How Many Hoaxes Are On Wikipedia? No One Knows 186
An anonymous reader writes The Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey has written a lengthy feature covering one of Wikipedia's most intractable problems: carefully inserted hoax information that is almost impossible to detect. Dewey's investigation starts with the recent discovery of the nonexistent Australian god "Jar'Edo Wens" (which lasted almost ten years), and discusses a Wikipediocracy post about a recent experiment by critic Greg Kohs, in which 30 articles received cleverly-chosen minor falsehoods. More than half survived for more than two months. Included is also a chart showing that editing participation in Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007. It is quite rare to see a feature in a major media outlet as critical as this, of Wikipedia and its little-known internal problems. Especially on the heels of a very favorable CBS 60 Minutes report. As Kohs says, "I think this has proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it's not fair to say Wikipedia is 'self-correcting.'"
Any other examples that anyone's spotted? (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be interesting to see them compare to other sources.
Re:Any other examples that anyone's spotted? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Any other examples that anyone's spotted? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia's problem is the Napoleon problem - there are a bunch of self-important "editors" who want to exercise extreme control over everything so you get a lot of people who would contribute who are just turned off by the political factors involved in editing Wikipedia.
Wikipedia created this problem for itself, and now they are learning that they won't get people involved or to donate when they are treated poorly.
Re:Any other examples that anyone's spotted? (Score:4, Interesting)
articles received cleverly-chosen minor falsehoods. More than half survived for more than two months
Ahh, my work has been successful then.
I'm one of the people who adds innocuous misinformation to various Wikipedia articles. I used to contribute large amounts in a positive and factual way, but with all of my experiences with control freak dick mods/admins or random idiots who think they own articles reverting or fighting almost every single one of my legit edits, I have taken to poisoning the site.
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There actually is no word for it in my language
There is now.
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That's the major problem why Wikipedia is pure shit.
There have been dozens of articles I've edited to fix misspelled words, missing punctuation, etc.
Then seconds later my edit gets reverted.
Even though they allow "anonymous" edits to articles. I posted on talk page and got told if you want your edit to stay you have to register an account and not edit anonymously.
I asked then why do you allow anonymous edits? Plus wikipedia advertises that it allows anyone to anonymously edit as a group collective project.
b
Re:Any other examples that anyone's spotted? (Score:4, Interesting)
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But how many of the entries on that page are hoaxes about being hoaxes?
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But how many of the entries on that page are hoaxes about being hoaxes?
Much like the turtles, it's hoaxes all the way down.
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All of the pages to do with organised religion are hoaxes. Religion is a con.
Why bother with other sources? (Score:3)
...."I think this has proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it's not fair to say Wikipedia is 'self-correcting.'"
It's fair to say Wikipedia is self-reenforcing and subtlety is lost.
To me, Wikipedia is a cult - you can keep sending them money, contributing to their belief system, and you can never leave (I'm serious, they have no way to delete an account)
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(I'm serious, they have no way to delete an account)
There are technical reasons for it, but if you really want to clear your history of editing you can always do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It is not a sign of a cult.
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The "technical reasons" are bunk. It's a computer system, anything is possible if you have the desire to make it so.
...Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007... (Score:4, Insightful)
... Included is also a chart showing that editing participation in Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007 ...
As Kohs says, "I think this has proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it's not fair to say Wikipedia is 'self-correcting.'"...
I could have told you that, and have been telling you that.
.
The big problem with Wikipedia is that in spite of what the publicity says, it is only a small number of people who contribute, and a surprisingly large number of those people have an agenda for what they edit.
imo, with Wikipedia, truth is not the goal. A certain point of view is the goal.
Re:...Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007... (Score:5, Funny)
Woo-hoo! Slashdot beat Wikipedia. Slashdot didn't atrophy until 18 Sept. 2012 [slashdot.org].
Re:...Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007... (Score:4, Insightful)
Technical subjects usually have quite clear and correct wikipedia pages. As soon as politics enter it wikipedia is not reliable.
Re:...Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007... (Score:4, Insightful)
As soon as politics enter it, nothing is reliable.
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Re:...Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Never is almost always wrong.
For example, the wiki page on lenses [wikipedia.org]. I think it is quite clear. It offers examples, formulas and the way of thinking when calculating a lens.
Do you feel that that is jargonated? Is the notation obscure?
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Every time I try to make major improvements to articles on something I'm expert in, those edits are reverted as being original work. If it's something I actually care about, what I have to do is create a blog entry that covers the topic. Then I put the text I originally wanted into Wikipedia, citing myself. That makes it all fine.
