The Wikimedia Foundation has been hiring "Disinformation" staffers over the past year or two. Related discussion (see first section titled "Meetings about misinformation with FBI, CISA, etc.."):
Job ads asked for Russian, Persian and Arabic language skills.
The work of these Disinformation specialists apparently also includes tackling "disinformation regarding Indian and Iranian elections" (see linked discussion).
And a couple of years ago the Foundation finally tackled the Croatian Wikipedia, which had been in the hands of far-right extremists for almost a decade. A report was published in mid-2021:
"As Wikimedia projects have risen in prominence across the world, it has attracted increasing attention of those who would like to control the information published on it, for political or other reasons."
Not that curtailing conflicting interests where possible is wrong, but "a number of users with close connections with external parties... editing the platform in a coordinated fashion to advance the aim of those parties" echoes the Wikimedia Foundation's behavior in recent years, or tacit acceptance thereof.
> In that investigation, we were able to confirm that a number of users with close connections with external parties were editing the platform in a coordinated fashion to advance the aim of those parties.
"Community members have addressed concerns of this sort for many years, but sometimes volunteers who intervene in such cases may themselves face retaliation for their actions..."
This is why I stopped contributing.
There is a particular person whom I encountered who'd been using Wikipedia for several years to praise himself and defame others. This includes Wikipedia editors, journalists, politicians, and academic institutions.
If he took a particular interest in you or your organization, he would create websites defaming you. He would do this while trying to clean up reports about his behavior across the Web and in the media.
I spent a couple of years tracking his behavior across the Web, archiving things, and developing of profile of him and his behavior. I finally decided to call it quits because I was concerned that I'd end up as a direct target.
I also stopped editing Wikipedia to ensure that our paths would not cross again.
This is definitely not Wikimedia's fault. He's developed an increasingly sophisticated approach to avoiding detection like using rented residential IPs, mobile devices from other countries, numerous sock accounts, and more. In the end, it simply wasn't worth it to me.
I gave up on Wikipedia many years ago when my account was banned for adding information to Michael Chertoff's (former head of DHS and co-author of the Patriot Act) page. The information I added was deleted and my account was banned. His page now shows the information that I was trying to add.
There is a prominent programming competition which was operated by the ACM for many years. If you find the Italian language version of the article on Wikipedia, check the very first edit from 2012. He was the IP editor who created the article.
With that information, you can search for a current draft article on the English website. Again, the IP editor is him. This opens up information about some of his current websites posing as official websites. These websites include claims about him being a consulate, a knighted individual, defamatory articles targeting people who called out his shady political campaign in 2018, and his false claims to a particular academic pedigree.
Should that draft article disappear, you can simply find archived versions of the most recent version using popular web archival tools.
Dig for articles about his 2018 political campaign in the country matching the first language mention above and which deals with gratis "flights".
If you dig enough, you'll find links back to an article in a prominent magazine in that country. The article does not exist on the magazine's website, but you can use the URL to find archives using popular web archival tools.
Take that journalist's name and search for "blog". That's his defamatory website for her. It's just the tip of the iceberg of his attack on her.
This is one of six current defamatory websites that I know about targeting specific individuals and/or organizations which are operated by him. This doesn't include the prior existing websites, outside articles, or fake reviews.
I'm not interested in becoming one of his targets.
This is only the most recent attempt. It was proceeded by a successful publication of the exact same article to mainspace, but it was removed because the account used to create it was linked to a previous blocked sock.
If you review the history of the article proper, you'll see a history of creation and deletions. There are also past attempts in Italian, Japanese, and Simple English.
If you use COIBot reports to search for his various domains, you'll find Wikipedia is littered with his activity.
If you have all of that documented, there are plenty of youtubers who would probably love to do a random rabbithole/deepdive video on the subject and let you collab anonymously.
14 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 38.6 ms ] threadI'm also very glad that the broader entity is aware and dealing with these matters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village.....
Job ads asked for Russian, Persian and Arabic language skills.
The work of these Disinformation specialists apparently also includes tackling "disinformation regarding Indian and Iranian elections" (see linked discussion).
And a couple of years ago the Foundation finally tackled the Croatian Wikipedia, which had been in the hands of far-right extremists for almost a decade. A report was published in mid-2021:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia_Disinform...
Not that curtailing conflicting interests where possible is wrong, but "a number of users with close connections with external parties... editing the platform in a coordinated fashion to advance the aim of those parties" echoes the Wikimedia Foundation's behavior in recent years, or tacit acceptance thereof.
Do they say which parties anywhere?
This is why I stopped contributing.
There is a particular person whom I encountered who'd been using Wikipedia for several years to praise himself and defame others. This includes Wikipedia editors, journalists, politicians, and academic institutions.
If he took a particular interest in you or your organization, he would create websites defaming you. He would do this while trying to clean up reports about his behavior across the Web and in the media.
I spent a couple of years tracking his behavior across the Web, archiving things, and developing of profile of him and his behavior. I finally decided to call it quits because I was concerned that I'd end up as a direct target.
I also stopped editing Wikipedia to ensure that our paths would not cross again.
This is definitely not Wikimedia's fault. He's developed an increasingly sophisticated approach to avoiding detection like using rented residential IPs, mobile devices from other countries, numerous sock accounts, and more. In the end, it simply wasn't worth it to me.
Wikipedia is a shtshow I won't participate in.
There is a prominent programming competition which was operated by the ACM for many years. If you find the Italian language version of the article on Wikipedia, check the very first edit from 2012. He was the IP editor who created the article.
With that information, you can search for a current draft article on the English website. Again, the IP editor is him. This opens up information about some of his current websites posing as official websites. These websites include claims about him being a consulate, a knighted individual, defamatory articles targeting people who called out his shady political campaign in 2018, and his false claims to a particular academic pedigree.
Should that draft article disappear, you can simply find archived versions of the most recent version using popular web archival tools.
Dig for articles about his 2018 political campaign in the country matching the first language mention above and which deals with gratis "flights".
If you dig enough, you'll find links back to an article in a prominent magazine in that country. The article does not exist on the magazine's website, but you can use the URL to find archives using popular web archival tools.
Take that journalist's name and search for "blog". That's his defamatory website for her. It's just the tip of the iceberg of his attack on her.
This is one of six current defamatory websites that I know about targeting specific individuals and/or organizations which are operated by him. This doesn't include the prior existing websites, outside articles, or fake reviews.
I'm not interested in becoming one of his targets.
If you review the history of the article proper, you'll see a history of creation and deletions. There are also past attempts in Italian, Japanese, and Simple English.
If you use COIBot reports to search for his various domains, you'll find Wikipedia is littered with his activity.