Talk:Kompromat

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This article was nominated for deletion. Please review the prior discussions if you are considering re-nomination: no consensus to delete, 2014-02-10, see discussion. delete, 2009-02-20, see discussion.

"Kompromat" does not mean "compromising" but "comprometting" material. "To compromet" = to tarnish a reputation; to draw into bad light; to destroy someone’s public image. "Comprometting material" is something which can be used on blackmailing, extortion and bullying: "compromising material" would be something which could be used to access the opponent's resources. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.78.159.117 (talk) 08:51, 14 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The meaning of the word "Kompromat" is just blackmail, only with focus shifted onto the blackmail materials rather than the act of blackmailing.

We don't need special second articles for mundane things just because you heard a scary Russian word for it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:A442:581E:1:309F:1EA7:ED13:6BCE (talk) 22:11, 8 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Seconded. This article could--I'd argue should--be merged with the page on blackmail. Such a section could include the particular history of blackmail in Russia if there is a solid argument that this use is meaningfully unique, or at least unique enough to justify its own section. Otherwise an entry under the already existing 'Laws by country' section would be appropriate. Any section outside of the 'Laws by country' section ought to include the criticism noted above and discussion of the word's use in western political discourse. I am sure there's plenty of material to cite on this critique.

I'm fairly new to editing and only do it occasionally, is there a process for adding the tag to suggest such a merger? Or is there any informal community standard as to the polite way to go about this?

Chippy87 (talk) 19:31, 25 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The English article makes me believe that 'kompromat', as described, is used strictly within politics of Russian Federation. The actual meaning of the word is more general, and can apply to politics of any other state, or organisation (even a small, or non-formal organisation, such as group of friends). The Russian version of the article reflects the actual meaning. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.83.86.21 (talk) 12:05, 10 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

A dubious, and insufficiently documented example is given in the article: specifically, there is virtually no reliable proof that the incident concerning Ted Kennedy tried to work with the KGB in order to beat Ronald Reagan in 1984. See </ref>https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/jul/18/greg-gutfeld/fox-news-host-cites-ted-kennedy-kgb-meeting-never-/</ref> Inadequately documented because the two sources it offers are 1) Kevin Mooney writing for a less than reputable right wing source of propaganda, "The Daily Signal." He provides virtually no reliable sources for his assertions. 2)Larry Elder in "Real Clear Politics." cites a story in the "London Times" about a memo, but the memo is not corroborated sufficiently As Politifact points out: "The memo gained attention when it was the basis of a news report published in the London Times in 1992, after the Soviet Union dissolved. When the report came out, Tunney told the London Times that it was "bull----." We reached Tunney in 2015, and he emphatically repeated that."

Furthermore, the entry with these citations is irrelevant to the topic of the article. It is not about Kompromat but about what the contributor calls: "reverse kompromat." This is as a example of "Everybody does it" or Tu quoque as a means of deflecting or diminishing suspicions directed at Trump. This is a frequent theme in the right-wing media. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.71.62.243 (talk) 08:09, 8 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It will help if there were more verifiable online sources.

Also does anyone feel that this belongs to wiktionary and not wikipedia ? Sasank Sleeper (talk) 23:09, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• You have not heard of Google Books? All the book pages referenced in the article are publicly accessible if you just paste the ISBN numbers into books.google.com. And if for some reason you don't like Google Books, Amazon offers book previews with full-text search on many of the books that they sell. --Tetromino (talk) 23:21, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• As for the wiktionary vs. wikipedia question: after reading the Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary policy, I believe that the article belongs in wikipedia. First of all, because the article is about a particular phenomenon in post-Soviet politics and public relations, and not about the usage of a particular word. Second, it has the potential to grow (e.g. by translating articles about famous examples of kompromat in the Russian wikipedia, such as ru:Чемоданы компромата Руцкого). Third, because as far as I can tell, it is not a synonym or inflection of an existing article title (are there other articles specifically about the negative campaigning technique of paying off police to dig up dirt on your opponent and then paying off a journalist to publish said dirt)? --Tetromino (talk) 23:37, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• There is no requirement in WP:RS for online sources, indeed offline printed sources are specifically allowed. Persoanlly i often find book sources of greater value than online sources, and as mentioned above, google books often permits online access. ({{Cite book}} does permit specifing a URL where the text can be seen, and this can be helpful. Google books URLs can be used for this purpose. DES ^(talk) 01:06, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This happens to Eldon Chance, some child porn is planted on his laptop (presumably by an evil cop who beats his wife that Chance is investigating) and he nearly plays it during a presentation he is giving for psychiatry.

