A couple weeks ago there was an article in Quillette about the English Wikipedia, in the context of our recent fork Justapedia. While there's plenty to discuss about the majority of the article — which can be read about in this month's In the media column — there is one particular rhetorical aside that caught my eye. It's brought up briefly, almost in passing, and the article moves on with its argument. But it's fairly interesting, and I think warrants some closer examination. Here is what it says:

An example of such a case, in which the problems with a Wikipedia article cannot be reduced to left vs. right, concerns the hacktivist “Cyber Anakin.” In 2022, Cyber Anakin launched an attack against Chinese computer networks that included government websites, satellite interfaces, and various industry- and infrastructure-related systems. In retaliation, most of the biographical details were removed from Cyber Anakin’s Wikipedia article, and the Taiwan News reports that this was likely done by employees or sympathizers of Xi Jinping's regime. These removals from the Wikipedia article provoked a further round of attacks against Chinese government websites by the hacker group known as Anonymous.

To an outside observer, removing information from someone’s biography in order to retaliate against a hacker looks like an abuse of Wikipedia. But from the standpoint of Wikipedia’s internal rules, the removals were done by means of (mostly) legitimate editing processes, with the perpetrators arguing extensively on the article’s talk page for why their removals were justified. Perhaps more importantly, the quantity of text posted to justify these removals was so immense that, in the words of one outside commenter, "most editors would walk away in an instant." For these reasons, the removals from Cyber Anakin's Wikipedia article have never been undone. But the removed material has been added back in his Justapedia article, and consequently, as of this writing, the Justapedia article about Cyber Anakin is around four times the Wikipedia article's length.

The first thing to note

No.

There are a lot of claims made here, and a lot of facts to address. The accusation goes beyond "big if true" — it would be gargantuan if true — and, as such, it warrants being examined in full detail, rather than rejected out of hand. It should not be dismissed as pure fancy. After all, astroturfing is a real and ubiquitous phenomenon, and astroturfing on the English Wikipedia is attempted on a daily basis by any number of organizations and entities.

I think, however, that when the merits of this situation are examined in full detail, you will agree with me that the insinuation of the Chinese Communist Party being somehow involved with this Wikipedia article is bullshit.

To be more specific:

The article revision linked to with the text "Cyber Anakin's Wikipedia article" is from late November 2023. As best I can tell, the version they are actually referring to (the much-longer one, referred to by the Taiwan News article) is this, from September 2022. It is indeed true that the current revision is much shorter. It's also true that many articles on Wikipedia are made shorter (or longer) on a regular basis. But unlike most websites, the page history on Wikipedia articles is an open record for anyone to inspect. So we can inspect this and try to figure out the real story. First, though, allow me to take a minute to tell you a different story.

As a Wikipedia administrator with over a hundred thousand edits, and over a hundred article creations, I have gotten into all sorts of disagreements with people. But perhaps the greatest frustration in my editing career was this deletion discussion. In it, an extremely useful and detailed 122,174-character-long tabular list of technical specifications for Xilinx field-programmable gate arrays was unceremoniously redirected to a couple paragraphs in the larger article about Xilinx. Look how they massacred my boy. I didn't write the article, but I'd used it, and I gave it my all at the debate. It was me, a consummate Wikipedia nerd (and a handful of outraged hardware engineers) against an opposing contingent of equally consummate Wikipedia nerds. We lost. It made me angry, but the decision was compliant with policy, and part of working on a collaborative project is that sometimes stuff happens that makes you angry. Eventually you have to get over it, which I did.

Note that this single deletion discussion was about 3,200 words long, and it wasn't anywhere near the longest. I've written some software that keeps indices of the largest deletion debates of all time; to give you an idea of the Wikipedian capacity for argumentation, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of bow tie wearers (4th nomination) is 22,271 words long. Talk:Cyber Anakin and its archive page (which contain the entirety of the talk page arguments mentioned in the Quillette piece) come out to about 17,708 words.

Sure, this is a lot. It's a whopping 0.79 bow-tie-wearers-fourth-nominations' worth.

Anyway, one of my adversaries during the Xilinx FPGA deletion debate was Drmies. He is, incidentally, one of the editors who removed content from the Cyber Anakin article in November 2022, and therefore, I suppose, one of the "employees or sympathizers of Xi Jinping's regime". Is this plausible?

Well, let's see: Drmies — who really is a Dr. — is an administrator, for which he had to submit to a grueling public seven-day job interview that was being voted on the entire time (and passed with 205 in favor, 2 opposed and 3 neutral). In the twelve years since then he's also been given the checkuser and oversight usergroups. Being an oversighter involves access to information so sensitive even administrators can't see it (e.g. they are the people who remove shock videos of executions and naked children), and for which you are required to sign a non-disclosure agreement with the Wikimedia Foundation. Since 2007 he's made 378,748 edits.

Just as a thought exercise, try to imagine you are a college professor, and you're approached by a foreign spymaster, who offers you a mission: to edit an encyclopedia in your free time, carrying out research, writing articles, fighting vandalism, making hundreds of thousands of individual edits, debating the finer points of policy, writing dozens of paragraphs arguing with engineers about field-programmable gate arrays, and signing legally binding documents to achieve a position of authority and prestige on said encyclopedia — to do all of this for sixteen years — as a ploy so that one day you can remove a couple paragraphs from an article about a hacktivist. How much money do you think you'd ask for? How many millions of dollars do you think Xi Jinping's budget is for each individual English Wikipedia article? My guess is not enough for this to be a viable strategy.