For bonus fun, after going through this you then change the original blog entry to say something different.
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If you can break something down into simple elements and that works out, the thing wasn't really complex after all. Claiming otherwise is fundamentally misunderstanding the concept of complexity.
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AC is 12 and hasn't found his level of incompetence yet. Hence _everything_ is simple to him.
Most /.ers should remember what that was like.
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Nope; some subjects are simply hard. I understand very well how to show that SAT (a logical consistency problem) is NP-complete, and can explain it in about an hour, using visual aids, to somebody who's reasonably proficient with algorithmic complexity and Turing machines. I've observed that I can get two types of explanations of General Relativity: those that include a lot of hand-waving, and those that include a lot of tensors. I do suspect that some people have a firm grasp on at least the basics, a
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As soon as politics enter, no source is ever reliable.
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Truth is explicitly off the table on Wikipedia
Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth [wikipedia.org]
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The "Verifiability" policy hinges on the definition of "reliable sources". On Wikipedia, that overwhelmingly means "Newspapers" and "News websites". You can take the rest from there.
Outright falsehood can and will be published on Wikipedia as long as they are told by "reputable sources".
Meh, I just write what I want, then I Google for a book title that looks related and add that ISBN number as a source.
It's not like someone will buy every book listed as a source and read through only to find out that the book never says anything about the subject.
"Verifiability" doesn't mean that it is practical to verify, just that it is technically possible.
Interestingly enough they don't allow original research, so testing something yourself and providing a method for others to repeat the experiment isn
Re:...Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007... (Score:5, Funny)
Two classics. :)
1.Proof by ghost reference:
Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the reference given.
2. Proof by reference to inaccessible literature:
The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883.
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The best though is the self-generating reference. Wikipedia article goes up, magazine publishes article using Wikipedia. Said article is used as a citation to satisfy [citation needed].
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Re:...Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more a case of editors selecting the sources that confirm their point of view, and attacking the ones that don't as either not reliable enough or by relegating them to an opposing view footnote somewhere.
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Short version: Man is added to Wikipedia with wrong name. While he tries to get it changed, a usually reputable newspaper copies his wrong name from the Wikipedia article. Result: The wrong name can now be verified from a reputable source.
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I gave up editing Wikipedia when it started to ban edits via proxy servers. Forcing editors to give up their anonymity only gives a false sense of confidence they would be more responsible since they now have a "reputation" to protect, even if their real identities are hidden by some lame pseudonym. This weeds out the casual vandals, but not the determined peddler of disinformation or serial practical joker.
Wikipedia's problem with accuracy is a function of its size. It's become far too easy to hide in the
Re:...Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia needs to change how their system works to allow for more collaboration and participation. I'd suggest a system where anyone can propose changes that are collected over a period of time until a group of individuals can work together to create new revisions of an article. Have other teams that are devoted solely to improving the grammar or readability of articles and others that are just looking to fact check the existing information to recommend removal of fallacious information. Perhaps even go so far as to assign people randomly to different teams and articles to mix it up and prevent the same kind of agenda-driven article ownership that we see so often now.
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Exactly. There is too much emphasis on the people as Wikipedia's problem, when in fact it's the software that's the problem. I write about problem of Wikipedia's software design in this blog post [newslines.org], and have implemented the solutions you suggest (randomizing and mixing the editors to avoid the accumulation of power) in Newslines, my crowdsourced news site.
Re:...Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the big problem with Wikipedia is politics. Wikipedia is the reinvention of communism, and it's proceeding just like Animal Farm and other Communist nations down the path to failure.
Heck, it's already at the "Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others" stage.
That's the main problem - you have editors and higher ups who now patrol their part of Wikipedia who are not interested in the truth, correctness or other aspects - just in having little power struggles. Heck, for a time there were massive parts being deleted for arbitrary reasons (usually along the lines of "this content is not suitable for Wikipedia" despite having plenty of similar content around). And these days, well, edit-reversions by the same power-mad editors have basically rendered any reason to edit it moot.
I mean, there's a small amount of contributors because everyone else got driven away. Try to fix a mistake and you'll et into an edit war with an editor who thinks their interpretation is completely correct even if it's obviously wrong.
Yes, it's an encyclopedia anyone can edit. Except that if you do so, chances are someone will revert it in a few minutes because they don't agree with what you edited, even if all you did was fix an error. "Everyone has equal edit rights, but some people have more equal edit rights".
