Talk:Cognitive warfare

I am getting a message that "Cognitive Warfare" may not meet notability?

I'm not sure how to inquire about this. CW is a separate form of warfare distinguishing itself in military circles as an evolved iteration of psychological and information warfare. Academic and military circles have made this distinction and I presented a clear case for this; yet I still see this at the top of the article. CognitiveOP (talk) 05:31, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

@CognitiveOP, some remaining issues:

1. Article's a bit too buzzwordy at times.
2. When you cite a long video, you need to include a timestamp so we can double-check the citation.
3. Same goes for books (you need to cite the chapter or page number; we can't read the whole thing).
4. There is technically no requirement for doing this, but it makes our lives a lot easier when you use the built-in citation tool, so we can easily keep the citation formatting consistent.

– Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 22:28, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Weasel words??

Hey all!

I looked up the definition of weasel words but the definition seems to be just as ambiguous!

SOS wikipedians!

Thanks again!! CognitiveOP (talk) 07:09, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

CognitiveOP: Apologies for the tone; I realise these standardised warnings can come across as impersonal, especially for new contributors.

I do hope others stop by and can give a second or third opinion. The fact is, I've made a few attempts at trying to understand this article, and I don't know whether it's my lack of expertise in cognitive science and military matters, or the dense language it's written in, but this article remains inscrutable to me. Therefore I also can't assess whether this is an accurate summary of reliable secondary sources, or contains original research or fringe theories.

To be clear, this is not a judgment of you or your work, but keep in mind that the goal of Wikipedia is to build an encyclopaedia, that is, a tertiary reference, accessible to general readers, that summarises topics that have already seen significant coverage in reliable secondary sources. To that end, we strive to make technical or specialised subjects comprehensible to general readers, while holding fast to our fundamental principles. You may also find the essay Relationships with academic editors illuminates how scholars and Wikipedians may end up at loggerheads despite everyone's best intentions. — ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · contribs · email) 08:24, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

It is completely ok! no offense taken at all! I am currently in the midst of making it more digestible! If you have any more opinions at all don't hesitate to drop them here! The sources are another thing I'm improving upon to make it as reliable and credible as possible! Will doing so begin to remove the caveats at the top of the page? CognitiveOP (talk) 19:49, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

After revising the article, there's only two top-of-page maintenance tag issues remaining: one for the article itself maybe not meeting the general notability guideline, and one for the sources having questionable reliability. I think we can probably remove the source-reliability one at this point; everything that's left appears to at least facially pass the reliability test. The general notability guideline is topic based, and says that "A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject." The main sticking point on this issue would be whether the coverage cognitive warfare has received meets the "significant" bar. I think it arguably does, though it's maybe a bit questionable whether it does so from sufficiently independent sources (e.g. the major sources that appear to discuss cognitive warfare appear to be mostly military entities and defense academia) but I don't think that's enough to suggest it fails the GNG bar. As such, I'm going to remove those two maintenance tags, but if someone disagrees with my assessment there they're more than welcome to revert away. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 20:26, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Major article cleanup

This article needed cleanup: lots of sources to unreliable sources, full of synthesis, non-neutral language, and fringe theories. I've done a significant cleanup effort which can be summarized as follows:

• Removed all claims and references sourced solely to Gary Bonick JR. This person appears to lack any recognized expertise in the field, and these were overwhelmingly sourced to a self-published e-book; thus failing to meet the reliability standard.
• Attributed almost all claims sourced solely to Masakowski, and rewritten to not be in wiki-voice. Whether Masakowski qualifies as an expert in the field is debatable -- for the sake of this article I operated under the assumption that she is, and thus that her Youtube video constitutes an expert SPS -- however, her claims cannot be used in wikivoice as there is no indication they are broadly representative of anything but her own opinion.
• Maintenance tagged most claims by Masakowski as needing verification (they link to a Youtube video without timestamps) and as requiring better sourcing (in general, a youtube video is a poor source even for an SPS as it lacks the traditional indicia of reliability.
• Removed a number of claims that were not directly supported by their source. Per WP:V, WP:SYNTH, and WP:RS, sources need to be *directly* applicable to the claims made
• Removed a significant amount of synthesis. See above explanation.
• Removed entire history section tangent about SCL, Cambridge Analytica and the U.S. presidential elections. Not one of those sources make any reference to cognitive warfare; this is a textbook WP:SYNTH violation and a massive neutrality issue.
• Rewrote section on "Cognitive warfare weaponry" -- inappropriate tone, as there are no "weapons" used; this is masking language that makes the article more difficult to understand. It's referring to data.
• Copyediting, mostly combining sentences, decapitalizations
• Page moved from Cognitive Warfare to Cognitive warfare in accordance with our capitalization practices.

