I worked on the article posted here. I think it's come up again because anti-war US writers are now noticing more hostile editing of their pages[1]. Philip Cross was banned from editing in the area of British politics (which, in my opinion, was done reluctantly by Wikipedia arbitrators after Hacker News[2] and later BBC[3] exposure), the account now continues with the same kind of editing, but targetting people that fall outside the area of the topic ban.

Here's an example: Philip Cross had little interest in Max Blumenthal's Wikipedia entry prior to the Wikipedia topic ban (edited only 11 times from 2007 until Cross was banned from British politics in July 2018[4]). Since then, it's been edited by Cross 552 times[5]. According to WikiWho, Cross is responsible for 56% of all content on Max Blumenthal's Wikipedia page. Before the ban, Cross was responsible for 0.9% of the content.

[1] https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1381746315659509763

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17109290

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csws6q

[4] https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Max%...

[5] https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Max%...

If there is enough evidence to start a arbitration request, then start there. A editor who has already received a topic ban is more likely to get a second ban, or harsher because of the repeat offense.

That said, if you go after a person for their personal social media comments and succeed, the common result is that people clam up about their personal opinions in social media. This is the common argument against the recent trend of digging through peoples social media in order to find something to hang them. All it does is to make people less open and more closed minded.

Looking at the archived discussion at the Administrator noticeboard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...), the big issue seems to be the lack of any actually edit conflict. On Wikipedia, that is a problem if one want to sanction an editor for doing biased editing.

The whole discussion seems to be similar to the one about hardware back doors by NSA (if produced in a country where the US has influence), china or both. We can suspect there is a security problem, we can point towards incentives and capability to do it, but trying to do a proper response to the threat without anything concrete is difficult.

I'm not sure if the account is operated by a single person, and if it is, I'm not interested in "hanging them" for their opinions. This isn't a free speech issue. People go to Wikipedia thinking they're getting neutral information. How many people are aware, when they load some of these pages, like Max Blumenthal's for example, that it's mostly the work of one account hostile to that individual? And in this case, the work of an account that's already been banned for the hostile editing of other people's pages.

If you're interested, compare Max's page before and after Cross got involved with it. You'll see the same pattern we documented in our article. It just gets filled with more and more criticism.

This isn't the same for establishment-friendly voices. Have a look, for example, at the entries for Bellingcat or its founder Eliot Higgins (Bellingcat appears 5 times on Max's page). See how much criticism you find in those entries. Compare with the the articles below[1][2]. One reason of course is that Wikipedia deprecates sources it doesn't approve of, favouring instead "reliable sources" (mostly corporate, establishment-friendly news sites)[3].

Having followed the discussion and arbitration process in 2018, I don't really think anything will change. But I'd like to see more people become aware that what they read on Wikipedia, if it's political, is likely to be very biased and could be the work of nefarious actors.

[1] https://www.mintpressnews.com/bellingcat-intelligence-agenci...

[2] https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/24/author-bellingcat-opcw-wh...

[3] https://twitter.com/fivefilters/status/1381290433658167299

I have seen plenty of times when reliable sources are mostly negative about a subject, and Wikipedia article reflecting those sources while ignoring more critical or broader investigative journalism. Gamergate was one of those time, and depending on a persons political alignment the Wikipedia article is either a great description of what happened, or an corporate/establishment-friendly perspective with a specific narrative in mind.

One way we could measure bias in political articles would be to count how much of an article is sources by each news papers and then measure total media bias through establish finding in media bias research. A common cited sources is the study done during the 2016 US election which estimated media bias for each major news paper by looking at social media links where the profile were openly set as being in support to one specific political party. The more links that was shared by a single political aligned demographic, the more aligned the study would define the news paper.

Back to the specific at hands, it is difficult to build a case based on the sum of reliable sourced information without an actually edit dispute. One of the first layers in Wikipedia in order to address issues is through a third-party, and one would have to ask them to decide if the sum of sources are given correct weight in the article. Looking at Max page myself I can't say if the article is correctly reflecting reliable sources or not. I am surprised there even exist 121 distinct reliable sources about a political writer/political documentary maker. If anything the article looks very bloated and should be trimmed down to match subject matters of similar notability. I think there are noble price winners that has less coverage than this person.

If it's clear he has the backing of Jimmy Wales (as evidenced by wikipedia's weirdly explosive reaction on twitter to people questioning this), what would be the point?