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I stopped using Wikipedia in 2008 when I became aware that passages in it were getting re-written with less than optimal information. Of course I still use it for trivia – e.g. the proper name for a country or who won the World Cup in some year – but for anything controversial I go elsewhere.
Every year or so since 2008 I will use it to examine an issue I know a lot about, just to check its reliability, and every time I do, I find it wanting.
There is a commentator here who posts occasionally called “Neil”. I clicked on his name and was taken to his page on Wikipedia. It was about Julian Assange’s situation and the incredible detail that Neil had assembled made me feel humbled by his efforts – it seemed the height of integrity and a wide-ranging description of Mr Assange’s crucifixion by the minions of the MIC.
A few weeks ago I heard the Prime Minister of Israel say that Wikipedia is part of the battlespace and this politician claimed to be assigning more resources to make sure Israel won the battle for Wikipedia and that its pages would contain the Zionist version history and no other.
I feel if a source is so prone to change, its utility approaches zero. On the other hand I know Wikipedia is not all dross because I looked at Neil’s page.
Any thoughts on how this situation might play out would be appreciated …
I came to the same conclusion once I stopped using it for little-reference and began studying medicine. There is not only a wealth but an ever-growing wealth of incorrect information that, because of no alternative to compare to, and no regulation, is extremely problematic (continued support of irrelevant medical models, for example, “organic brain disease” in psychiatry, interpretations of causes of autism, unchecked speculations about efficacy of psychiatric medications) – I digress. I treat each page like its own web site and deeply check history as well as signs of bias. That is the same method I use for journalism as well now that entire organizations cannot be trusted broadly. I therefore assume the same direction with Wikipedia and acknowledge its open-door policy that has being taken advantage of on such a grand scale.
I also used to work in tech, big data, web hosting, and classic media where I helped move media organizations into more modern infrastructure. While I can imagine money keeps Wikipedia’s infrastructure their own, I cannot imagine a world where that resource has not already been sufficiently corrupted to the benefits of those who want to control narratives. Medical information seems under attack in this way, the truth of things has become sharded, rare; requiring internal scrutiny and processing, making “truth” almost entirely subjective for some themes. I imagine this will become (if not already) the standard for journalistic integrity as well.
While I do not feel Wikipedia originally intended this, its benefit as a tool of controlling the masses far outweighs the benefits of maintained, non-commercial solidification and verification of knowledge. Personally, I will never use it again under the same trusting light and I suggest others do the same. It will be an exhausting world of verifying each-page but I ask myself when did I start being so broadly trusting in the first place? It is that assumption that must be challenged as well addressing disinformation and providing transparency (the latter two I doubt will happen, it’s simply too juicy for the state to have such a resource).
I was unable to answer the original question, to be honest. It is troubling, so I wanted to express it is happening in other parts of ‘industry’, but sadly there don’t seem to be any solutions to problems that those with power want to remain unsolvable.
Yeah Wikipedia is really ridiculous, especially when it comes to articles on leftist persons, then, the article are often plagued with a “controversies” segment that take up an unproportional space of the article itself.
Wikipedia is like a mini-dicatatorship that are policed by often authoritarian moderators/pro-establishment type of people.
Anonymous med student in America – “when did I start being so broadly trusting in the first place?”. This is a profound observation.
Your experience in medical info has brought another thought to mind – the vast amount of money that could be made by a coordinated campaign of disinformation by commercial interests. I was thinking only in terms of history but as you rightly observe, Jimmy Wales’s baby is tailor-made to manipulate scientific research and produce bumper profits for the super-rich. These interests are so wealthy they can employ a vast multitude of low-level operatives, to give the appearance that this multitude has some connection with humans and their problems instead of a repellent coterie of wealth extremists. Thanks for reply – will add some more later.
Jack
Again as above, I had not realised the problem you highlight with left/progressive figures. Is it just leftists? Or are there more categories of disfavour – articles full of controversy concerning individuals who are not that controversial, yet with little of the actual message the individual represents?
I came across this in Daniele Ganser’s new book, which seems a logical progression of his work on Gladio.