There's probably more but that's the high points. Issues that still remain:

• Concerning over-reliance on Masakowski, and questions about her qualification as an expert
• Better sourcing than Paolo Ruggiero's statements -- same concerns about Masakowski and
• Better sourcing than the RigaDialogue video, which frequently veered into WP:SYNTH territory in the article.

In any event, it looks like there's just barely enough meat here after cleaning up, that it would survive an XfD so I'm not nominating it, but there's still a lot of work left to be done. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 16:39, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you so much, @Swatjester – this article is now easier for a non-expert to read and evaluate against our notability and verifiability criteria. ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · contribs · email) 23:42, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

On References and in-line citations

This article seems to flip flop between the wiki standard of superscript references and more "academic publishing" style (ex. Author, 2005) without then providing direct references.

What is the procedure here? Are bracketed refs without links allowable/acceptable?

This article also seems to suffer from 'reference clustering' where a bunch of refs are inserted at the front or end of the paragraph and in between are numerous bold statements without direct references, making it difficult for the reader to connect the statement to the reference it links to. What is the guidance on that?

I'm trying to tidy this article up, but I don't want to be disruptive by taking out huge chunks of (what seems to me) unsourced info if it actually is sourced but the reference isn't closely placed. maryshelagh (talk) 07:40, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

Also, much of the most recently added content seems to come from users as part of a class project, and their references are mostly in Chinese. Not an issue in itself imo, but how would I go about verifying them? maryshelagh (talk) 08:03, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

You can use machine translation (Google Translate or -- and I rarely advocate this but in this one limited use case it works well -- Chatgpt) to verify if the text looks close enough. If you're aware of a better English language source generally replace it and use that instead. If you're not aware of one, you can tag it with an in-line maintenance tag. Templates like {{better source needed}}, {{Verify source}}, {{Request quotation}}, {{Unreliable source?}}, {{Additional citation needed}}, {{Globalize inline}}, all potentially can be useful depending on how much information you have to go on. Do keep in mind though that verifiability alone doesn't guarantee inclusion. Per our policies: While information must be verifiable for inclusion in an article, not all verifiable information must be included. Consensus may determine that certain information does not improve an article, and other policies may indicate that the material is inappropriate. Such information should be omitted or presented instead in a different article. The responsibility for achieving consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content. So for example, if after researching you still can't really verify something but it theoretically *is* verifiable, you can still remove it pending discussion, and the responsibility for discussing and gaining consensus then shifts to any future editor who wants to try and reinclude it. Basically as long as you're making good-faith efforts to discuss and work collaboratively with other editors on the article talk page, you shouldn't have to worry about disruption. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 16:27, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the guidance! maryshelagh (talk) 18:02, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

On NPOV/OR

Some of this article seems to stray into non-NPOV and OR.

For example: the section Media literacy and civic engagement seems to seek to recommend a course of action, has some tone issues and sounds prescriptive.

How can we rework this section to portray info as ‘responses to cognitive warfare’ in a more neutral way?

Certain stray lines also veer into NNPOV as well, should they just be yoinked as a matter of course? maryshelagh (talk) 07:44, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

We can start by removing any OR and the non-NPOV sections to begin with. The article was in a decent state before whatever class project came in and frankly made a mess of it; now we have a bizarre hybrid of two completely different stylized articles, one globally and one essentially solely about China. I'd prefer not to revert back to a version prior to the class submissions unless we have to, but maybe the right approach would be to do that and then break down their changes section by section? WP:CONSENSUS applies to classroom editors too -- they can't simply disruptively rewrite an article without discussion. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 17:12, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

I'm comfortable with the idea of a big revert, and then figuring out what needs to come back in. The huge focus on China, while interesting, really gives the overall impression that they are the only nation-state that engages in cognitive warfare in a sustained way, which I think isn't accurate. should the original users be pinged to see if they will improve their sections? This sort of thing isn't quite in my wheelhouse, in the sense that up until now I've done mostly grammar/spelling edits here on wiki and I'm now starting to push myself to learn how to do more. maryshelagh (talk) 16:59, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

I'd say if you're interested in devoting the time to it and especially if it's a learning area you want to engage with, be bold and give it a shot. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 19:24, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

