This is the shit LLMs are trained on.

Wikipedia is full of various large disinformation campaigns. Not just Russia, but Iran, Qatar, North Korea, etc. Unless I'm looking at the history of DB-9 connectors or early Simpsons episode summaries, etc, it's not a reliable source.

Thank goodness my government would never stoop to such levels.

A long list of controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...

That half these comments are whataboutism related is disappointing but unsurprising.

The propagandist author is complaining about how come the Russians are using counter-propaganda measures against a book published by the fricking Atlantic Council, this has to be a joke, right?

> In a report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue

From here [1]:

> Sasha is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Global Internet Forum on Counter-Terrorism, the Christchurch Call and the Global Partnership for Action against Tech Facilitated Gender Based Violence. She is a founding board member of the Forum on Information and Democracy and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Coalition on Internet Safety.

Also from here [2]:

> European Commission (EC Horizon, DG-CNECT, DG-JUST, FPI) (...)

> US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

> US Department of Justice (DOJ)

> [A litany of US embassies from around the world]

These atlanticist ghouls still think that the world has remained stuck back in 2018, it hasn't.

[1] https://www.isdglobal.org/team-member/sasha-havlicek/

[2] https://www.isdglobal.org/partnerships-and-funders/

I think the article tried to refer to this link https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10663 As I understand from scanning the paper, the authors attempt to determine differences between the Russian wikipedia articles and the articles on the Russian fork. They show that articles on the fork that were that differ from RU wikipedia have a significantly higher number of edits on RU wikipedia. The authors suggest that these may be signs of manipulations, however, it may not have affected the quality negatively (as stated in the discussion).

I do not find state sponsored activity on Wikipedia unlikely, but I am not convinced there is clear evidence that Russia poisoned wikipedia succesfully.

1. The article looks LLM-assisted, if not LLM-generated.

2. The Western "left" have been trying to write Wikipedia articles in a way that promotes their point of view in a much subtler, but also much more persistent way. The Western "right" have been complaining about this at least since 2009.

While I'm not happy about the Russian disinformation campaign, it is a guilty pleasure seeing "Western left" taste their own medicine.

Look back to the earliest version of the history and information of various countries on Wikipedia. They say themselves they were from US State department or CIA histories of those countries.

I was editing a page on the US massacre of civilians in No Gun Ri, Korea with some IP at CENTCOM removing my edits. I spend my off tine trying to send in facts of what happened, my taxes from my on time pay for some propaganda arm of the US armed forces to remove it.

As the US kidnaps the president of Venezuela and his wife, blockades Cuba, bombs Iran and on and on, great to know someone else is smearing Russia to further my tax dollars funding the endless war on their borders too.

The article is very one-sided and emotionally charged. The usefulness of it drops significantly because of that.

The Russian government is so all powerful that they control the minds of the majority of Americans and their leaders. I applaud the brave windmill fighters.

Wikipedia should be more like Github, such that topics can be forked ad hoc, and we can get a truly diverse set of viewpoints on everything. Then auto-generate a summary page that highlights the agreements and disagreements.

Or someone else should do it. If you build it I will come.

Genuinely interesting strategy, the term “poison” should really apply more to AI that depend on Wikipedia for training

>This strategy, in a likely attempt to evade global sanctions on Russian news outlets, is now poisoning AI tools and Wikipedia. By posing as authoritative sources on Wikipedia and reliable news outlets cited by popular large language models (LLMs), Russian tropes are rewriting the story of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The direct consequence is the exposure of Western audiences to content containing pro-Kremlin, anti-Ukrainian, and anti-Western messaging when using AI chatbots that rely on LLMs trained on material such as Wikipedia.

Russia has minor influence. You, on the other hand, is a totally different story, and the amount of disinformation about Russia, China etc injected by the west is orders of magnitude more, and it is in today's lingua franca, to make matters worse.

If one Scott Aaronson permits himself to write publicly something like (as far as I recall) "it was Alan Turing who won the second world war", one can only imagine the amount of poison that goes into your heads, and of course not only through wikipedia.

I don't doubt this happens, but given all the wolf crying about clandestine Russian operations, it's hard to assess what the scale and influence of these are. Especially as this is based on analysis of Atlantic Council, which is essentially a NATO think tank.

This will probably read to many as me being a useful idiot for Putin or something. And maybe I am, hard to say definitely.