The study of Wikipedia itself is quite fascinating, no many times you get to see political ideology put into play and see the results. Usually you end up with people getting hurt or humanitarian crises if you try to experiment.
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Personally, I found a few things I wanted to correct, corrected them, and then didn't continue, because the things I wanted fixed either stayed fixed (not necessarily with my words), or my edits reverted in a way that suggests that putting them in again would be futile. A few years ago, I made another edit, and watched it be immediately improved. My experience has been positive, but I've mostly avoided hot topics (cf. my reversion comment above).
So what? (Score:2, Informative)
1 - publish false claims on wikipedia about about things that matter to people and see if they still go unnoticed for 10 years. ("Sir Anonymous Coward, the inventor of world wide web")
2 - I could write a book with nothing but false information in it and publish it (so long as there is a publisher willing to do so), it would be up the readers to decide to trust my book or fact check it. I know of one that such book that has gone unnoticed for a couple thousand years
wikipedia is self-correcting (Score:5, Insightful)
pointing to corrections that haven't been done yet doesn't mean anything. if something is obscure and unimportant it can persist for years, with no impact. and then it's corrected. if it's important, it will probably be corrected in days or minutes
can anyone point to any other media that this isn't true about? (i'm not talking about corrections, that may never be made, simply that all media has a backlog of errors that need correcting)
and questioning wikipedia's veracity, alone, has no value
judge it against other options and their veracity
the traditional encyclopedia is subject to the editorial whims of professionals, and professionals can have agendas and are not automatically superior to a mass of impartial folk. emphasis on "mass." as thousands of editors, even if there's been a drop in participation, is superior to an overworked few with questionable biases
and please note we're talking about brief introductions to topics, not deep dives into esoteric academic specialties. wikipedia is never intended as a replacement for serious texts on topics. and if someone is relying on wikipedia alone for vital topics, that's the reader's fault, not wikipedia
wikipedia's innate superiority is the same reason we have juries instead of professional judges. professional judges can start deciding cases based on having something to prove: "i'm finding this guy guilty because i made the previous guy innocent" or "this guy is clearly innocent, but it's important to send a message, so i'm finding him guilty"
certainly, a million examples of bad juries can be found. we can find problems with the jury system that are truly horrible
as if that means anything. because all other options are worse
this is classic form of propaganda, half-truth, cognitive fallacy: criticism in a vacuum
outside of the context of other choices, anything can be made to look like shit
for example, we can criticize all sort so problems with democracy. there are many problems with democracy and they are real and major. it's just that our other options are clearly worse
likewise with wikipedia: you can list thousands of things wrong with wikipedia, some truly horrendous
but it's still superior to what came before and other current options
Re:wikipedia is self-correcting (Score:4, Interesting)
What you say is only true if lots of people can participate equally. Wikipedia has a lot of cliques and groups with agendas where editors support each other to promote a particular view or bias, so it's just as bad or worse than having a single editor writing the material.
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pointing to corrections that haven't been done yet doesn't mean anything. if something is obscure and unimportant it can persist for years, with no impact. and then it's corrected. if it's important, it will probably be corrected in days or minutes
The vandalism saying that pain from inflammation is caused by rhyolite, a volcanic rock that the body produces, lasted for over 6 weeks, toward the top of an article that got over 100,000 page views in that time period. Nine different subsequent editors modified the article, but none of them thought to question volcanic stone in the human physiology. I'm convinced that had I not terminated the experiment and reported on it at Wikipediocracy, that misinformation would have persisted still longer. Your cri
Caveat Emptor (Score:2)
With wikipedia, you get what you pay for.
What good is a source of truth if it's not accurate?
Wikipedia was not meant as an existential discussion on the meaning of truth; it was meant as a crowdsourced source of truth. What details do you consider important or unimportant? Why would one detail be not worth correcting?
The last thing I read about faking information on wikipedia was some life detail about an author - that even her relatives believed! It wasn't important, except that it was.
If Wikipedia cared,
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There's a sampling bias issue if you fairly compare the site to a print encyclopedia. Encyclopedia editors have a job where they write about everything. On average, they'll have little personal connection to the articles they write. That's even part of the job description--the less biased you are, the more your writing will be judged as positive by that industry.
The universe of Wikipedia editors is self-selected. The people going to the trouble of editing.things is strongly correlated with people who ha
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But it uses all of them, which makes it easier to spot errors, discrepancies, and agendas, which can then be the focus of additional investigation.