🫡 thanks for your input! I'll try and pick away at it. If you have a moment, would you mind replying to my other topic on this talk page, about references, to give me some clarity on that while I make my attempts? Cheers! maryshelagh (talk) 07:46, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

• I think one major issue (or at least one that I am encountering while trying to read through and copy edit), is that a lot of the sources, and a lot of the article's perspective, is/are Taiwanese. Most (more than half as of this writing) of the sources are in Chinese and are referring (at least mainly) to China's cognitive warfare on Taiwanese citizens, and also on Chinese and perhaps also Hong Kong citizens. Those articles and concepts are hard to translate into a general-purpose article on cognitive warfare. So there's a lot of rambling, a lot of repetition, and a lot of vague claims and "suggestions" that may derive from WP:OR, WP:SYNTH, WP:NPOV, and WP:ESSAY. I don't know what the solution is, and I haven't finished my copyedit yet (because the article is so unbelievably long), but I thought I'd chime in. RipplingRiver (talk) 03:43, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

  Yes, definitely. It very much feels like an article within an article with the amount of focus on Taiwan/CCP. Thanks for your work/copy edits, hopefully we eventually wrangle this beast of a page!! maryshelagh (talk) 02:55, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

Rename section "Actual cases"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we can come up with a more encyclopedic sounding title for this section. Jesse (May the toast be with you.) (talk) 23:20, 20 August 2025 (UTC)

Fixed now. RipplingRiver (talk) 03:47, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

Note on using "the Republic of China" as a designation for Taiwan

I have gone through the article and changed mentions of "Republic of China" (without the "People's" in front of it) to "Taiwan". Even if the designation is spelled out once somewhere in this overlong article, it is too easy for English-speaking readers to confuse "the Republic of China" with the People's Republic of China, and thus mistake it for the wrong country. RipplingRiver (talk) 23:28, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

Merger with Psychological warfare

Merger with Psychological warfare

I struggle to see the difference between these, and to the extent there is a difference, it seems this article could be a section of the other article rather than a separate one, as it is now, because they cover very similar concepts, with a lot of overlapping information. Yet, for how similar the two articles are, there is very little cross-linking between them. Blippy1998 (talk) 17:26, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

searching cw in open-and-closed inverted commas on google scholar yields 3000+ results.
Does the superiority of merging into a section to leaving as two separate articles hinge on the absence of defined, distinctive use of the term "CW"?

eg https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/11/14/assessing-cognitive-warfare/ "For du Cluzel, psychological warfare attempts to change what the target audience thinks,

but Cognitive Warfare aims at shaping how they reason and their resultant behavior."

eg https://www.jstor.org/stable/48873423 "Psychological warfare focuses on the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of human agents

… Cognitive warfare is a concept that has evolved a step beyond psychological warfare, …"

Eg the study, 'A Comparative Study on the Development of the CCP's "Psychological Warfare" and "Cognitive Domain Warfare."', in the wikipedia article.

Even if there's overlapping information, they needn't be merged: CW and PW are not equivalent. FatalSubjectivities (talk) 07:45, 22 April 2026 (UTC)

Overlaps can be removed without merger FatalSubjectivities (talk) 07:46, 22 April 2026 (UTC)

Not merge - however, the article could mention - if there are any wiki-notable pundits that have claimed that "Cognitive warfare is not a thing", or "Cognitive warfare is hardly anything else than another name for Psycological warfare", or similar claims. ~2026-33847-40 (talk) 13:12, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

Merge It's fundamentally the same concept, and should be merged; this is just another think-tank buzzword variation on the exact same concept. The definitions are not actually different. "shaping how they reason and their resultant behavior" is literally the same thing as the lead sentence definition for psychological operations ("Psychological operations (PSYOPs) are military operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their motives and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and large foreign powers.") It's the exact same thing. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 14:32, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

In that case, anyone should consider changing "Psychological warfare" article immediately, so that it says something like

"A similar concept, Cognitive warfare has been defined as shaping how they reason and their resultant behavior ... influence their motives and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior", blah blah.

Be sure to add wiki-notable reference.

