Last month, Forward obtained a document created by the Heritage Foundation called “Wikipedia Editor Targeting,” which set a goal to “identify and target Wikipedia editors abusing their position by analyzing text patterns, usernames, and technical data through data breach analysis, fingerprinting, HUMINT (human intelligence), and technical targeting.”
The document discusses creating sock puppet accounts to “reveal patterns and provoke reactions,” discusses trying to track users’ geolocation, searching through hacked datasets for username reuse, and using Pimeyes, a facial recognition software, to learn the real identities of Wikipedia editors. Molly White of Citation Needed has an extensive rundown on Elon Musk’s crusade against Wikipedia, and both Slate and The Atlantic have written about the right’s war on Wikipedia in recent days.
Politics aside, the scale in which Wikipedia editors are being targeted is quite concerning. Even with anonymous pseudonyms, these folks are still vulnerable to these type of attacks.
I’m an American Wikipedia editor (same username); this is the kind of shit I would see happen to Chinese or Indian editors. Now it’s here. Sad…
Though, Wikipedia is generally pretty good with keeping editors anonymous. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) is very protective of user privacy. Unless you have poor opsec like me and use the same username on every platform, you’ll be fine.
(And I’ll be fine too. I’ve never touched modern US politics on that site with a ten-foot pole and now I definitely never will.)
The articles posted are unfortunately mostly partisan politics, and discussion over Wikipedia’s editorial bias. Here is the document in question, that allegedly points to efforts from a singular organization to perform account tracking using technical methods:
My theory is that this is likely in support of an effort to detect users or organizations who use IP editing and sockpuppets to further agendas that the organization disagrees with. The organization would benefit the most from using this to bring the attention of staff to delete confirmed sockpuppets. Similar efforts have been undertaken against government “troll farms”.
Its not a police or government organization doing this, so it is highly unlikely this is intended for real-life suppression.
These methods can be mitigated by hiding your IP, using an anti-fingerprinting browser such as Firefox with privacy:reduceFingerprinting, using a program that prevents text analysis such as Anonymouth.
I’ve done a bit of editing on database tech articles so my guess is I’ll be fine.
I’ve long held that Wikipedia needs to decentralize to avoid being a target. All good, just move the servers and lats share good privacy practices as we do here!
I think that due to various issues with particular editors in the past, this isn’t a terrible idea by the administration. There’s an immense amount of power and influence in various Wikipedia pages that I think should be treated with scrutiny and verified as much as possible. The acceptable amount of manipulative, low quality information should be zero here.
Just a few stories from Wikipedia's history if you are curious
I couldn’t agree more except saying various implies that people get to pick and choose which pages are causing problems and which are just reporting facts based on peer-reviewed evidence.
Treating information with scrutiny and verification of sources should be how all scientific, journalistic, and educational mediums should be treated in general. The same could be said for corporate-funded (perhaps that is redundant at this point) media outlets.
The heart of the issue is that people are not in the practice of thinking critically. We’ve been spoonfed our world views through all these mediums that it just seems like the only way to know the world is to avoid taking opinions across political spectrums.
Self-censorship for those who do this thinking is a survival technique with the choice of a crowded red or a crowded blue raft tied to a giant cruise ship, and if you start voicing any support for the other raft you’re immediately knocked off. Relevant Wikipedia page.
Honestly the humane way to neuter Wikipedia would be to just use their buckets of money to pay Google to censor those pages and leave the editors alone. Not ideal by any means, but this is the biproduct of centralized power.
This would hopefully incentivize a version of Wikipedia that mirrors open source code, by that I mean, you have all variations of a topic represented by people who maintain their views on the articles and index all the views in a standard way like the current project that Larry Singer is working on. Don’t create search engines or algorithms that think for people (give them tf-idf and datetime filters) yet we likely need to figure out ways to incentivize critical thinking behavior that puts it into practice…
Anyways… The critique on Wikipedia is valid IMO. But the Heritage Foundation, and I’d argue any other politically or money motivated think tank, is not the “benevolent” hammer that should be swinging. This would just push Wikipedia to the other side of the political fence.