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A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

wikipedia.fivefilters.org

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Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#301

Post by nneonneo »

I'll preface this with noting that I did my own research into both sides prior to writing this. I don't have a horse in this race one way or another.

Something is not right here. This is not the first attempt to discredit a major organization - fivefilters previously ran a campaign against The Guardian (http://theguardian.fivefilters.org/), with much the same kind of conspiratorial tone that I detect in the page on Wikipedia. The fivefilters folks seem to be surprised that this user is spending so much time editing their favorite articles.

The articles in question have had quite a history of "interesting" editors pop by. Look for example at the page on Oliver Kamm. The fivefilters folks allege that Philip Cross is suppressing information about a pending court case. The edit history (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oliver_Kamm&offse...) shows something much different:

- 05/01, 86.63.4.158 adds some information about this "court case", which is really just a crowdfunding request for pending legal action (sourced to a blog). This user gets reverted several times by Cross for adding poorly sourced material.

- 05/01, User:Leftworks1 re-adds it, and gets into a revert war with Cross, User:ScrapIronIV, and User:Cullen328 (all of whom are reverting the poorly sourced stuff). This user has only ever edited the Kamm article.

- 05/02, several IP address editors, in quick succession, attempt to re-add that section. Three established editors revert. Protection is added to prevent anonymous users from editing.

- 05/04, protection expires and a pile of anonymous IPs start to add the material again. Total of 12+ attempts.

- 05/07, Leftworks1 comes back and attempts to add the court case material again. Protection is added back.

- 05/09, the article is edited several times by User:Ubli9917, User:Ubli4351, User:Ther7514, User:Ifit8488, all of which are accounts created 05/05, who have made exactly 10 edits to unrelated accounts (to gain autoconfirmation), and who then promptly tried to add the court case to the Kamm article.

So what this reveals is that a number of sockpuppet accounts, anonymous IPs, and such have been trying to push unsourced crap through onto Wikipedia, and Philip Cross (and others) have been trying to get it removed. This gets played out on other pages, too. Just look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga...

While Philip Cross might have a certain bias in his choice of articles, I can't help but view this particular fivefilters article as a very biased attack on an established editor who happened to step on some toes. His Wikipedia opponents, apparently tired of fighting him with sockpuppets and normal edit procedures, have taken to an external medium to decry him. Wikipedia has many layers of dispute resolution, but other than an AN/I posting by a largely uninvolved user, the aggrieved opponents of Philip Cross appear not to have attempted any form of real dispute resolution. Until they provide evidence that they have attempted to work within Wikipedia to solve their editorial dispute, I would not pay this fivefilters article any heed.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#302

Post by nneonneo »

k1m wrote: post #289
notahacker wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the set of people who (i) know about and (ii) are neutrally disposed towards most of the political figures highlighted here is an empty one (maybe one can feel neutral towards Kamm, whose foreign policy views in the early 2000s were very wrong but I've never felt to have behaved in a particularly loathsome manner). And it's perfectly possible to contribute in a dispassionate manner about people and or…

I'm really not sure where you're going with all this. We haven't offered rewards for doxxing anyone. We've written an article highlighting a problem with a particular editor's behaviour on Wikipedia where he has a conflict of interest and Wikipedia is refusing to act. You seem to be talking about anything and everything except this.

Has anyone involved in the articles actually attempted to engage Wikipedia's normal dispute resolution procedures? I see one editor who reached out to CoI, but this editor is not actually involved in the articles.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#303

Post by teddyh »

Retric wrote: post #292
nullymcnull wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am saying that if you look at Wikipedia history you can find plenty of places where an anonymous user/occasional editor fixes a spelling mistake that was then reverted. You're essentially refuting yourself by making the same claim again, and yet still without offering a single example of something you are claiming is rampant. If there are "plenty" of examples, it should be easy to link a few . I'm skeptical, beca…

By the nature of Wikipedia it really depends on how many people / editors are looking at the page. But, feel free to dig through the reverts they are really common and not just for regional variations in spellings. PS: I realize listing even 50 in all of Wikipedia is not nessisarily meaningful so no I am not going to waste my time tilting at windmills.

You have made an assertion that a certain thing is a common occurence on Wikipedia, and have multiple times been asked for sources. The fact that you are still refusing to provide any sources (all the while claiming it is “really common”) is clear grounds for dismissing your point out of hand.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#304

Post by bjourne »

belorn wrote: post #121
bjourne wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is already happening on a daily basis regarding all articles related to a certain country. Correcting erroneous information doesn't work because most issues aren't about facts, but about judgement calls. Is this piece of information relevant in this context or not? Should we use "this definition" that all anthropologists uses or "that definition" that most Wikipedians prefer but no scholar uses? Unless you are get…

Interesting that you mentioned political topics since I find Wikipedia a much better source than news agencies that are openly aligned to one specific political platform. For news here in Sweden its not uncommon to hear the national radio say "in the political aligned left/right news paper xxx, they wrote ..., while the political aligned (opposing side) wrote ...". Fact checking sites are naturally better and usually…

I agree! But when you read news articles you know and expect that the information will have a political slant. But on Wikipedia, the information is advertised as neutral and free of bias, which it isn't. That's the problem with the site. People are treating it as "the truth," rather than just one source among many.