Poor soul thinks that Wikipedia editors actually "investigate" content with the intent of spotting errors, discrepancies, and agendas. News flash: most Wikipedia editors "challenge" content with the intent of inserting their own agendas. Period.
As opposed to people who complain about wikipedia can can't possibly have agendas?
Color me skeptical when various political factions are consistently complaining that "the media" is against them.
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(don't remember why...)
Because you wanted to see how long your edit would last? You slay you...somebody should.
"Wikopediocracy" (Score:3)
Maybe it should be "Wikopidiocracy"? TFTFY
Wikipedia is convenient, not accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
.
It is easy to use Wikipedia,
It is that ease to use, rather than accuracy, that has made Wikipedia as popular as it is.
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The popularity of Wikipedia is due more to the convenience of citing an article in it, and not necessarily the accuracy of those articles.
This. Wikipedia is a great starting point for research, but it should not be the end point.
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My opinion was always that Wikipedia should be treated as a single interview with an expert in a field. It is generally accurate, but almost certainly wrong on a few details, that other unrelated sources should be used to verify.
From that perspective, it's certainly a good starting point for learning about the "unknown unknowns" in a field, and getting a path for further study. It might even be suitable as the main source for a select few kinds of research.
Duh (Score:2)
This is basically crowd sourced media in general. The great achievement of web 2.0 is that PR companies etc can now pretend to be 'the people' while feeding us with the messages they want to broadcast. I find this very dishonest. At least when Scarlett Johansson tells me I should buy a soda stream on TV I'm not sitting there wondering if she is actually an expert in carbonated beverages and should be trusted.
For a master class in how ridiculous it is, just go read any comment page on the Guardian associated
Wikipedia has exactly one problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, you can get into revision wars over whether to use the word "which" or "that" in a given context; but fixing a factual error? Good luck!
"Citation needed!"
"But the old, wrong version didn't have a cite either."
"Doesn't matter, it stays, and my minimum wage burger flipping ass has just banned you for daring to challenge me, you pompous PhD-wielding expert in this particular field!"
Re:Wikipedia has exactly one problem... (Score:5, Funny)
..."burger flipping ass has just banned you for daring to challenge me, you pompous PhD-wielding expert"...
Burger-flipping and PhD aren't mutually exclusive.
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Wait just a god damn second. Are you claiming you know professors that _work_ full time?
I'm incredulous.
Re:Wikipedia has exactly one problem... (Score:4, Interesting)
Norman Wisdom (Score:2)
A few years prior to his death, I was looking up some obscure entry to be startled to discover that Norman Wisdom, a nonagenarian British comedian, was alleged to have invented a key device referenced within the article. Corrected and thought no more.
However, someone had big plans for Norman, as after his death, similar sets of spurious facts had been seeded all over Wikipedia, some making it to his published obituaries - see
http://www.theguardian.com/media/mediamonkeyblog/2010/oct/05/norman-wisdom-wikiped [theguardian.com]
Two Important Reasons. (Score:5, Funny)
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Wikipedia has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
Actually 3 reasons (Score:2)
You missed the third and most important reason in TFA
Yorhmum
Nothing New (Score:3)
I know of at least one hoax from the 80's, invented for local political purposes, that made the local papers, got a memorial built to it, and now appears in several web pages and at least one documentary as fact, with all kinds of made-up details filled in. No Wikipedia page yet, but I'm sure that eventually will come.
And I guess most people here are too young to remember how seriously UFO's and Bigfoot used to be treated back in the 70's.
The only thing really special about hoaxes appearing on Wikipedia is that they can get thoroughly debunked when/if they get found out, and this is much more likely to happen with enough eyes on the issue. Without a user-maintained knowledge base, hoaxes used to be pretty much unkillable.
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The internet is a great thing for hoaxes, just because they spread so fast. My favorites all exploit some form of social, religious or political confirmation bias - they spread because people read them and assume they must be true because they reenforce what they already believe. Like the story of how the Plymouth colony was almost destroyed by an attempt to practice a communist economy leading to mass-starvation until the reintroduction of private property saved everyone, or any one of the many free-energy
Encyclopedias are not prescriptive (Score:2)
I think as a society we need to maintain paid content reviewers for a competitor to Wikipedia. Field experts who aren't doing it for power or to push a POV but because someone is paying them to fact-check. I'm not e
It's the citing of hoaxes that's a bigger concern (Score:4, Informative)
If people want to monkey with Wikipedia, have at it. We're told over and over again that Wikipedia is not a suitable reference; however the references on the page can sometime be useful.
