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Wikimedia actually bans administrator for posting fake information

by on28 June 2021


Next step recognising the existence of Fudzilla?

The Wikimedia Foundation has taken the extraordinary step of banning one of its admins after he was found to have been posting radical right-wing views on the Wackypedia site.

Normally Wackypedia treats its admins as gods and backs them to the hilt even when they clearly have political agendas and personal grudges. For years its editors waged a war claiming that Mike Magee and the Everywhere Girl did not exist and lately has refused to admit that Fudzilla does either.  Most editing arguments depend on the views of the admins being accepted as law, even when it is clear that they don’t know what they are talking about.

But now it seems that the administrator of the Croatian version of Wikipedia has crossed over some line after an investigation revealed that together with other admins, they edited and distorted content on the site with radical right views.

This group had de-facto control of the website between 2011 and 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation said.  During that time they fixed web pages to reveal the following information:

* Hitler attacked Poland and started World War II after the Poles committed genocide against Germans.

* A World War II concentration camp was a labour camp.

* Changing sites that were critical of EU decision-making claiming that they endangered Croatia's sovereignty.

* Insisting that the EU had used propaganda to trick Croatian citizens into joining the European Union.

Since 2013 the dubious edits had been spotted by users and the Croatian press, according to the article — but other Croatian Wikipedia editors failed, multiple times, to wrest away control of the site's moderation.

Apparently, nothing was ever going to happen until the Wikimedia Foundation discovered that the administrator of Croatian Wikipedia had been using sock puppet accounts to manipulate discussions and staff elections on the site.

In other words, you can turn the site into a neo-nazi propaganda site, but you are in trouble if you try to fudge a staff election.

The Wikimedia Foundation's report on the abuses of this team also points to possibly similar far right based editing on Wikipedia's Serbian version as well. This is the second major Wikipedia scandal in the past year. In September 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation said it found and banned a public relations firm that had created and used a network of sock puppet accounts to edit the site on behalf of some of its customers.

Last modified on 28 June 2021
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