On Wikipedia, the possibly Israeli intelligence operative known as "Icewhiz" spent years cultivating an account known as "Eostrix" that operated entirely out of Israel-Palestine. They were one day from passing their admin election* before getting banned. A member of the committee that oversees allegations of misconduct against admins analyzed patterns in Eostrix's writing/behaviour to discover the ruse.

This was presented to the committee and resulted in a ban of Eostrix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Com...

If this were a Reddit, Discord, or even a government employee, banning Eostrix would've been a discretionary act of the top moderator/manager, who would've also been the person to have vetted Eostrix.

This is embarrassing and creates an incentive to cover up the scandal. In real life, Aldrich Ames was able to spend years avoiding scrutiny from the CIA because the CIA's management didn't follow-up on reports he was suspicious.

But because the committee is a group ultimately elected by the community, the individual incentive is to take action against, because any member of the committee could betray a cover-up and fuck over everyone else. If ArbCom did not take action, the information that they ignored a serious report would become public and lead to an even bigger scandal.

This is the same reason why even weak democracies are harder to emplace spies into than strong authoritarian regimes.

*technically not an election but they were almost guaranteed a win by that point

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing

Generally, it is unacceptable to notify people of a structured discussion in a non-neutral manner to get them to advocate a specific point of view in that discussion.

This can be applicable to notifying specific groups of people if only groups likely to have a specific viewpoint were notified.

It's also generally considered worse to give these notifications secretly or off of Wikipedia.

In this case, it would be acceptable to notify a project related to Israel and a project related to Palestine of discussions related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

But its not acceptable to only notify the project related to Palestine.

It's also not acceptable to instruct people in your notification to vote in a certain way. r/Palestine giving these instructions is a big problem.

The fact it's "secret" and offsite also plays a role. Collaboration on Wikipedia itself shows you didn't have malicious intent, so unintentional violations usually result in warnings the first few times it happens. The fact you need to join a Discord server hidden from others is a clear signal to any reasonable person that the group is against the rules.

The line is clear and the arbitration group has banned some participants, the challenge is detecting who participated.

The pro-Israel ones have been around for decades. Icewhiz, NoCal100, etc. They are easy to spot because they are tightly regimented and run a volume game of many accounts. They are obviously billing by the hour to a nation-state level actor that is not demanding a clear ROI on their investment and is instead using shitty KPIs.

There are also commercial sock farms. They are easy to spot because their income is "clients that want Wikipedia articles and don't qualify for one". Any account who spends all their time writing articles on small market cap companies without news coverage is a paid shill.

They are meaningless to target because Wikipedia has a bureaucratic process called "Articles for Creation" where these shills can submit the same crap endlessly for years and bill the client for time spent without impacting the encyclopedia.

This is incorrect.

Shills do well when they contribute outside of the topic area, memorize wiki-law, and only coordinate to !vote in contentious high-impact discussions. e.g. requested moves, reliable sources noticeboard discussions, and RfCs. They are seen as "normal" Wikipedia editors.

Professionally organized shills are unable to do this since they must ensure most of their time is "on-task" meeting a comment/karma/etc qutoa and find it difficult to justify doing non-shilling work. This works well on sites like Reddit or HackerNews. It does not work on Wikipedia.

For starters, discussion outcomes are moderated and closers do not count votes. Closers look at your history and assign lower weight to editors that appear only to be interested in a particular area.

Other mechanisms include a 500 edit minimum for certain areas + a "balanced editing restriction" (maintained by Tamzin, the same person starting the strike) which tracks %age of edits by subject area and can impose a maximum of 30% in the contentious subject.

Trying to skate under these bare minimums is similar to avoiding money-laundering by making many cash deposits of $9999. You'll be taken to Arbitration Enforcement and look even more suspicious.

You need someone who'll can non-professionally shoot-the-shit at random hours to maintain the cover story despite it not being a clear requirement.

Currently, the best shill-farm is run by the /r/Palestine subreddit. If you join their Discord, you can participate yourself! https://discord.com/invite/hhsG4QTf9n

Essentially, you're given free rein to edit as you see fit with an encouragement to make many uncontroversial edits & befriend normal editors. You do not know who else is part of the project and do not interact with them on Discord. It is very antisocial in that sense.

You are only "activated" by the Discord mod through direct messages to !vote in high-impact RfCs/discussions, e.g. officially recognizing the Gaza Genocide.

This avoids creating a clear paper trail of collusion and means it's difficult for someone to infiltrate/burn the network. It's also incompatible with the micromanagement typical of traditional influence operations.

