Wikipedia talk:Disinformation

Admin request
Can an admin please undelete and userfy 2015 New York poisoned turkey incident to help with some research related to this essay? An undelete was also requested by for similar reasons. If anyone is wondering why these requests are coming 3 years after the page was deleted, it's because it was the subject of a recent Wall Street Journal story. R2 (bleep) 17:09, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
 * This was already done - it's at User:WilliamJE/Hoax. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 23:50, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Areas to watch

 * 5G -- — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ahrtoodeetoo (talk • contribs)
 * Wonderful. -- Green  C  16:49, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Balance between Russia and other countries
Russia is mentioned 12 times in this short article, but no "other" country is specified. Thought it would be fair to balance it. Or maybe simply rename the article to "Russian Disinformation".

I am not partial to Russia, (or to any other country for that matter), it is just odd to talk about disinformation but only inform the reader about Russia. Seems a bit strange. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.25.44.110 (talk • contribs)

I just realised what this page is about. Sorry. It is just a minority viewpoint and it means can contain as much biased info, as one feels to write about. There is probably no point to try and correct it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.25.44.110 (talk • contribs)


 * I think you misread the essay. It's about all state-backed disinformation on Wikipedia, regardless of which state. That's why it refers to "other countries." If you have credible information about other countries engaging in this type of behavior, please please add it. However, we can't say that state-backed disinformation on WP is "by no means restricted to Russia" without some evidence of that. TLDR: Put up the evidence. R2 (bleep) 15:45, 20 May 2019 (UTC)


 * The list of countries in the abstract of the COVID-19 anti-clustering analysis paper (full source: ) used as one of the references of the essay Reliability of open government data has Algeria with the most unusual COVID-19 daily infection counts, in the sense of lacking noise, and "Tajikistan, Turkey, Russia, Belarus, Albania, United Arab Emirates, and Nicaragua" as also having unusually low noise (the order is based on the numbers, from worst to least bad). These resulted from purely statistical analysis of the 78 countries that had valid data to analyse (section Results - data - 3.1 - of the paper). The suspicious COVID-19 daily counts are not disinformation directly aimed at Wikipedia; they are aimed at the countries' citizens and the world. The analysis is peer-reviewed. There is no bias against non-Western countries in the analysis: Russia happens to be on the list of results of the analysis. Boud (talk) 00:18, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

US election disinformation contact email at WMF
Hi all - I just wanted to drop a notice here about a Wikimedia Foundation contact email address we'll be using during the 2020 US Presidential Election relating to disinformation on Wikipedia.

In the run-up to the election, a group of Wikimedia Foundation staff have been monitoring and investigating the potential for disinformation campaigns on Wikipedia (read more in this blog post). We have been working with other technology companies, external disinformation experts, and Wikimedia functionaries to explore how disinformation campaigns might intersect with Wikipedia in addition to understanding the broader landscape. Wikimedia projects are in a great position with respect to disinformation overall, but aren't immune, so we're making sure that we at the Foundation are in a good position to support the community in the event of a potentially high profile incident. Later in the year we'll share some information on how this work played out, any disinformation incidents that occurred on Wikipedia, and what we've learned.

If you see a disinformation issue on Wikimedia projects or social media that you think the Wikimedia Foundation should be aware of - for example because it requires an Office action or we might expect to see media coverage - please contact the WMF Disinformation Task Force at drt@undefinedwikimedia.org. While this email address isn't quite as sensitive as emergency@, please only use it to report potential disinformation incidents, and not for general queries. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 11:10, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

Official open data from some countries appears to be disinformation
There are some government agencies whose official open data is quite suspicious, based purely on its statistical properties. Given that Wikipedia has published so much official government data (daily infection and death counts) for the COVID-19 pandemic, with no obvious warning that the data might be fabricated, apart from a few national pandemic articles with sections about "controversies" or sometimes stronger section titles, it seems to me that this effectively a form of disinformation, even if it's not targeted directly at Wikipedia. For details, see the essay Reliability of open government data, which includes (currently) two peer-reviewed references on statistical properties of government data suggesting that in some cases they are unlikely to be genuine. Boud (talk) 23:59, 16 September 2021 (UTC)