> but at some point a state based cyber attack that just wipes wikipedia off the net is deeply damaging to our modern society’s ability to agree on common facts
Haven't we hit that point already with bad faith (and potentially government-run) coordinated editing and voting campaigns, as both Wales and Sanger have been pointing out for a while now?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Wikipedia is not a democracy.
> as both Wales and Sanger have been pointing out
{{fv}}. Neither of those essays make this point. The closest either gets is Sanger's first thesis, which misunderstands the "support / oppose" mechanism. Ironically, his ninth thesis says to introduce voting, which would create the "voting campaign" vulnerability!
These are both really bad takes, which I struggle to believe are made in good faith, and I'm glad Wikipedians are mostly ignoring them. (I have not read the third link you provided, because Substack.)
That's a relatively recent process: there have only been 3 such elections ever. They have measures in place to try to curb abuse of the process, and it cannot really be used to introduce bias (since an administrator exhibiting bias would leave a public trail of evidence attesting to that bias). That said, thanks for letting me know about it.
Haven't we hit that point already with bad faith (and potentially government-run) coordinated editing and voting campaigns, as both Wales and Sanger have been pointing out for a while now?
See, for example,
* Sanger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses
* Wales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide/Archive_22#...
* PirateWires: https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-is-becoming-a-ma...