When that largely is done (as outlined in this post), then i will most definitely consider changing my "vote" (from "Not merge" to "Merge"). ~2026-33847-40 (talk) 03:23, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

That would be done post-merge. There's no need to do it ahead of the merge discussion closing. And, as a reminder this is not a vote, it's a discussion. It sounds like you're in favor of a merge with the post-merge content in place. Great. The closer should take that into account. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 04:26, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

I'm glad we're finally getting some people in here to discuss. To be clear, when I said "could be a section of the other article", this is indeed exactly what I meant. I don't want to delete this page or the info on it; just deduplicate to the extent that is appropriate and add what is missing, but ultimately consolidate the pages. Obviously I'm in favor of merging but I don't think we should go ahead until we get more discussion on the subject here, ideally from some more folks. To that end, if anyone wants to tag people who've contributed to these articles in the past (if that is appropriate by Wikipedia guidelines), go ahead. Blippy1998 (talk) 04:34, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

yeah? do i accept? Alty of Steel (talk) 23:13, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Oppose merge; these are clearly distinct topics; readers are best served by having these discussed separately, and each of the articles is sufficiently well-developed that a merge isn't warranted for 'short text'. Klbrain (talk) 10:43, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

in my proposal, i wrote that i struggle to see the difference between them; that is, they are not "clearly distinct topics". could you explain please? also, even if they are meaningfully distinct, it's possible that "they cover very similar concepts", as i wrote. (edited to add this underlined section.) Blippy1998 (talk) 22:22, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

"Cognitive informational warfare", probably not needing redirect

No mention on wikipedia, in regard to "Cognitive informational warfare".--The topic seems to have an article today, on this linked media outlet.

(I have not linked the news article, eventhough it might not be an outright book review, in regard to a book from this year.) ~2026-33847-40 (talk) 13:03, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

Proposal to add recent decision-dominance framework

I propose adding a short, neutral sentence on a recent “decision dominance” framework in cognitive warfare. Suggested text: A 2026 issue brief by Rakesh Kumar Singh for the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies proposed a “decision dominance” approach to cognitive warfare, arguing that influence activities should be assessed not only by narrative reach or visibility, but by their effect on perception, behaviour, and decision-making conditions. Suggested citation: Singh, Rakesh Kumar (9 June 2026). "Decision Dominance in Cognitive Warfare: A Framework for the Indian Context". Centre for Joint Warfare Studies. Retrieved 28 June 2026. Reason for inclusion: The article discusses cognitive warfare as a contest over perception, behaviour, and decision-making. This source adds a recent military studies perspective that frames cognitive warfare through decision-making effects rather than narrative reach alone. I am proposing only a short neutral addition, not a separate India-specific section. Rahulp007 (talk) 14:00, 28 June 2026 (UTC)

You already made this edit and were reverted, in fact. Why would we place special emphasis on reporting Singh's opinion, as you suggest here? Are there any independent, secondary sources that indicate some special importance? MrOllie (talk) 17:06, 28 June 2026 (UTC)

Suggested source on cognitive warfare, decision tempo, and open societies

Disclosure: I am one of the authors of the article suggested below, so I am not making a direct edit to the article. I am proposing it here for review by uninvolved editors. I suggest adding one short sentence to the section “Cognitive warfare and information warfare”, where the article already discusses the relationship between cognitive warfare, information warfare, interpretation, and decision-making.

Suggested text: “Recent conceptual-doctrinal work has also framed cognitive warfare less as a struggle for narrative control or information dominance, and more as a contest over decision tempo, strategic orientation, legitimacy, and institutional coherence in open societies.”

Suggested citation: Vaz, Luis; Ferreira, Pedro (2026). "Cognitive Warfare and Strategic Uncertainty: Planning under the Threshold in Open Societies". Bulletin of "Carol I" National Defence University. 15 (2): 229–256. doi:10.53477/2284-9378-26-26.

Reason for inclusion: the article is a peer-reviewed source that contributes to the conceptual/doctrinal discussion of cognitive warfare, especially its relationship to decision-making, institutional orientation, and democratic governance. I am proposing only a short neutral addition, not a new subsection or author-specific discussion. ~2026-39019-06 (talk) 16:21, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

That's just pointing out that the work exists. It doesn't build the article or increase readers understanding. We're not here to just list papers. MrOllie (talk) 16:40, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Thank you — fair point. I agree that the article should not list papers for their own sake.

The improvement I had in mind is a conceptual clarification: cognitive warfare is sometimes framed not only as influence over beliefs or narratives, but as an attempt to affect interpretation, trust, orientation, and decision-making under uncertainty. If editors think this distinction is useful for the section on cognitive warfare and information warfare, the source I suggested could support that point.

I have a conflict of interest as one of the authors, so I will not edit the page directly. ~2026-39019-06 (talk) 10:07, 15 July 2026 (UTC)