This year, more than 10,000 edits were made on the English-language page for “Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022”, the largest number of edits for a single entry!
Wikipedia it is an attractive target for governments seeking to influence large numbers of people. Social networks are bustling public… “squares” where nations can overtly or covertly promote their own agendas.
However, due to the system of checks and balances, and the dedicated volunteer editors who monitor every change to Wikipedia entries, coordinated government intervention is often a complex undertaking.
Factors that claim a place on Wikipedia are doing so on one of the most popular sites on the internet, not in some dark corner of cyberspace. This year, more than 10,000 edits were made on the English-language page for “Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022”, the largest number of edits for a single entry!
The Vladimir Putin, Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskiy pages also had many war-related edits. Wikipedia’s English site was “changed” 7.5 billion times in September alone, while the Spanish site, almost, a billion times!
“Information Warfare and Wikipedia”
A recent report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Center for Analysis of Social Media (CASM), analyzes how state-sponsored organizations can infiltrate and modify high-profile Wikipedia pages.
“Our paper does not attempt to empirically demonstrate that Wikipedia is vulnerable to any measurable degree,” said Carl Miller, co-author of the report and director of research at CASM. “It tries to convey what we know about the threat. The overall aim of the exhibition is less ambitious. Wikipedia is overlooked by researchers and journalists as a potential site for disinformation campaigns.”
Wikipedia’s impact extends far beyond those who visit the site, also feeding information to Siri and Google Assistant.
The main danger posed by misinformation is not online vandalism, nor the typical differences of opinion between dedicated editors. Àlex Hinojo, editor of the Catalan-language Wikipedia website, cited as an example the long-running dispute over toponyms used on the Spanish-language Wikipedia website for some Spanish municipalities in Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands.
But this kind of editorial confrontation is not what concerns Carl Miller and his team of social media researchers. “We believe the biggest threat is ‘entryism’, the long-term infiltration by state-sponsored actors who build Wikipedia’s reputation over time so they can later exploit its underlying policies and governance processes,” said own.
Wikipedia and the invasion of Ukraine
The report “Information Warfare and Wikipedia” used the English-language Wikipedia page on the invasion of Ukraine as a case study and looked at 86 accounts, which edited the page and were subsequently blocked from editing. The difficulty of detecting any concerted activity from these accounts is illustrated by the sheer number of Wikipedia revisions they have made over the years: 794,771 revisions to 332,990 pages on topics ranging from Judaism, Poland, aviation, airports, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
“The team manually evaluated the edits that contained these links and found that 16 of those 22 edits were controversial, presenting narratives consistent with Kremlin-sponsored information warfare,” the report said.
However, when the research team looked beyond the Wikipedia page on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they found a common pattern of adding biased sources – they found 2,421 edits that inserted links to state-linked domains on 667 pages for each potential Russian conflict, but also pages on Formula 1 racing, floods in Pakistan and more.
“This does not necessarily identify coordination or strategic intent,” the report says, “but may highlight various areas of Wikipedia that could be more closely investigated.” In other words, disinformation campaigns on Wikipedia have been ignored. “In a world where information warfare is more widespread and sophisticated, this worries me, precisely because Wikipedia is so valuable,” said
Carl Miller.
Wikipedia’s preventive measures included content warnings, restrictions on articles in terms of the types of users who could edit, and blocking of IP addresses and registered accounts.
Wikipedia’s various language pages have boards that accept community reports of suspicious behavior. All you have to do is provide the admins with a link to a specific edit and state why you think it violates a rule.
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I am currently a news writer for News Bulletin247 where I mostly cover sports news. I have always been interested in writing and it is something I am very passionate about. In my spare time, I enjoy reading and spending time with my family and friends.
