Information Warfare on Wikipedia

ISD and CASM Technology set out to examine the ways in which Wikipedia may be vulnerable to the forms of systematic manipulation that have been exposed on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and a number of other information spaces. As a case study, we took the English-language Wikipedia page for the Russo-Ukrainian war, finding 86 editors who had previously made changes to the page and who had been banned from Wikipedia due to vandalism, sock-puppet accounts and so on. We used Beam to track the 794,771 revisions these 86 editors had made across Wikipedia, using network analysis to identify other pages which had seen many edits, identify the addition of state-affiliated sourcing, categorised the edits for (in some cases) pro-Kremlin bias and identified possible coordination through the introduction of common URLs.