A report by two British think tanks – the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and the Center for Social Media Analysis (CASM) – was released on Monday. It exposes a whole network of shadow editors, without pointing to the Russian government, but without revealing many clues about it. The English Wikipedia page on the Russo-Ukrainian war was chosen for the study.

What do the test results say?

As you know, anyone can edit an article on Wikipedia. This imposes certain risks on the reliability of the information provided by the authors of the texts. Over the years, the Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the resource, has developed a sophisticated auditing system and is still constantly working to improve this process and maintain the quality of information. However, this still does not provide a complete guarantee that bad writers will one day not publish another lie.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. The new report analyzes the activities of 86 editors who were previously blocked for various violations of Wikipedia’s code of ethics. Among the many pages they edited were articles about the Russo-Ukrainian war. Analysis of his edits shows deliberate attempts to manipulate the narrative and at least tilt it slightly towards the Russian version of events.

According to the researchers, these efforts included “modifying discourse to minimize the objectivity of pro-Western messages and maximize the objectivity of pro-Kremlin messages,” introducing “subjects that shift the historical background to pro-Russian narratives,” and adding “Kremlin.” Direct-to-page excerpts and press releases to increase the importance of pro-Russian arguments and viewpoints.” Additionally, these editors constantly added links to Russian state media.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to prove the coordination between the editors and to find out who manages these accounts. It may turn out that all the edits were actually made by one person under different accounts. By the way, there have already been such cases. Earlier, we wrote about a resident of China who for 10 years posted a fictional history of Russia on Wikipedia.