It's been going on for a few years now as a continuation of other farms. It's one of the main reasons there's been such a slant towards Palestine onwiki lately.

Yes, it's been reported many times by many people. It is an open secret at this point and Arbitration has failed at actioning this.

So far, the only people who have been banned were the ones dumb enough to re-use the same username on Discord as Wikipedia, so now you get a warning not to do that during onboarding. Otherwise, it's too difficult to prove participation.

For those not in the loop, AE is the main mechanism to enforce civility and neutrality in contentious areas (obvious stuff like Israel-Palestine, American Politics, but also India-Pakistan, casteism, etc etc). It removes editors that are obviously only on the site to astroturf a specific belief relating to a globally controversial topic.

This requires painstaking review of one's conduct and is the main reason Wikipedia is not astroturfed in the same way Reddit or other discussion forums are.

If the strike goes forward, Wikipedia will have a massive realignment towards whatever political groups can amass the most accounts agreeing with them.

Grokipedia would unironically become more neutral in a year.

But it is a great idea for indigenous languages that aren't in the training data but many people speak, which was the original purpose.

I am hopeful that it'll create synthetic training data for those groups.

"notability" means there are peer-reviewed/editorially controlled articles on the topic.

So, if I wanted to write an article on Gas Town, I couldn't. It got a lot of technical blogs and Arxiv preprints written about it by experts, but it won't be notable.

Yet, there's tons of people that love having control over articles and what people see. I was one of them.

It's exciting seeing news outlets quote your arguments in an onwiki dispute, or paraphrase an article that you wrote. Or having millions of people look at an article. It's much easier than starting a blog.

There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market. A shrinking pie forces cliquey political slugfests. It happened to IBM and can happen to StackOverflow/Wikipedia.

I hate it now. There's so much doxxing and meanness. There's also sizable contingents of propagandists in anything controversial. Most famously, pro-Israel Icewhiz, who creates hundreds of sockpuppets and harassed people IRL, but now more recently r/Palestine's sock farm. There's similar farms in trans issues or India-Pakistan.

The saddest part is that Wikipedia's original purpose was unbiased copyleft-style free knowledge.

LLMs have the potential to democratize access to knowledge more than any other technology. But they are an existential threat to editors that previously did this deep research manually and served as gatekeepers with the attendant social status.

As a result, there's a vitriolic hatred of any attempt to integrate LLMs into Wikipedia. Even if it's open-weights stuff running locally.

So, Google will continue to eat Wikipedia alive with AI summaries.

I hope Wikipedia is replaced by something AI-native run by a non-profit that has the interests of readers at heart.

The reason why is because the laid off team maintained the Community Wishlist, the main way for editors to feature request for "professional" solutions.

The Wikimedia Foundation also deweighted popularity as a metric for tackling feature requests on the Community Wishlist. This pisses off enwiki as the largest editor base.

From the WMF's perspective, though, enwiki is a cash cow on the BCG matrix.[1] It has been in seemingly terminal decline for over a decade[2], accelerated by LLMs, yet still drives the majority of donations/clicks.

As a result, WMF prioritizes investing in emerging markets over enwiki. This means outreach to indigenous languages in the Global South and developing supporting infrastructure. e.g. "Abstract Wikipedia" which aims to use a language-neutral syntax that can be automatically translated into any language.

These currently form a tiny segment of the editor population but have much larger potential TAM and are growing. So it's the correct strategy even if it pisses off editors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_los...

I'm sure there are Google engineers who can push changes to prod and bypass CI but that isn't a normal way to handle infra.

A certain number of "community" admins maintain that right to this day after it was realized this was a massive security hole.

You can also upload scripts to be shared and executed by other users.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia is run on insecure user scripts created by volunteers that tend to be under the age of 18.

There might be more editors trying to resume boost if editing Wikipedia under your real name didn't invite endless harassment.

The Wikipedia community takes a cavalier attitude towards security. Any user with "interface administrator" status can change global JavaScript or CSS for all users on a given Wiki with no review. They added mandatory 2FA only a few years ago...

Prior to this, any admin had that ability until it was taken away due to English Wikipedia admins reverting Wikimedia changes to site presentation (Mediaviewer).

But that's not all. Most "power users" and admins install "user scripts", which are unsandboxed JavaScript/CSS gadgets that can completely change the operation of the site. Those user scripts are often maintained by long abandoned user accounts with no 2 factor authentication.

Based on the fact user scripts are globally disabled now I'm guessing this was a vector.

The Wikimedia foundation knows this is a security nightmare. I've certainly complained about this when I was an editor.

