On 17 January 2018 at 13:24 Harry Mitchell
<hjmwiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Would it be worth Wikimedia UK's while to put out a blog post talking
about quality control processes (ad-hoc as they are) on Wikipedia? Not so much
as a direct reply - both because these articles look like they're just
filling empty column inches, and because we obviously can't prove a negative
(that "Russian trolls" *aren't* running amok on political articles). Rather
as
a timely reminder of what Wikipedia is about and how the 'wisdom of the crowd'
makes it quite difficult to grossly distort its content. I could say something
about what admins do, though there I'm sure there are people who spend more
time on politicians' biographies than I do.
As you say, proving the negative is out of reach.
I would say, take the lesson of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well
to heart. Along with straightforward lying, selective quotation, guilt by
association, and the reporting of rumour as truth, there is a lot of it about
these days.
I'm glad to see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie has had some recent
attention, while we're on the topic of propaganda techniques everybody should
know about.
Charles