And then there's http://www.dailydot.com/lol/am... [dailydot.com]
The person in the story inserted a little fake factoid into an otherwise proper article. This little factoid ended up very quickly
- cited in a lesson plan by a Taiwanese English professor
- cited in a book about Jews and Jesus
- cited in innumerable blog posts and book reports, as well as a piece by blogger Hanny Hernandez, who speculated that Amelia Bedelia’s tendency toward malapropisms was inspired by Parish’s experiences in Cameroon, as “several messages can be
misinterpreted between a Cameroonian maid who is serving an American family.” One blogger even speculated that Amelia Bedelia wasn’t a maid, but a slave.
- cited in the Amelia Bedelia entry on the website TV Tropes and Idioms, and Peggy Parish’s Find-A-Grave page
- cited by Mr. Amelia Bedelia himself: Herman Parish, Peggy’s nephew and author of the books after his aunt passed away in 1988, who apparently told a reporter from the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier that his aunt based “the lead character on a French colonial
maid in Cameroon.”
Once again, Wikipedia can be a useful overview of a subject and a launch-pad for further research. But after all these years of Wikipedia hoaxes (and Wikipedia maintains a list of hoaxes; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... [wikipedia.org]), the mantra must be "trust but verify".
Because, in Wikipedia's own words:
Misinformation on Wikipedia misleads readers, causing them to make errors with real consequences, including hurt feelings, public embarrassment, reprints of books, lost points on school assignments, and other costs. With some articles, like medical topics, they could lead to injury or death.
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The Bhutanese Passport hoaxer, by the way, also worked on other "projects" [wikipediocracy.com] that promptly infected Google's "Knowledge Vault", like all these Wikipedia hoaxes do.
Some of these hoaxes have entered academic literature [wikipediocracy.com]. In such cases, Wikipedia actually destroys knowledge.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
As opposed to what, exactly? (Score:3, Insightful)
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What source of information is flawless and can be believed without question? Why do people exhibit good critical thinking skills when it comes to Wikipedia, but swallow wholesale what they get from Encyclopedia Britannica, CNN, Fox News, the Bible, etc?
Perhaps because those others tell them to believe, while Wikipedia tells them *not* to believe, but think critically? Compare:
http://www.newyorker.com/humor... [newyorker.com]
http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
http://www.gotquestions.org/Bi... [gotquestions.org]
to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Truth (Score:2)
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You're not quite right about the molecular printers. To forge historical artifacts needs molecular printers that can also print in defined isotopic ratios. Alternatively you could disassemble an artifact of similar composition from the desired location and date and reuse the material.
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Two months eh? (Score:3)
When I was in grade school I was taught that the speed of sound increased with density. The examples were air, water and steel.
Actually, the speed of sound goes *down* with density, for the obvious reason that there's more atoms to get through. It goes up with springiness, which transmits the motion more rapidly. The science textbook from school simply selected three examples where the later was true - steel is much springier than air.
This utterly wrong "fact" is still being taught today.
The wiki took two weeks to correct carefully hidden wrong information? I'm supposed to be worried about this?
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I'm supposed to be worried about this?
Kinda know the feeling. When I was 7 I drew a picture of a dog in a space capsule. The teacher said that dogs haven't gone to space.
It was a little early in life to conclude that teachers can't be trusted. Sigh.
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Actually, the speed of sound in air is independent of density and instead varies with temperature. Feynman covered that in one of his lectures.
Is self-correcting (Score:2)
I dunno . . . more than half of "cleverly-chosen minor falsehoods" inserted into 30 articles are corrected within 2 months? That sounds more like **is** self-correcting than **is not**.
Nothing is perfectly self-correcting and that holds up here, too. But through the mid-2000s we kept a shelf full of encyclopedias dating from the 1980s or so. I'm pretty sure that thing was packed with various bits of incorrect, erroneous, outdated, and incomplete information, and strangely enough, not one snippet of it ev
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In my house we had a set of encyclopedias from around 1952, the year my mom was born, plus about ten addenda for the years 1953-1962. In 1988 I needed to do a report on nuclear power plants, and was first confused and then very amused when I realized my encyclopedia didn't even have an entry for those things. It was one of the first times the encyclopedia had completely failed me.
I do suppose the addenda made it partially self-correcting.
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At least one school I know of still has some encyclopedias still predating the fall of the soviet union. There's no reason to replace them, because no-one ever reads them.
Hoax levels are exaggerated (Score:2)
On the rare occasions that a "hoax" article such as "Jar'Edo Wens" stays around, it's because no one is visiting it.