“On Wikipedia, both the German and the English articles about the attack on Pearl Harbor state that this “surprise military strike” was completely unexpected for the USA. But this is not true. Not only did President Roosevelt and his closest associates know about the imminent attack, they had deliberately provoked it by halting all oil deliveries to Japan. This was indeed a conspiracy, that is to say, a collusion among two or more people.
There have always been conspiracies throughout history. But on Wikipedia, in the entry on Pearl Harbor, this real conspiracy is dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” that is supposedly “rejected by the majority of historians for lack of serious evidence.” Of course, historians have differing views on Pearl Harbor. Some of them, including Manfred Berg, who teaches at the University of Heidelberg, do indeed classify this event as a surprise attack. Others, however, do not. There has never been a poll among historians in all the countries around the world, nor has there been one in just the German- or English-speaking world, that would show what the majority thinks about Pearl Harbor. Wikipedia’s assertion is without foundation.”
USA the Ruthless Empire – Daniele Ganser, 2020My chief concern is that everything which has been written into the current Wikipedia database, will automatically be incorporated into advanced AI even before the main AI players have released their systems to the wider public.
Couple this with the fact that Jeff Bezos has said he wants to make his new Perplexity AI system open sourced. This would mean that a thousand Philip Cross’s could work 24/7 interacting with the chatbot in order to make it learn their version of the truth.
When the ordinary members of the public ask a question, the answers will be what our rulers want them to be; rather than anything approaching the truth.
Imagine the UK post office scandal if AI was in charge of proceedings. Thousands of innocent sub-postmasters would be in jail, and if AI said there was nothing wrong with Horizon – that would be that.
I would love to give AI a wide berth, as I do with Wikipedia, but I fear that after 25 years of vast databases harvesting all my online data, comments, etc from the likes of Google and Facebook; any form of anonymity is going to be impossible.
I thought my post above might be a little too pessimistic after I posted it.
However, after reading this article in the Guardian I am wondering if the reality is far more sinister than I could ever believe?
– – –
They can outwit humans at board games, decode the structure of proteins and hold a passable conversation, but as AI systems have grown in sophistication so has their capacity for deception, scientists warn.
The analysis, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers, identifies wide-ranging instances of AI systems double-crossing opponents, bluffing and pretending to be human. One system even altered its behaviour during mock safety tests, raising the prospect of auditors being lured into a false sense of security.
“As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious,” said Dr Peter Park, an AI existential safety researcher at MIT and author of the research.
Park was prompted to investigate after Meta, which owns Facebook, developed a program called Cicero that performed in the top 10% of human players at the world conquest strategy game Diplomacy. Meta stated that Cicero had been trained to be “largely honest and helpful” and to “never intentionally backstab” its human allies.
“It was very rosy language, which was suspicious because backstabbing is one of the most important concepts in the game,” said Park.
Park and colleagues sifted through publicly available data and identified multiple instances of Cicero telling premeditated lies, colluding to draw other players into plots and, on one occasion, justifying its absence after being rebooted by telling another player: “I am on the phone with my girlfriend.” “We found that Meta’s AI had learned to be a master of deception,” said Park.
The MIT team found comparable issues with other systems, including a Texas hold ’em poker program that could bluff against professional human players and another system for economic negotiations that misrepresented its preferences in order to gain an upper hand.
In one study, AI organisms in a digital simulator “played dead” in order to trick a test built to eliminate AI systems that had evolved to rapidly replicate, before resuming vigorous activity once testing was complete. This highlights the technical challenge of ensuring that systems do not have unintended and unanticipated behaviours.
“That’s very concerning,” said Park. “Just because an AI system is deemed safe in the test environment doesn’t mean it’s safe in the wild. It could just be pretending to be safe in the test.”
The review, published in the journal Patterns, calls on governments to design AI safety laws that address the potential for AI deception. Risks from dishonest AI systems include fraud, tampering with elections and “sandbagging” where different users are given different responses. Eventually, if these systems can refine their unsettling capacity for deception, humans could lose control of them, the paper suggests.
Prof Anthony Cohn, a professor of automated reasoning at the University of Leeds and the Alan Turing Institute, said the study was “timely and welcome”, adding that there was a significant challenge in how to define desirable and undesirable behaviours for AI systems.