People need to be aware of how incredibly messy the Wikipedia editing game is, and that it is dominated by politically affiliated paid editors. Believing otherwise is incredibly naive.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#305

Post by nneonneo »

TheForumTroll wrote: post #300
notahacker wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be brutally honest, the fact he's made over a hundred thousand edits on Wikipedia and the examples you choose to highlight of alleged bias include following WP policies and removing an unsourced claim about a libel suit from a biography underlies the fact that beyond Galloway et al moaning about it and Murray actually suggesting he's part of a government ' “cyber-war” op aiming to defend the “official” narrative a…

There is no He. It is them. "He" has made edits every single day in more than 1700 days. It is clearly a group.

There are far more productive Wikipedians (Cross is 308th) who are easily attributable to individuals. 30 edits a day is literally nothing - Cross probably has WP open in a tab at work and checks it like email. Someone makes a negative change to a page he's watching, and he reverts. Easy way to rack up hundreds of edits in a week. (Source: I used to do exactly this for about a year).

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#306

Post by ThoAppelsin »

JdeBP wrote: post #185
ThoAppelsin wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important difference here is that this platform claims to be an encyclopedia, and any random vandal may not simply make an edit on an article of the conventional encyclopedia. It would only be natural for us to take this resource as not-so-reliable, for that it is as easy a man to spit on the floor to infiltrate Wikipedia with false information. Yet, we usually don't. We usually just go ahead and trust what we se…

The General Disclaimer saying that very thing is hyperlinked at the bottom of every single page on the WWW site. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer

... which pretty much catches nobody's attention unfortunately. If Wikipedia does have the goodwill, then something has to be made to bring the average user's perception of trustworthiness down to the level of how much trustworthy they really are, and maybe even less. In the context of trust, false positives are worse than false negatives, since an individual may simply build up trust by referring to other resources and relieve their scepticism.

I'd say Wikipedia is really to blame for creating this false sense of trust on their platform. Not that they are completely unreliable, but they are less so than they seem to an average user.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#307

Post by nneonneo »

k1m wrote: post #295
notahacker wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

George Galloway offered the reward, according to RT in the article posted above (and various other sources generally supportive of Galloway). That's... not usual behaviour. And as I pointed out above, having a negative opinion of a subject is not a "conflict of interest", and several of the diffs, of literally thousands you could have chosen, are entirely unobjectionable. I even pointed out one above was actually rem…

George Galloway offered the reward Well, we're not George Galloway. If the real interest was in the edits as opposed to promoting conspiracy theories about Wikipedia colluding with conflicted editors to damage the good name of Messrs Murray and Galloway, presumably people would be devoting their time to reasoned explanations of why X is important or Y is irrelevant in talk page discussions on article wording I'll jus…

If there's an editorial dispute, please solve it in an editorial manner. Editors opposing Cross on Wikipedia have shown prior bad-faith activity. For example, User:Leftworks1 created over a dozen sockpuppets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga...) to push their viewpoint, only to get smacked by several editors including Cross repeatedly.

If there's a real editorial dispute - if anyone wanting to "correct" the bias on the articles is actively doing that, with reputable sources, and getting smacked down, then you can bring that to dispute resolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution) and come to consensus. But yelling about Wikipedia being broken or unfairly targeting people is just bunk until you've worked through the process.

In case you think this is me telling you to submit to the bureaucracy - that's exactly what I'm suggesting. If you have a dispute in the real world, you would go to the courts and use the legal system, not just yell about it endlessly to passersby.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#308

Post by cooper12 »

hexane360 wrote: post #249
cooper12 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is nuance and actually reading what these titles say? It's all written out for you and there's no contradiction. Also, no one actually uses the disrupt point like that.

>It's all written out for you >no one actually uses the disrupt point like that. You're using institutional knowledge here, not something that's obvious straight from the text. This is exactly the point GP is making.

Nope, I'm saying they fabricated their own scenario that none of the documentation actually backs up. Maybe you should read it too.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#309

Post by TheForumTroll »

infinity1 wrote: post #283

This article makes me sad. Sad it has so many upvotes for a blatant piece of manipulative propaganda. Sad that hn has been the bated. For those that don’t follow British politics, these politicians are oddly pro Russian. I would like to see the reverse analysis, of pro Russian trolls’ edits on Wikipedia.

What has pro-russian to do with anything? Even if they are or were Nazi sympathizers that doesn't change the fact that Wikipedia is being gamed by someone with an agenda. 1700+ days of edits without pause? It is clearly a group behind that account.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#310

Post by ThoAppelsin »

c22 wrote: post #263
ThoAppelsin wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important difference here is that this platform claims to be an encyclopedia, and any random vandal may not simply make an edit on an article of the conventional encyclopedia. It would only be natural for us to take this resource as not-so-reliable, for that it is as easy a man to spit on the floor to infiltrate Wikipedia with false information. Yet, we usually don't. We usually just go ahead and trust what we se…

I would argue that anyone who takes wikipedia at face value and trusts everything they read there without further verification, research, or compatible pre-existing knowledge is not a very discerning individual. Wikipedia is not being coy about their identity, I'm pretty sure everyone knows it's edited by strangers on the internet. If you want an encyclopedic source you know you can trust then buy an encyclopedia.

> I'm pretty sure everyone knows it's edited by strangers on the internet

I can assure you that there are at least some who are unaware that even they can edit a Wikipedia article. My housemate (a computer engineering student) didn't. My girlfriend seeking her doctorate degree didn't. My 2 roommates who managed to get to the first 100 at our national examination, also didn't.

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