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A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia

supercommodore

supercommodore

Prophet of Truth
Member
Apr 13, 2020
4,190
UK
waterpuppy

waterpuppy

Too green for a tag
Member
Jul 17, 2021
1,816
Stories like this are so wild, makes me appreciate the wiki pages with pretty strong moderation more. Some people dedicate their lives to keep Wikipedia somewhat reliable, and then we god others like this lady who are honestly kind of screwing over those people.
 
MikeHattsu

MikeHattsu

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,916
Non-English wikipedia can be horrid:
www.fastcompany.com

Non-English Wikipedia has a misinformation problem

The crowdsourced encyclopedia is accurate only if the crowd is big enough and diverse enough to catch factual problems reliably—and that often isn’t the case for Wikipedia’s hundreds of non-English sites.
www.fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com

the foundation acknowledged that a small network of volunteer administrators of the Croatian-language version of Wikipedia have been abusing their powers and distorting articles "in a way that matched the narratives of political organizations and groups that can broadly be defined as the Croatian radical right." For almost a decade, the rogue administrators have been altering pages to whitewash crimes committed by Croatia's Nazi-allied Ustashe regime during World War II and to promote a fascist worldview. For example, it was reported in 2018 that Auschwitz—which English Wikipedia unambiguously deems a concentration camp—was referred to on Croatian Wikipedia as a collection camp, a term that carries fewer negative connotations. The Jasenovac concentration camp, known as Croatia's Auschwitz, was also referred to as a collection camp.
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Wikipedia exists in more than 300 languages, half of which have fewer than 10 active contributors. These non-English versions of Wikipedia can be especially vulnerable to manipulation by ideologically motivated networks.
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Although the Japanese edition is second in popularity only to the English Wikipedia, it receives fewer than one-sixth as many page views and is run by only a few dozen administrators. (The English-language site has nearly 1,100 administrators.) I discovered that on the Japanese Wikipedia, similar to the Croatian version, politically motivated users were abusing their power and whitewashing war crimes committed by the Japanese military during World War II.

For instance, in 2010 the title of the page "The Nanjing Massacre" was changed to "The Nanjing Incident," an edit that downplayed the atrocity. (Since then, the term Nanjing Incident has become mainstream in Japan.)
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Aaronrules380

Aaronrules380

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
22,427
Falchion said:
That's incredible. A blow for Wikipedia's credibility but I'm going to tell myself a sweet lie that it couldn't happen on the more heavily trafficked English wiki 😬
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I don't think something of this scale could really occur on the english wiki without getting caught pretty quickly, but yeah you do need to be careful. It's why if you want to use wikipedia for serious info gathering you go to it to look for sources. I think wikipedia is a genuinely useful way to gather info on a lot of things, but you do need to be careful
 

Deleted member 9305

Oct 26, 2017
4,064
History is written by the victors, ... and bored chinese housewives
 
caseyg

caseyg

Banned
Apr 20, 2022
70
Why is she wasting her time screwing with Wikipedia? Write an alternative history novel and make a pretty penny!
 
Sarobi

Sarobi

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,979
LOL that's impressive. She can now boldly claim she is the ultimate source of information that never happened in Russia history.
 
Distantmantra

Distantmantra

Member
Oct 26, 2017
11,148
Seattle
toad02 said:
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Did you listen to the Reply All episode about this where they interviewed Guy Standing? What an amazing person. He handled it so incredibly well.
 
SPRidley

SPRidley

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,231
MikeHattsu said:
Non-English wikipedia can be horrid:
www.fastcompany.com

Non-English Wikipedia has a misinformation problem

The crowdsourced encyclopedia is accurate only if the crowd is big enough and diverse enough to catch factual problems reliably—and that often isn’t the case for Wikipedia’s hundreds of non-English sites.
www.fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com
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Not as serious, but spanish language wikipedia takes CC (creative commons) photos to the fucking extreme and makes everything look stupid and amateurish.
For example, 99% of trying to search for a fictional character has a guy in a cosplay. There was once when blacksad's article had a photo of a wall with a frame of a vignette of one of the comics and the description was "blacksad panel on a frame in my friends house". Lots of articles about movies are missing the typical poster as header image, and isntead have a weird image of those leaked photos that fans take while the movie is being filmed, or a guy in a cosplay of one of the characters.
The articles are usually also incredibly badly written and a lot of them are just bad translations of the english versions, and theres a ton of infighting with latin american communities and spain communities changing stuff left and right just to paint each other the best, in articles that contain things like voice acting.
Its awful.
 
Harry Potter Obama

Harry Potter Obama

Member
Feb 13, 2018
3,842
Japan
In high school my friend added two flavors to the Pop Tarts Wikipedia page: Wild Diarrhea and Hitler Explosion.
The changes did not last very long.
 
mbpm

mbpm

Member
Oct 25, 2017
23,536
Plywood

Plywood

Does not approve of this tag
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
6,079
This is tangentially related, but I feel like most Wikipedia articles about a person almost always have a bad picture of them. Makes me wonder if it's one person behind it like this article.
 
Katbobo

Katbobo

Member
May 3, 2022
5,369
Damn, someone give this lady a job doing worldbuilding on an IP, or a historical fiction book deal.
 
GravaGravity

GravaGravity

Member
Oct 27, 2017
4,223
there's probably a fun screenplay in this, contrasting her wild historical fiction against her(probably) banal life with the growth of the articles throwing things awry
 
Tavernade

Tavernade

Tavernade
Moderator
Sep 18, 2018
8,617
It's kinda crazy someone just made up an incredibly detailed alternate history out of boredom. Like, clearly someone needs to hire her for an actual writing job, that's not exactly easy.
 
Kwigo

Kwigo

Avenger
Oct 27, 2017
8,027
Man I could only dream of being so bored to have enough time for something like this
 
RecLib

RecLib

Member
Oct 27, 2017
4,365
Already been pointed out a few times, but pretty good timing for this article to come out just after we had the thread about whether people just take for granted that Wikipedia is fact.
 
El Bombastico

El Bombastico

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
36,027
She should become a novelist.

Also, this reminds me of that high up Japanese government official that turned out spent most of his office time editing Gundam related articles on Wikipedia.

I wonder how many other people with no jobs or Cushy do-nothing jobs also spend their days mindlessly browsing the internet looking for something to do.
 
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