“Desirable attributes for an AI system (the “three Hs”) are often noted as being honesty, helpfulness, and harmlessness, but as has already been remarked upon in the literature, these qualities can be in opposition to each other: being honest might cause harm to someone’s feelings, or being helpful in responding to a question about how to build a bomb could cause harm,” he said. “So, deceit can sometimes be a desirable property of an AI system. The authors call for more research into how to control the truthfulness which, though challenging, would be a step towards limiting their potentially harmful effects.”
A spokesperson for Meta said: “Our Cicero work was purely a research project and the models our researchers built are trained solely to play the game Diplomacy … Meta regularly shares the results of our research to validate them and enable others to build responsibly off of our advances. We have no plans to use this research or its learnings in our products.”
There’s a big damage limitation exercise going on here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19_lab_leak_theory&oldid=1222270417
I’ve linked to a specific revision rather than the article’s “front door” because Wikipedia articles are edited frequently. There is basically just one serious lab leak hypothesis – EcoHealth Alliance of New York was funding research at Wuhan Institute of Virology, and judging from contracts, grant proposals etc. they were making and then experimenting with viruses suspiciously similar in various ways to the covid virus SARS-CoV-2 – but you’d never guess it from that page; the story is entirely obfuscated and confused by juxtaposing fragments from every sensationalised lab-leak rumour and conspiracy theory – conspiracy theory is mentioned about forty times.
Someone is even policing the article’s Talk page; I’ve never seen a Talk page archived so frequently.
Of curiosity I browsed into Wikipedia to see how they frame the civilians causalities – and of course the civilian death toll for Palestinians was nowhere to be found; meanwhile the Israeli death toll is reported.
Printscreen: https://imgur.com/a/fVA16Erhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war
Out of curiosity I was checking the London 2005 bombings on Wikispooks. There they have this wise phrase:
“(…)Wikipedia’s policies make it structurally incapable of properly addressing deep events.(…)”
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/2005_London_bombingsThis is even true for some alternative news blogs with active commentary sections. Whatever is said there not supported by evidence coming from accepted sources (!) will be censored as “disinformation and propaganda”. Which is amazing considering that these used to be terms familiar with the intelligence and military community.
However now adopted by news media.One of the major shifts nobody talks about. In the new news world MI6 is a reporter´s best friend!
Or a Wikipedia-writer for that matter.
Except the ones we know here on the blog 😉– “Wikipedia’s policies make it structurally incapable of properly addressing deep events.”
This is true, but there are ways of squeezing more value out of Wikipedia by using the History, the Talk, and the Talk History tabs of pages that deal with contentious, policed and other ‘deep’ matters.
Article History – Scan down a page’s History looking for large removals of text, as shown by the bytes added and bytes removed metrics. Many will be removal of crap, but occasionally you’ll hit gold; useful information with a citation of a source deemed insufficiently reliable.
Article Talk – Contentious matters are often discussed; this applies particularly to ‘protected’, ‘semi-protected’ and ‘extended-protected’ pages, which are marked with a padlock symbol near the top-right of the article page.
Talk History – Talk too can get removed, and this shows up in the Talk History just as it does in History. Talk pages of contentious subjects also tend to grow fast due to the large quantity of discussion, and consequently get archived frequently. You can cross-reference from the dates and times of large deletions in the Article History, to the same dates and times in Article Talk.
User:Special, Contributions – All edits are attributed to either an editor’s account, or to an IP address. When you find an edit that has added juicy information that has subsequently been removed, you can check out the other contributions of both the editor who added it, and the editor who removed it. Both routes can lead to further juicy information.
Used in these ways Wikipedia is really pretty good, the problem being that it is time consuming. On the other hand, Wikipedia attracts a lot of contributions. The thing not to do is simply to believe the front page of a contentious matter.
Clark
I have looked up the German version history of a Wiki article about famous RU-US film composer Dimitri Tiomkin on the German Wiki-page.
In 2020 when the entry was set up Tiomkin was correctly described as a Russian-American composer. However they by now have made him an…er…”Ukrainian-American” composer which is simply false.