No visits means it wasn't actually fooling anyone, so there was no hoax. It was just a dusty page, so dead and forgotten that no one had even thought of tagging it for deletion yet.
Truth is that there are very few people in the world who will bother inserting 30 hoax factoids into Wikipedia, and most people that try would get spotted quickly. It's very easy to spot suspicious contributors, a
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On the rare occasions that a "hoax" article such as "Jar'Edo Wens" stays around, it's because no one is visiting it.
No visits means it wasn't actually fooling anyone, so there was no hoax. It was just a dusty page, so dead and forgotten that no one had even thought of tagging it for deletion yet.
Truth is that there are very few people in the world who will bother inserting 30 hoax factoids into Wikipedia, and most people that try would get spotted quickly. It's very easy to spot suspicious contributors, and once you do then it's easy to check their other contributors.
Some of the misinformation that I inserted in the experiment was persisting on pages that got tens of thousands of page views. Granted, not every page-viewing session means that the specific misinformation will be read and cognitively evaluated by the reader, but let's just say that even 5% of page views led to a reader acquiring the misinformation. This still means that little old me was able to misinform a few thousand readers with an experiment that took me about four or five hours to set up. Had I no
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Your guesses and theories about "intake of knowledge" are waaay off.
Thing is, wrong info is only likely to stay wrong if it gets no attention. Change Hugo Chavez's date of birth and it will be fixed in 2 minutes. Change the date of the marriage of one of his kids and then you have a chance of a lasting "hoax". The article about his kid might get a few thousand hits, but few reads and no one cares about the date of the kid's marriage. Your guess: "Bwaa hahah, thousands of people are convinced Ramon Chave
you "systematically" set it up for one outcome (Score:2)
No one knows if you made 30 or 500 edits. Or if twenty previous tests were flops. (To do it properly, you should have informed someone before doing the test.)
And then you chose which pages and which facts to edit. (With a clear interest in these changes going unnoticed.)
No one knows how selective you're being in these posts which feed your business's interests.
There is nothing reliable, scientific, or objective about your tests.
Now you're caught (Score:2)
Now you're caught.
I checked the history of the page where you wrote about sacrificed Welsh Corgis: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind... [wikipedia.org]
The last time anyone contributed to the information content of that article was a minor edit in December 2012! The edits since then are to add or remove spam or vandalism.
You've proven my point: your silly edits only last if you stick them in an article that's getting no attention.
Moreover, the repeated spam removal edits show that even an article that no one is working on sti
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I'm pointing out that you're not worth listening to.
I won't go through each of your 30 silly edits, but ok, I'll look at one more.
You brag that the Newcastle upon Tyne article is "whoppingly" active. Your silly edit was: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind... [wikipedia.org]
Your misinformation is line 404. In this sentence:
"The nearest weather station to provide sunshine statistics is at Durham, about 14 miles to the South of Newcastle City Centre."
You changed "South" to "northwest". What's your point? Do you think 5% of re
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> Good luck in life! Sounds like you have a really
> pleasant relationship with a special someone!
Said the guy who spends his weekends looking for the most uninteresting paragraphs of Wikipedia so he can make edits no one will care about. And then blogs about it. :-p
Learn how to use Wikipedia ... (Score:3)
Yes, there are pitfalls to using the Wikipedia. Many of those pitfalls can be avoided if you know how to use it. Examples include examining the history page, which is available for each article. It will give you an idea of the maturity of the article, if certain details are under contention, and whether something is likely to be a hoax or agenda driven. In many cases, sources are provided. Examine those sources. Determine whether the sources are reliable, and have been interpreted in a reasonable manner.
Oddly enough, people question the Wikipedia when it gives more information about the providence of the writing and content than virtually any other source, yet people insist upon making blanket statements about how unreliable it is. All that really says is that people want an authoritative source rather than a verifiable source. They want someone to tell them what is "true" rather than giving them the tools to assess what they are reading. That is dangerous, because it is far too easy to put yourself in a bubble of misinformation by choosing inaccurate sources that cannot be assessed.
Re:Learn how to use Wikipedia ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oddly enough, people question the Wikipedia when it gives more information about the providence of the writing and content than virtually any other source, yet people insist upon making blanket statements about how unreliable it is. All that really says is that people want an authoritative source rather than a verifiable source. They want someone to tell them what is "true" rather than giving them the tools to assess what they are reading.
I get tired of reading apologetics for Wikipedia that present false dichotomies.
