from Hacker News

Weaponizing Wikipedia Against Israel

by xpl on 1/17/25, 1:56 AM with 6 comments

  • by anileated on 1/17/25, 4:01 AM

    I was curious about the topic of Middle East (no personal ties) a couple of years before the October 7, so I got to witness the Wikipedia campaign unfold. The transformation is difficult to notice but changes are drastic over months (maybe weeks, but I didn’t consult it that often). Sometimes Wikipedia feels self-contradicting and tying itself in knots on some topics, like the dominant colonization angle. It feels like certain editors would prefer if there were no articles about the ancient cultures that existed in the area and relevant archeological evidence, luckily for now those are still difficult to remove.

    It’s a sobering reminder that all knowledge is biased, no matter where you get it. So far Wikipedia is at least a good list of sources, but if you are truly interested in a remotely controversial topic you need to go to those sources and judge for yourself the veracity of each.

    I somewhat wish there were more publicized instances of manipulation, just to combat Wikipedia’s reputation of being trustworthy that probably makes many people blind to the above.

    (This is not a statement on whether I support all policies of incumbent Israeli government, etc.)

  • by not_your_vase on 1/17/25, 4:55 AM

    Wikipedia has been a political echo chamber since at least the early 2010's. You will be hard pressed to find a single unbiased article that's at least marginally political in its subject, even if it is some hyperlocalized issue.

    It's ridiculous (and exemplary) how bad wikipedia is, while still maintaining it's authoritative status.

  • by zappb on 1/17/25, 2:43 AM

    This is not too different from the XZ backdoor. Open collaboration is vulnerable to state actors wreaking havoc. With Wikipedia as a common source for LLM training data, this is just another front in international warfare.

  • by wslh on 1/17/25, 2:00 AM

    Wikipedia is not byzantine fault tolerant.

  • by JohnnyLarue on 1/17/25, 2:39 AM

    Lol, sounds like a gas!