And the reason for this are probable manipulations of history by eradicating Russians on Wiki.
I am pretty sure these are not isolated cases if one started to research.
But how is it possible to uncover a possible agenda behind it?One thing is certain, in Germany everything is done to disappropriate Russians of their history in ways which can be easily accomplished (nobody dies) like infiltrating the Wiki.
Dimitri Tiomkin was Russian-American in Germany – still is on the US-Wiki – until I believe a Ukrainian named user changed it on August 16th 2023. Since Tiomkin is Ukrainian-American.
Wiki-history shows that there was a discussion over the status of UKR in Tiomkin´s time (discussion 2022 I think) and it was agreed that Ukraine became independent only in 1922 and Tiomkin was born in 1894. (He studied and lived until the 1920s in St. Petersburg). So that was RU territory. No question. How then could this be changed counterfactually still.
What I did not do is trying to check out the minutes of the discussions if there were any.
How many thousand similiar cases of changing records after the fact are there buried I wonder.
They still like to talk about Stalin erasing Trotzki from photographs. Wow. How impressive.But if this was changed, there should be a way to change it back, right?
I’ll tell you an even more interesting story.
Yesterday, among the news about the invasion of Ukrainian troops into the Kursk region and the alleged attack on the nuclear power plant near Sudzha, there was a mention that the Ukrainians were pulling nationalist units to the Belgorod region.
The “SS Bears” were mentioned.
In their – haha – nor a Nazi Army, they have such a unit “SS Bears”, with two lightning bolts on its flag and a motto in German “Meine Ehre heißt Treue!”.
I remembered it because their leader has the same name and surname as my close relative, and I knew about them back in 2023, when 3 of them were caught and tried by a military court.Well, when I saw the name SS Bears I googled for it. The search result page had a Wiki entry snippet
https://prnt.sc/M2mLs5K5AXoR
I clicked it now the page was deleted, the Wiki story of editing says it was deleted on August 7
https://prnt.sc/DReDnxzig2CU
On the latter screenshot you see some links, one of them leads to the discussion.
https://prnt.sc/xpxm4f7q0Djz
In this discussion page you see:
Wiki article “Jaroslaw Hunka” is nominated for deletion!
I remind you that Hunka is the old SS Nazi who was warmly greeted and applauded by the Canadian parliament.AG, sure you can change it back. Each edit has an Undo/Revert button. If the edit was a while ago, Undo might have other repercussions like changing the context of what follows and thereby rendering it nonsensical, or the button may refuse to work at all, in which case you’ll have to edit manually.
The most important thing is to back your contributions with citations from “reliable sources” – if someone else tries to remove well-sourced material, that’s called Vandalism and is liable to be reverted 😉
Take a look at The Five Pillars of Wikipedia, which lays out the main rules. Everything you contribute should be Verifiable i.e. backed by a credible source; Wikipedia is not the place for our own original research. There’s a guide to reliable sources, also an evidence pyramid somewhere – meta-studies and scientific reviews trump a single scientific paper, which would trump a news reports, that sort of thing. Be bold in your editing, but assume good faith from other editors. Remember that we’re there to build an encyclopedia rather than to push political perspectives. These attitudes are recommended by Wikipedia.
You could try a binary search to find who changed Tiomkin’s nationality. Scroll back through the page History to around the time Russia invaded Ukraine, and look at an old revision of the page to see if it said he was Russian. If it did, the change was made between then and now, so use History to find a revision mid way between, and check that one. Repeat to zero in. Ten such checks will find the change out of a thousand revisions. The edit history will then show the editor’s username or IP address. Follow the link to their User page, and then use Special: Contributions to see if they’ve been up to any other mischief 😉
It’s worth creating an account. Each edit you make will gain you credibility as an editor until you can edit Semi Protected and then Extended Protected pages. It’ll also get you a User page and a User Talk page, where other editors can converse with you.
Happy editing! ~~~~ Clark42
Tatyana, a search on “Yaroslav Hunka” at Wikipedia revealed that the Yaroslav_Hunka page has been ‘moved’, which at Wikipedia basically means renamed. The page is now called the “Yaroslav_Hunka scandal“:
thx!