Does anyone recall any other instances of it in culture? I think someone mentions it as a tactic against an enemy in orphan Black. Keeping track of cultural references (whether or not the Russian term is used) could be useful to mention at the end of this article. ScratchMarshall (talk) 17:12, 5 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

This Project is often a victim of Kompromat in the form of subtle vandalism. The vandal contributes a phrase or paragraph that is sub-standard or wrong, but not hightly visible. Knowledgeble readers see this text and credibility of the Project is lessened. Disruptive as a free Encyclopedia is to various individuals that purvey information, there is ample motivation to undercut this source. As the site crosses all languages and is accessible anywhere, it is the battleground of information warfare on some controversial topics, and others where information has value. WP:SUBTLE represents a conscious group effort to address the problem. With so many articles, and a Talk on each, an editor can feel isolated, but there is at least this resource. — Rgdboer (talk) 23:30, 5 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Other defensive projects include WP:Typo Team and WP:Countering systemic bias. All editors are incouraged to remove compromising materials when found in text. — Rgdboer (talk) 23:46, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

According to the article:

The term kompromat is a borrowing of the Russian KGB slang term компромат from the Stalin era, which is short for "compromising material" (Russian: компрометирующий материал, translit. komprometiruyushchy material). It refers to disparaging information that can be collected, stored, traded, or used strategically across all domains: political, electoral, legal, professional, judicial, media, and business. The origins of the term trace back to 1930s secret police jargon...

In the early days, kompromat featured doctored photographs, planted drugs, grainy videos of liaisons with prostitutes hired by the KGB, and a wide range of other primitive entrapment techniques. However, more contemporary forms of kompromat appear as a form of cybercrime. One aspect of kompromat that stands the test of time is that the compromising information is often sexual in nature.

This account is problematic. For a start, the KGB didn't exist in the Stalin era. Nor did business to a great extent. And the electoral and legal domains were very different to what they are now. Prostitution in the USSR was very much underground, and I believe the illegal drug trade didn't exist until the 1980s. Nor did "videos" exist in the 1930s. I think they emerged in the 1980s. Moreover, the sources imply that kompromat boomed in the 1990s, after the demise of the USSR and the KGB.

The "History" section starts with the cases of John Vassall and Joseph Alsop, which also occurred after the Stalin era.

There seems to be a conflation of practices from a wide range of periods.--Jack Upland (talk) 10:12, 18 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I removed this section for a few different reasons, one being that uncritically presenting a hotly-disputed claim that rests on a single memo from a highly-dubious source like the KGB archives as uncontested fact is utterly irresponsible and smacks of POV-pushing. Politifact, incidentally, rated the story as false.[1]

But that’s kind of beside the point, because the story isn’t an example of Kompromat even if it’s true: Kompromat involves the exploitation of compromising material for the purpose of blackmail or negative publicity. There isn’t any of that in this story, so why was this off-topic passage ever allowed into this article? -- Rrburke (talk) 12:54, 11 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

What's going on? -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 23:16, 3 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Please clarify your problem. --Altenmann >talk 18:12, 4 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Every instance of the word kompromat is about size 16, whereas all the rest of the text is about 10. IOW the letters are very small. I have never seen this before here. I don't see any code on the page that would account for it. I use Firefox, but this is new, and the only page that does it to that word. It's looks fine on this talk page. I have gone back in the history, but no matter how far back I go, the problem persists. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 20:58, 4 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Valjean, do Kompromat and Kompromat appear differently? It is possible your system has an odd font selection for Cyrillic text, which doesn't work as well when Latin characters are supplied instead. Or something.Remsense ‥ 论 00:19, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Remsense: yes, they are VERY different! The first version is normal and the second is a very narrow line of text I can barely read. But since I know what it is, I can read it. It hasn't always been this way. On other pages, the word is not used with that template, so there is no problem. It is usually just written with typical wikimarkup as in kompromat. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 01:25, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Cool! Things seem to be working as intended—the first tags the text as in Russian, but using the Latin script (i.e. a romanization), while the latter assumes it is using Cyrillic. That's the case with the text in the article, and it is wrong: should be fixed by swapping {{lang|ru}} with {{tlit|ru}} in each case. Remsense ‥ 论 01:28, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I just tried that and it didn't work. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 02:01, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oops! I copied directly from above (in edit mode), and not from the rendered text. I'll try again. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 02:04, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It looks good now. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 02:25, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I just discovered it is only the instances that use this template: {{lang|ru|'''Kompromat'''}} (Kompromat). Without that template, the word kompromat is normal size. That is also the case in this comment. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 21:06, 4 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It might be your browser (or mediawiki software mishaqndling it). I dont see this problem. --Altenmann >talk 23:55, 4 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Module:Lang, the engine that underlies {{lang}}, does not change font size unless an editor explicitly sets |size=. There have been complaints at Template talk:Lang in the past about Firefox and non-Latn text renderings so likely this is more of the same.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:18, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Lots of people use Firefox, so our text should work. Chrome renders it fine. The solution might be to just not use that template. Is there any justifiable reason for using it when we can just write it as kompromat? -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 00:23, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's not a Firefox issue, as that's what I use. It is device specific, as the issue is not anything but what font one's device selects to render a given language tag. Thus, I would strongly advise against changing the semantics of the document to resolve a client-side style issue that affects an unclear but limited set of users. Remsense ‥ 论 00:26, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What can I do to resolve this? I have now downloaded Russian in Firefox, but that doesn't help. I am not suggesting we alter any semantics content, just the format of the word. It's the language module that does it, and when it's not used, there is no problem. That's an easy fix. Why use the language module? -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 00:32, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

can you answer my question above? it's important to declare the language that text is in for numerous accessibility and other reasons; otherwise, on the english wikipedia all text is explicitly specified as being in English, so screen readers and anything else that operates in a multilingual environment will not process it correctly Remsense ‥ 论 00:34, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Answered above. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 01:27, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]