Talk:Censorship of Wikipedia

Why delete an AP report?

@Simpleshooter666: Why did you delete the following:

On 13 April 2023 the Wikimedia Foundation was again fined by a Russian court.

It seems like a fairly recent bit of news by a reputable source that's quite relevant to the issues discussed here, indicating that the fine of 2022-11-01 was not isolated but amplified. I plan to revert that deletion. Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 23:41, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

References

DavidMCEddy (talk) 23:41, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

Wikimedians of Mainland China

I noticed that the below (the reference links are included on the articles) keeps getting removed from Propaganda in China and Censorship of Wikipedia. Any thoughts?

Despite being censored in mainland China, and as VPNs are normally not allowed to edit Wikipedia, Wikipedia administrators from China have permitted IP block exemptions for a select number of mainland users. Such users are recruited to change the editorial content on Wikipedia in support of China's viewpoint and/or to support the election of pro-Chinese government administrators on Wikipedia, with the aim of gaining control of Wikipedia. Academics suggested that “China urgently needs to encourage and train Chinese netizens to become Wikipedia platform opinion leaders and administrators … [who] can adhere to socialist values and form some core editorial teams.”

The pro-Beijing Wikipedia community, the Wikimedians of Mainland China (WMC), have clashed with Wikipedia editors from Taiwan, not only over Wikipedia's content, but also making death threats made against Taiwan's community of Wikipedians. One Taiwanese editor suggested that it was not just patriotic mainlanders, but a "larger structural coordinated strategy the government has to manipulate these platforms" beside Wikipedia, such as Twitter and Facebook. The Wikimedians of Mainland China (WMC) also threatened to report Wikipedia editors to Hong Kong's national security police hotline over the disputed article "2019–2020 Hong Kong protests" characterized by edit warring. A Hong Kong-based editor, who remains anonymous because of fears of intimidation, noted that "Pro-Beijing people often remove content that is sympathetic to protests, such as tear gas being fired and images of barricades. They also add their own content". Acknowledging that "edit wars" happen on both sides, the anonymous editor stated that "Pro-democracy editors tend to add content to shift the balance or the tone of the article, but in my experience, the pro-Beijing editors are a lot more aggressive in churning out disinformation. It's now unfixable without external interference. Someone is trying to rewrite history."

On 13 September 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation banned seven Wikipedia users and removed administrator privileges from twelve users that were part of Wikimedians of Mainland China (WMC). Maggie Dennis, the foundation's vice present of community resilience and sustainability, said that there had been an yearlong investigation into “infiltration concerns” that threatened the "very foundations of Wikipedia". Dennis observed that the infiltrators had tried to promote "the aims of China, as interpreted through whatever filters they may bring to bear", suggesting possible links to the Chinese Communist Party. Dennis said “We needed to act based on credible information that some members (not all) of that group [WMC] have harassed, intimidated, and threatened other members of our community, including in some cases physically harming others, in order to secure their own power and subvert the collaborative nature of our projects”.

HertzUranus (talk) 20:07, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

User:LilAhok wrote, "info about China can be found in China section." Is that not accurate?

I support retaining this information, but it does not need to be in the article twice. It should be in the section on China with probably a very brief summary of the most important point(s) elsewhere. DavidMCEddy (talk)`

yeah, this is true. HertzUranus is actually a sockpuppet of FobTown. HertzUranus is banned. User was aggressively canvassing users for his edits. This user has a history of making incredibly disruptive edits on pages related to China. I tried to write the articles in a way that is brief and avoids bias. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/FobTown/Archive)