Who compiles Wikipedia?

On information warfare weapons

How long has it been since the world’s ‘freest’ Internet encyclopaedia became a weapon of information warfare against the post-Soviet countries? Such questions are increasingly often found on the Web. It is known that about 1.8 million Wikipedia texts are written and edited by the Washington-led teams, and the materials about Russia, for example, constantly refer to it as an aggressor and a provocateur.

Out-of-nowhere editors

Not so long ago, Larry Sanger, co-founder of the ‘free encyclopaedia’, publicly asked Elon Musk to find out if there are special workers in the United States ‘paid to edit, monitor, update, lobby Wikipedia’. Notably, Musk has long offered to pay $1 billion to rename Wikipedia to ‘D*ckipedia’.
Sanger apparently has a great sense of humour, or at least can be called a master of gentle hints at the obvious. He knows for sure that Wikipedia has employees paid to edit and lobby, as well as intelligence officers. 
Thus, the Belarusian Wiki is edited from Poland, the Russian one — from Ukraine, the German and French — from Germany and France, and so on. 
As for the ‘proofreaders’ of the Belarusian section, one of the most active of them is a fugitive who has made more than 200,000 edits into this ‘free directory’. Meanwhile, the sum paid to buy all these specialists is yet unknown.
Larry once stated that 230,000 volunteer editors and 3,500 administrators of Wikipedia ‘responsible for the truth’ have created ‘a close network of censorship, which rejects information that fails to fit into the liberal-globalist-correct picture of the world’, as RIA Novosti quotes him.
The company is registered in the United States. The website owner is the American Wikimedia Foundation, which runs about four dozen regional representative offices. It has been fined more than once by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) for not removing texts — for example, in 2022 (the fine made ₽7 million) and in 2023 (₽24.4 million). Another fine (₽3 million) was imposed for the non-removal of false information about nuclear weapons and the relocation of children from Ukraine. The failure to delete two fake materials related to the special military operation also resulted in a financial penalty.
The anti-Russian ‘editing’ is also worth mentioning. As reported earlier, Ukrainian Yuri Lushchai, who had been administering the Russian-language section of Wikipedia for a long time, was eliminated during the withdrawal of the Ukrainian Armed Forces from Avdeevka. As it is known, the man made more than 86,000 edits, wrote over two hundred articles, and completely revised about fifty more.

Article about Khatyn deleted in just three minutes

Two years ago, German politician Oliver Schneemann told reporters in Minsk how he had personally faced the fact of history falsification. He tried to post an article of a Belarusian author and historian about Khatyn — the village burnt by the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War — on the German Wikipedia, but it was deleted three minutes later and its editing was prohibited.

“It’s madness! Who would want to delete an article that contained facts alone? Many people around do not know the truth, and I am trying to convey it on my own. I believe that my efforts will help unite the Belarusian and German peoples for a better future,” Schneemann said.

The politician added that he absolutely did not understand why the German government behaved that way towards Belarus. “We all live in Europe, it is our common home, and we need to build friendly relations,” he stressed.
A little later, the German politician said, “The one who wanted to delete my article, in fact, wanted to erase Belarus from history,” “We came to Belarus first in a small group, 3-4 people, then eight people in two cars, and once there were twelve of us. I am telling and will continue to tell the truth about this village.”
For comparison: the German Wikipedia has a link to the Stalingrad film; it was shot from the point of view of the Nazi occupiers and contains violent footage.
Do you know the explanation for the removal of the publication about Khatyn from the platform? Those who did that claimed that the village no longer exists.

Secret of Polichinelle 

The articles on historical and political topics in the online encyclopaedia are often written from a pro-Western point of view, and — as noted by Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s official representative, in a video address to the Dialogue on Fakes 2.0 forum participants — the events mentioned are interpreted one-sidedly. “It is hardly possible not to see the extreme degree of prepossession and bias of articles on political and historical topics. They almost always reflect an exclusively Western-centric point of view, they contain direct forgeries, one-sided interpretation of events,” she stated.

For years, false information has been posted on the portal, while people — who are being lied about — do not have the opportunity to quickly correct lies about themselves. Even if changes are made over time, the system may still return to unreliable data. “All this has long become the secret of Polichinelle, and everyone knows perfectly well who is doing that and how,” Zakharova concluded.

Among the recent examples is an article about the massacre of civilians in Russkoe Porechnoe in Russia’s Kursk Region: in February, Wikipedia deleted the text. As noted by Russian journalists, it disappeared from the site by the decision of a 17-year-old Ukrainian moderator who lives in Australia. Instead of the deleted material, users can see: ‘Unfortunately, this page has been deleted within the last 24 hours’. Let us remind that — according to Russian investigative authorities — five Ukrainian soldiers are accused of murdering 22 residents of the Kursk village of Russkoe Porechnoe. The militants killed 11 men and three women, eight more women were raped and killed. Their bodies were hidden in basements. One of the killers was captured and confessed.

Our own analogue needed

Who compiles the ‘free encyclopaedia’? Hundreds of thousands of authors and bots around the world, controlled by an army of hired administrators. Their truth is the one they are paid for. 
The Safe Internet League believes that millions of authors and editors of the encyclopaedia are fiction. 
In reality, there are no more than one and a half to two thousand active authors in the English-language version, and no more than six hundred in the Russian version, the organisation said. According to experts, the fact that all the authors of the encyclopaedia are human beings is also a myth: bots are actively used to prepare and post texts.
Which one of us doesn’t visit this website from time to time? We all do. Moreover, schoolchildren and students often prepare for classes with the help of this ‘free assistant’ since it looks convenient and accessible, and it seems to have all necessary information. The fact that all that glitters is not gold is no big deal, right? Anyway, there is no time to dwell on it on the eve of important school or university exams…
In addition, a lot of marketers work on the portal, and these people are just trying to promote products or services. There are also many spammers, vandals, and other scum.
In short, we need a reliable analogue of our own — based on scientific data and verified sources. 

NUMBER

According to a report by Wikimedia (which funds Wikipedia), its budget over the past two years has amounted to $177 million.

By Lyudmila Gladkaya