Wikipedia has suffered an "infiltration" that sought to advance the aims of China, the US non-profit organisation that owns the volunteer-edited encyclopaedia has said.
The Wikimedia Foundation told BBC News the infiltration had threatened the "very foundations of Wikipedia".
The foundation banned seven editors linked to a mainland China group.
Wikimedians of Mainland China accused the foundation of "baselessly slandering a small group of people".
Wikipedia seems like a prime target to be manipulated in a Comrade Ogilvy style fashion (it's a sequence in 1984, I'm sure you know what I mean and don't need it explained because you definitely read the book), or the old "he who controls the past, controls the future". Get everyone to think everything they know is just a Mandela Effect and surely they'll be eating out your hands?
You can get everyone up in arms about misinformation on Facebook and so on, but Wikipedia is an intellectual institution... but its very concept (as noted above) makes it uniquely vulnerable to this kind of subversion. And even people who look at talk pages don't do so for every issue.
So... what say ye, NSG? Does Wikipedia belong to a different age... a Utopian vision of the web... that's finally about to succumb to the failure of history to end?
n.b. Wikipedia's own rules are insufficient to prevent Comrade Ogilvy episodes... see what happened to the Big Four tennis article