Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-06-27/Disinformation report

A decade-old case of "project capture" of the Croatian Wikipedia (Hr.WP) by nationalist administrators may have been resolved with the help of a report published this month on Meta by the Wikimedia Foundation titled "". The report was authored anonymously, presumably to avoid harassment, and is an independent view of an expert on the subject matter.

The admins, led by, inserted disinformation and used sockpuppeting and other abusive tactics, according to a separate RfC which globally banned him last November. , who participated in the RfC, said that Kubura had an "army of socks". Blablubbs decided to help at the RfC "partially because of the whitewashing ... and partially because of draconian crackdowns on dissent inside the project".

The admins were linked by the report to Croatian nationalist positions by their downplaying the UN war crime convictions of Croatians who fought in the 1991–1999 Yugoslav Wars, their use of biased unreliable sources and by their support of the World War II era Nazi-puppet state, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), as well as the military group, the Ustaše which the report calls "terrorist".

The report echos earlier accounts of administrator abuse including a 2019 article in The Signpost, "The curious case of the Croatian Wikipedia", Croatian and international news stories going back to 2010, and complaints by Wikipedia editors starting about 2007. The report concludes that "Hr.WP had been dominated by ideologically driven users who are misaligned with Wikipedia’s five pillars, confirming concerns about the project’s integrity from the global community."

Articles are being re-written and disaffected editors are rejoining the project. The report notes this progress but warns that the transformation is not complete and that the banned admins may use new accounts to try to recapture the project.

The report also observes that this case highlights a "significant weakness in the global Wikimedia community and – by extension – Wikimedia Foundation platform governance."

The report
The WMF began its planning for the report in November 2020 as the RfC on banning Kubura was in progress, but the author's investigation started in February 2021. He is an external expert on the subject matter and provides three recommendations to the WMF. Jan Eissfeldt, Global Head of Trust and Safety at the WMF told The Signpost that the author is a native speaker of Serbo-Croatian with "decades of relevant international experience analysing ... patterns of organised disinformation." The report states "opinions expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Wikimedia Foundation."

The Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian Wikipedias are unusual in that they all separated starting in 2003 from the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, which continued to exist. All these languages are mutually intelligible variants of Serbo-Croatian, which is termed "pluricentric".

The report states that

The limited number and diversity of editors on the new Croatian Wikipedia allowed it to become politicized, and allowed Kubura, his sockpuppets, and followers to capture the administrative structure of the project.

Evidence of this capture is shown in the report's section on "Key findings and case studies" (pp. 15–35) which makes up one-third of the report. It includes subsections on
 * "Measuring disinformation," which uses a sample of articles on 32 people convicted of war crimes committed during the Yugoslav wars and compares how these crimes were covered in 8 Wikipedia language versions. Though the sample size is low, Hr.WP clearly covered Croatian war criminals differently than the other language versions.
 * "Illustrative examples," or case studies from the above subsection
 * "Propaganda," examining a dozen specific articles
 * "Questionable sources," which examines eleven sources used in the project and the frequency of their use, classifying them as self-published sites, those without any declared editorial standards, openly extremist sites, etc.

This section is the core of the analysis and may set the standard if any future reports of this type are needed.

Based on these findings the report makes three recommendations to the WMF and the Serbo-Croatian communities:
 * 1) that the Croatian community seek to "continue re-establishing a robust local governance system, requesting oversight and support from the rest of the Wikimedia movement as needed;"
 * 2) that they seek to unify the selection of admins and functionaries with other Serbo-Croatian communities; and
 * 3) that they explore a full reunification into the original Serbo-Croatian language project.

Adding some urgency to these recommendations, the report warns that, as currently constituted, Hr.WP is at risk of being recaptured by nationalist editors and admins.

An additional observation – strengthen global governance
Following the recommendations, the report's author makes a statement that goes beyond the Serbo-Croatian community and the Hr.WP disinformation problem.

The Signpost asked Jan Eissfeldt of the WMF for his reaction to the report's observation. He recognizes that disinformation is a growing problem, and emphasized that the WMF would work with the communities as openly as possible. For cases where safety is a potential problem, they might need to work through stewards or other trusted users. "We are investing in our movement's capacity to identify and respond to all kinds of influence operations, including those led by government actors, to ensure the accuracy of the information shared on Wikimedia projects. An example of this was the taskforce we put together ahead of the U.S. presidential election."

While not promising to start any new program to systematically evaluate disinformation problems, he said "the Foundation aims to conduct project evaluations, in collaboration with volunteers in the Wikimedia movement, to explore potential issues in projects openly and transparently."

How well did the WMF respond in the case of the Croatian Wikipedia? He says that the WMF "did not adequately understand some of the unique risks now identified in the report," in particular the risks of having separate Wikipedias for parts of pluricentric language communities.