"Oh... but things used to be so much worse with other sources which were so bad and evil and... so be grateful for the crap that is Wikipedia today!!"
Nonsense.
Look, just because other things may have been bad or worse in some ways doesn't mean we should accept the stupidity that is Wikipedia.
For example -- there are already vetting processes in place (somewhat) for getting articles approved on Wikipedia as having "good" status, etc. These review processes generally involve doing such things as checking to see sources actually correspond to what's in the article, etc.
Here's the obvious question -- why not actually create "stable" version of "good" articles, and have that be the default page for that article? Make it so such articles can no longer be edited directly -- instead, anonymous editors and random users can edit an "unstable" or "testing" or whatever version of a page that can be easily accessed through a tab (like the talk and history pages, etc. can be now). Periodically an established editor can clean up such proposed edits and migrate the good ones to the "stable" page.
Ideally, approved edits to the stable page should be approved by a consensus of editors for that particular page, some of whom may actually be experts in a subject. I know a LOT of academics who spent a little time here or there and tried to edit Wikipedia, because they actually would like to see it made better, but they get driven away by the politics and bureaucratic nonsense. What if we could actually get them involved? What if they could actually be verified and help to determine what makes it into the "stable" versions of articles that they actually know something about... you know, like old-style encyclopedias used to.
But there could always be checks and balances -- edits need to be approved by 2 or 3 editors with an appropriate level of "clearance" for that page, for example. There are many ways of working out the exact details, but something like this could raise the quality level of central articles significantly -- those stubs on the fringes can still operate as the "wild west" where anybody can edit the live page until someone creates a stable good version.
You don't need to give away authority completely to experts -- have mixtures of experts and other editorial staff able to approve edits. You don't need to lose the tracking information. In fact, you get even MORE tracking information, and you get a "sandbox" for stable pages for better versions to be worked out and incorporated into existing articles.
Or whatever. I don't claim to have all the answers. But I do know that there are serious and legitimate criticisms of Wikipedia's model, and some aspects are just going to get worse (and some have been for some time). Anonymous "wild west style" editing for just about anything was a great way to crowdsouce and build a resource... but it's time to hone this into something better, and that requires people with real skills: subject matter experts, experts in editing, etc.
We should never shut the contributions from crowdsourcing out -- but we can still improve the Wikipedia model while not falling back onto old crappy models either.
Too many fiefdoms (Score:3)
The problem is that there are a few, very active, and very stubborn power users that know how to use Wikipedia and navigate it's internal processes. They posses incredible power to make all their favorite articles conform to their own vision.
Every time I go to edit something, it immediately gets reverted by a major contributor, who cites some rule or process that is described on a page I've never seen before and don't know how to find.
Wikipedia should just stop with the charade. They should stop saying it's open to everyone. It's more like an open source project that only accepts edits from it's developers.
Wikipedia's biggest problem is the brain drain. They're no longer relying on the wisdom of the masses. In this case, if you get a prankster who puts in the time to get some Wikipedia cred, then they can put in pretty much any hoax they want.
How many? Well, there's one more now. (Score:2)
I used to hoax Conservapedia. (Score:2)
Until I found the entirely-serious non-hoax article claiming that most of the leading Nazi party members were gay, and the holocaust was actually the homosexual agenda's plan to exterminate the jews for refusing to accept their sinful nature. That's when I realised that nothing I could possibly make up would be one-tenth as silly as what they actually believe.
Self-fulfilling prophecies (Score:5, Interesting)
The Coati (a small member of the raccoon family native to Brazil) is also known as the Brazillian aardvark. The reason that it's known as the Brazillian aadvark is that someone made the phrase up and added it to Wikipedia - but the coinage gained traction, because journalists copied it, and this led to a citation for that name being added to the article. Now wikipedia is in a quandary... there are, thanks to lazy journalists, people who know the coati as the Brazillian aardvark, because they read that in a newspaper... so is the hoax now true?
Does it become true if the dord of references to that name reaches a certain level?
Does it become false even though people do use the term, just because the etymology of the word was a hoax?
Re: (Score:2)
new age germophobes (Score:3)
This is the same old elitist bullshit being smuggled out through the back door.
Fundamentally, there are a lot of people out there who don't want Wikipedia to be part of the answer. Whatever standard Wikipedia achieves, the bar is raised at least a hook higher.
I was brought up with "Gerry Germ". This is how insanity was introduced into my grade three class back in the 1970s.