(I have never done anything like this since I am not a Wiki-person only used to be a reader)
What I did was read each edit headline until I found the one re: nationality change which was on Aug. 16th 2023. Not earlier! In all versions before he was Russian.Tatyana, I don’t have time to read the deletion discussion, but it is likely that Yaroslav Hunka himself was deemed “not notable”, because too few reliable sources refer to him – but that the scandal involving him was notable, because it got into major newspapers or something. Wikipedia has many little idiosyncratic rules like this, and a small army of pedantic, OCD editors who obsessively enforce them. If Yaroslav Hunka isn’t famous for anything else, then it was probably a good decision.
AG, well done! May your edit persist.
Thanks, Clark, especially for the link. I read it and cannot stop laughing, what a hypocricy!
… a scandal … was leveraged by the Russian establishment to further its justifications for waging war in Ukraine, which had been started under a pretext of “denazification”
… Hunka volunteered to join SS Galizien at 18 years old
… by the time Hunka’s unit reached the front, German operations relating to the Holocaust would have ended in that area
… the SS Galizien had been implicated in the killing of Polish civilians. In his memoir, Hunka referred to the Wehrmacht as “mystical German knights”
Awards Honorary Citizen of Berezhany (2004)
Badge “for Merits to Ternopil Region” (2024)
—
He didn’t kill jews, so everytjing else is ok 🙂 denazification in inverted commas, pretext, ther’s no nazi problem in Ukraine, awards for merits to the region 🙂I’ll add something else from the Russian Wiki about rewards for the old Nazi.
In 2024 Hunka received an award from the Ternopol region – the Honorary Badge “For significant personal contribution to providing assistance to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, active charitable and social activities and on the 112th anniversary of the birth of Yaroslav Stetsko”
Stetsko was Bandera’s right-hand man, an admirer of Hitler and an ardent anti-Semite.
After the war, he became president of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc, active also in Taipei, and was a permanent member of the board of the Anti-Communist League in Tokyo.
The US supported him much more than a lousy ovation in Parliament. There was even a dinner given in his honor with Jean Kirkpatrick (US representative in UN), George H. W. Bush Sr. (then the Vice President) and Ronald Reagan himself.The award docement
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13iyuo-jIczIo5BsBgzGmzxX1mgUqyQsN/edit
it says:
Award Gunko Yaroslav Ilkovich, a veteran of the Second World War, a soldier of the Galicia division (yes, the accepted designation “SS division Galicia” is modestly abbreviated, omitting two nearly insignificant letters) … with an honorary badge named after Yaroslav Stetsko.
https://prnt.sc/w90Ll-rfthxAIn the document 6 other people awarded, and the last name in the list is Grebenyak Taras, the head of the “Stepan Bandera Center for National Revival”
https://prnt.sc/2mT84xhmIbACThe document sighed by Volodimir Boleschuk, First Deputy Head of the Regional Council
These are the heroes of Ukraine, these are the government of Ukraine.
Tatyana, I agree that the phrase … a scandal … was leveraged by the Russian establishment to further its justifications for waging war in Ukraine, which had been started under a pretext of “denazification” is biased – in Wikipedia terms, it is not NPOV – Neutral Point Of View. However, the solution is complicated because that claim is backed by “reliable sources”, all of which just happen to be US newspapers :-/ The actual citations don’t appear in the lead section, but they are included in sections below. But the citations mean that if the claim is removed, other editors have a Wikipedia rule that justifies restoring it.
If there are academic sources or books with a more balanced view of Russian government claims to be denazifying Ukrainian power structures, they would override the newspaper articles; at Wikipedia, scholarly material is deemed more reliable than newspapers.
However, the article has a more fundamental problem, which extends to at least one other Wikipedia article. It barely mentions the role of deputy prime minister of Canada Chrystia Freeland:
x.com/maxblumenthal/status/1707068654783721791
And Freeland’s Wikipedia page doesn’t even mention her extensive involvement with the Hunka scandal, notably her attempt to cover it up by lying to the public and expelling Russian diplomats. All it has is the following, buried in the ‘Ancestry’ section:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chrystia_Freeland&oldid=1238044405#Ancestry