Wikipedia article histories are public records

Anyway, you can look at the Xtools statistics for the article and see for yourself what the deal is on everyone else. Sideswipe9th, a heavy editor of the article, has often removed material from it, and has also made 9,996 edits over the last few years. They edit a lot of political stuff but they've never been blocked, something which seems fairly difficult to do if you're a saboteur. Jayen466, one of the editors who's argued for inclusion of material in the article, is not only a highly experienced user, but a former editor-in-chief and regular contributor to the Signpost; one would hope he'd be capable of noticing and saying something if he found himself surrounded by psyops agents.

Of course, it's impossible to know who people are in real life without instituting rather intrusive measures that destroy anonymity — something which would bode quite poorly for our editors and readers who live in, say, tin-pot dictatorships where all remotely political Internet activity is monitored and official arbiters of truth given central registries by which to control speech.

Ultimately, it's impossible to say for sure that none of the well-established editors arguing over that article were on the PLA payroll. Or that I'm not, for that matter. The same is true, of course, of the milkman, the firefighter, or the thinkpiece writer — can any empirical knowledge truly be known? — well, no. But some things are just not very likely to be the case, and it's just not very likely that thousands of volunteers who can't even agree on the notability of field-programmable gate array datasheets would be able to carry out a coordinated decades-long operation (after all, unmasking your interlocutor as an international psyops agent is a great way to win the argument).

You may wonder why I am getting so bent out of shape about the accusation of paid editing. Surely this stuff happens all the time. Yes and no — we're volunteers, and it takes a lot of time to track down people who are up to no good, and there sure are a lot of them. But we have a small army of volunteers who sniff out sockpuppet farms and astroturf operations. They are pretty good at it, and something like this would be a gigantic ordeal. The Signpost has reported on dozens of cases of influence operations on Wikipedia getting busted.

Oh, speaking of astroturfing operations getting busted

While we're on the topic of unmasking strange behavior, a couple other things may be worth mentioning about the history of the article. Primarily, one editor — Bugmenot123123123 — created both Cyber Anakin and the since-deleted page 2016 KM.RU and Nival Networks data breaches. Bugmenot123123123 doggedly (and unsuccessfully) defended both pages at their respective deletion nominations in late 2016 (here and here) — and was eventually blocked for disruptive editing. Like I said before, due to our principles of anonymity, it's difficult to know exactly who someone is in real life. The jury is still out on who this is: but they've been remarkably consistent in their agenda over the better part of a decade.

Throughout their tenure, they were persistent in advocating for Cyber Anakin to have an article, for the article to be retained, and for the article to be expanded. In fact, they were so dedicated to championing the cause of Cyber Anakin that, even after their block, they operated several sockpuppet accounts — including Mdikici4001, Mamasanju, and Wizzakk — all of whom were fixated on recreating the article. All of whom, I should note, were rather easily detected and their efforts stymied: it is pretty obvious when five brand-new accounts suddenly try to create articles about the same random hacktivist over and over. This is not the first time someone has tried to do this, and we're not idiots.

It is true that, despite all the sockpuppetry and abuse, Cyber Anakin has a page now. We're not idiots, but we're not Inspector Javert either, and we don't punish people simply because they have aggressive fanboys (or, for that matter, if they are the aggressive fanboys). The article was since put to a second deletion nomination last November, at which it was concluded that there were enough independent, third-party sources to be able to write a neutral, accurate article. I mean, who knows — someone could nominate it again and maybe it would get deleted. Maybe it should. Maybe it will. Or maybe not. Part of working on a collaborative project is that sometimes stuff happens, and then other stuff happens.

But back to Bugmenot123123123.

There are many sockfarms — and I mean hundreds of farms and thousands of socks — with investigation casepages. But there are comparatively fewer long-term abuse pages; these are a distinction reserved for people whose abuse of the project is so persistent and relentless that it's necessary to keep tabs on their modus operandi (like this guy, whose LTA page's "see also" section includes a link to the "California" section of our cyberstalking legislation article — draw your own conclusions from that).

Bugmenot123123123 has been such a giant pain in the ass, for so many years, and in so many diverse ways, that they have a long-term abuse page of their very own:

BMN123 canvasses extensively onwiki, offwiki, and crosswiki, changing proxies frequently and using external rather than normal links (to avoid backlinking) in an attempt to conceal its extent, often seeding in random editors among those targeted as likely supporters.

Edits to Cyber Anakin focus on maintaining the sockmaster's preferred narrative. They will edit-war (Special:Diff/1113301828, Special:Diff/1112087106) and leave long rambling talk page posts (Special:Diff/1113134519, Special:Diff/1112288532) in effort to restore their preferred version when it is disturbed, occasionally leaving warning templates on the talk pages of people who revert them (Special:Diff/1112090413).

Edits on other Anonymous area pages attempt to spam mentions of Cyber Anakin or incidents associated with Cyber Anakin everywhere (Special:Diff/1082332024, Special:Diff/757938463) subsequently edit-warring to retain them (Special:Diff/1117016182 Special:Diff/757940419). In an unblock request they outright stated their intent to spam Cyber Anakin across many pages (Special:Permalink/1117032979#Request_to_downgrade_block_to_partial_block_of_some_pages).

[...]

It is possible that more than one editor is responsible. They've directly claimed to have hired others to edit [1] and have posted on and off-wiki attempting to form a dirty tricks cabal (Special:Diff/1113171407). Regardless policy is clear that when there is uncertainty whether a party is one user with sockpuppets or several users with similar editing habits they may be treated as one user with sockpuppets so the detail is not particularly important.

They've also shown on ability to trick journalists from some marginally reliable sources to defame Wikipedia editors and subsequently post the ultimately self-sourced statements in mainspace as part of their harassment campaign.

Man, that sure would be embarrassing.