But most editors that use the website are not professional developers and view attempts to lock down scripting as a power grab by the Wikimedia Foundation.

This is incorrect.

many do it with accounts linked to their real onwiki profiles. jps is an example and I provided a link to unambiguous doxxing:

https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=14172

They've been doing it since 2016 when they started an" alt-right identification thread":

https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=8031

Others use accounts linked to their onwiki personas to ask for doxx. e.g. AndyTheGrump is a well-known user who posts in the "alt-right identification thread" about someone they dislike and getting a quick response. Here's AndyTheGrump asking for doxx on a user named "BlueGraf".

https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=8031&p...

Quickly followed up with that individuals full name and employment.

And many editors/admins participate in those doxxing threads to gawk or have fun under their real usernames.

I dont want a world in which Trump regulates Wikipedia but pretending it's sunshine and rainbows is a joke at this point.

And the person you're replying to is strawmanning. I never said Beeblebrox doxxed anyone, just that they leaked secret information on a doxxing forum in violation of Wikipolicy and possibly privacy law.

i know that Beeblebrox did not doxx anyone and I said that in my comment. my point is leaking information to a doxxing forum sends the wrong message and is dangerous.

Maybe you should create an account and look at the "Wikimedian Folks Too Embarrassing for Public Viewing" forum and get back to me. Or do something about it before the Trump administration uses this as an excuse to censor enwiki. Either way here are some excerpts if you don't want to.

From the first page, here's an active editor (iii, known as jps or ජපස) doxxing someone about UFOs. I took out the names to be polite but it's all there:

https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=14172

"Is [username 1] (T-C-L) an alt account of [username 2] (T-C-L)?

For those who are not aware, [username2] is the name of an account used by one [redacted] on various platforms up until about 2024 when he more or less abandoned them. That account also was involved in the ongoing game of accusing [redacted] (T-H-L) of being [redacted] (T-C-L) which is about as fairly ludicrous an attempt at matching a Wikipedia username as I've ever seen.

Anyway, I feel like maybe he thought "If [__] can do it, so can I." And maybe that's the origin of the VPP.

Oh, this is about UFOs. Yeah, I'm in the shit. Maybe someone can link to some other stuff for you to read, but I just want to drop this here because I have nowhere else I get to speculate on these matters and everyone loves a good conspiracy theory data dump from time to time "

Here's the thread "Who is Wikipedia editor i.am.qwerty"

https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=13821

"I.am.a.qwerty (T-C-L) gathered up a bunch of those articles and some earlier material to create Wikipedia and antisemitism..."

It goes on:

"But who is I.am.a.qwerty? Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that I.a.am.a.qwerty is a PhD student named [real name]. Specifically, this [real name]:"

    "[real name] is a PhD candidate [major] at [university name]. He received his BA (Hons) in [major] from [university]. Previously [real name] received his rabbinical ordination from the [other school] in [location] in [year]. [real name] is also the [job title] at [organization]."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

According to that Arbitrator, Wikimedia gave a legal opinion that he violated the law in doing so:

"Well, I got a result today: the ombuds commisssion found that I did indeed violate the access to nonpublic data policy, and has issued a final warning to me. Apparently mailing list comments are, "under a contemporary understanding of privacy law and the policies in question," nonpublic data on the same level as CU data or supressed libel."

https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=350266#p350...

Wasn't the first time he did it either... Officially, community guidelines only apply on the site itself. Once you get into the Discords or forums, doxxing is common and tolerated. Admins and arbitrators are happy to participate on those forums under their Wikipedia usernames because they feel like they need doxx to take action against those trying to harm Wikipedia. And because it (usually) isn't them doing the doxxing, it's ok. There's even an "alt-right identification thread" where established editors can request doxxing from people who don't link their accounts onwiki.

Generally this targets newer editors who aren't in a clique yet. e.g. The person who made "Wikipedia and Antisemitism" got doxxed. Once you get to a certain level, you are expected to participate in these "offwiki" forums to get anything done.

Some people try to complain about it but it doesn't end well. Generally you don't want to fuck with them because by the time you find out about Wikipediocracy, you've already revealed too much and are doxxable. & unlike nation-state actors they have inside information and understand the site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...

If you do choose to edit Wikipedia, use a burner email and only edit during the same one or two hours of the day so they can't track timezones. & don't post any photos or information on where you live nor attend meetups.

There are some good people but once you get deeply involved it is a toxic community. Sorry for the rant but it pisses me off whenever people talk about how great the Wikipedia community is as someone who's into the internal shit. it's the worst place to get involved in "free culture".