Some of my unfortunate classmates probably grew up to become the adults who try to spray the entire world with 99.9% germicidal carcinogens. Aside from the shocking innumeracy (readily vaccinated in just five inquisitive minutes wielding your dad's miraculous eight-digit calculator, during which one discovers the small difference between zero point zero repeating and 0.001 as multiplicands), there are about six other layers of illiteracy here. We have subsequently learned that our own bodies are outnumbered 10 to 1 (if you count cells) or 100 to 1 (if you count genes) by our personal Gerry Germ symbiotes.
Nevertheless, we continue to hold wacky beliefs about our standards of personal hygiene, and absolutely ludicrous beliefs about what we ingest or acquire from the external environment. Yet somehow we live.
The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of information we encounter in daily living has never been up to to the germ-free standards of my grade three Gerry Germ indoctrination.
Common sense is the human ability to walk past something yummy that's being lying on the sidewalk for an hour that you just stepping on, and not licking it off the bottom of your shoe.
Yet with information about the world, the idea is that the ignorant and uniformed are just going to stick any piece of information into their mouth that they pass by, so all information in the world needs to be currated by food-safety professionals (aka all the authors dripping with expertise and credentials who might have succeeded in authoring Nupedia before the heat-death of the local universe).
Fundamentally the reason that this cloaked nonsense in Wikipedia is lying there undetected is that it's almost entirely immaterial. If a person holds a transient belief in the Australian god Poopoocaca, how much does that affect this year's RRSP contribution level? About 0.00000001 times as much as the five minutes with dad's expensive 8-digit calculator they unfortunately bypassed as a young child.
And you know what? The lunacies these people believe make 99.9% of the content on Wikipedia look like an oasis of sanity by comparison.
Wikipedia needs to bump that up to 99.99% exactly as badly as the germicidal soap in my bathroom needs to bump itself up to a 99.99% bacterial kill rate. As if the human condition is nothing but 1000 lb sand-dampened power supplies with a -100 dB bullshit noise floor at 60 Hz.
Now if I can just find an industrial-strength soap (so far recognized as safe [fda.gov]) to rid me tout sweet of all the preening assholes from which this elitist crap originates in the first place, I might start clicking the "buy" button.
Re: (Score:2)
I have to agree. The experiment cited modified 30 articles with minor and cleverly-chosen falsehoods, and more than half were fixed within two months.
From that, Kohs then claims, "I think this has proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it's not fair to say Wikipedia is 'self-correcting.'"
Um, WTF? That statement proves he's not very good at making accurate statements. If he added a time period to that, and maybe some disclaimer about the popularity of articles being modified, then it wouldn't be much of a p
Re:Sounds like it's working to me (Score:4, Informative)
I have to agree. The experiment cited modified 30 articles with minor and cleverly-chosen falsehoods, and more than half were fixed within two months.
From that, Kohs then claims, "I think this has proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it's not fair to say Wikipedia is 'self-correcting.'"
Um, WTF? That statement proves he's not very good at making accurate statements. If he added a time period to that, and maybe some disclaimer about the popularity of articles being modified, then it wouldn't be much of a point, but it'd be closer to true.
You conveniently leave out that Kohs himself (that's me) reverted 6 of the false edits himself, when it became clear after more than 45 days that nobody else was likely to do it anytime soon.
You're also being rather unfair to say that Kohs' statement -- a sound-bite that the Washington Post journalist selected from a lengthy telephone interview -- which you then rip away from the context of the article, "proves" that I'm not good at making accurate statements. Why don't you peruse the actual spreadsheet of the 30 articles, which speaks for itself on my ability to convey accurate information?
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The amount of truth out ways it by the magnitude of a galaxy !
Sounds like Wikipedia is an appropriate reference source for someone of your capacity.
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Re: (Score:2)
It would appear that you're another of the judgmental types who have formed an opinion -- and a strong one at that -- without access to most of the facts.
For example, I didn't "try to start" a business, I actually started one. And it continues to serve clients today, nearly nine years later. What percentage of 2006 start-ups do you think are still open for business today? The practice of writing content in exchange for clients' payment was not "rejected by Wikipedia". Indeed, the practical justificati
Re: (Score:2)
>Wales dictated that "interwiki transclusion" links that included thousands of links to his for-profit enterprise Wikia site, should be "do follow",
I am interested in this. Do you have a citation?
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. Once you realise why you reject all other gods... etc.
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Wikipedia is not intended as a citable source. Instead, a Wikipedia article is supposed to provide sources, which can themselves be cited. It's usually an excellent place to start for anything not a hot political or current events or celebrity topic.