Saturday, December 18, 2021

Think OODA, Think Open

The war over Chinese Wikipedia is a warning for the open internet

Wikipedia's a treasure. A self governing, user driven dictionary, it's impact on the net, and to yours truly, cannot be understated, something needing protection, this time regarding China and its recent push to control all things relating to unfettered information as espoused by entities such as Wikipedia.

The war over Chinese Wikipedia is a warning for the open internet

How a group of pro-China users ‘infiltrated’ Wikipedia, launched a new encyclopedia, and exposed growing threats to Wikipedia’s free-knowledge mission.

This past July, before he was banned from Wikipedia, Techyan was one of dozens of volunteers preparing to speak at the free-knowledge movement’s annual conference, Wikimania. Born in China’s northeast, Techyan, as he’s known in the Wikipedia community, had been editing Chinese Wikipedia since his early teens. As one of its three dozen elected administrators, he hoped his presentation would put a more positive spin on what, lately, had become Wikipedia’s ugliest battlefield.

Rather than the edit wars and personal threats that had come to define some of its hot-button political topics like Hong Kong and Taiwan, Techyan planned to talk about how his three-year-old user group, the Wikipedians of Mainland China, or WMC, had thrived. It had done so in spite of government restrictions, and without official acknowledgment from the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts the site in over 300 languages and hands out millions in grants.

Then in July, weeks before Wikimania, an email from the Foundation landed in his inbox: His presentation had been canceled. “Weeks later, I was banned,” he says.

The art of the lie ...

According to a September statement by Maggie Dennis, the Foundation’s VP of trust and safety, Techyan and six other high-level users were actually involved in “an infiltration” of the Chinese Wikipedia. In an interview, Dennis said a monthlong investigation found that the veteran editors were “coordinating to bias the encyclopedia and bias positions of authority” around a pro-Beijing viewpoint, in part by meddling in administrator elections and threatening, and even physically assaulting, other volunteers. In all, the Foundation banned seven editors and temporarily demoted a dozen others over the abuses, which Dennis called “unprecedented in scope and nature.”

Dangerville ...

The rhetoric and threats obscured a more sobering warning. At 20 years old, the encyclopedia that anyone can edit is now the improbable backbone of our information ecosystem, a place to rely on and get lost in, built on top of a similarly impressive volunteer-run infrastructure. Bottom-up and consensus-based, Wikipedia’s framework has proved remarkably resilient to vandalism and disinformation. But it can also be surprisingly brittle, weakened by a litany of problems from within, including harassment and bias. (Much of this stems from the stubborn fact that most Wikipedia editors are English-speaking men in Western countries.) The site’s weaknesses, meanwhile, leave it more vulnerable to manipulation by governments and non-state adversaries, who threaten not only its vision but also the safety of its volunteers.

You gotta speak the language.

Dennis acknowledged the Foundation had fallen short in its ability to address its human rights impacts and to communicate with Chinese users. At the time of its investigation, for instance, Wikimedia didn’t have a fluent Chinese speaker on its trust-and-safety staff. (Elise Flick, a Foundation spokesperson, said in an email that the Foundation “has added in-house Chinese language engagement support as of mid-October.”) In her September statement, Dennis apologized to the Chinese community. “You have not had the service you’ve deserved,” she wrote.

Situational awareness applies. Think OODA when dealing with Xi

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