group’s ideological views. More recently, after 2020, the local community has made tangible improvements to some of the most sensitive and most disputed articles. However, it is too early to say if this will be enough to put the project firmly back into alignment with the five pillars."
Apparently, an encylopaedia anyone can edit anonymously is susceptible to disinformation authored by ideologically driven editors. Who would have thought? :) It's stunning that the Wikipedia administrators still treat uncovered infiltrations as "isolated incidents" despite all evidence to the contrary.