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Usenet Psychic Wars With Wikipedia
Early last week an anonymous editor with a posting style remarkably like the one widely believed to be that of Sollog himself contributed this article to the encyclopedia, boasting of Sollog's prophesizing prowess and mathematical genius. Less than twenty-four hours later, the article was looking a little more balanced and encyclopedic. Along with Sollog's claims, it now carried the revelation that not everyone is as convinced of the accuracy of Sollog's power of prediction as he himself is, along with links to some rather unflattering appraisals of his work.
A week of spectacular net.kookery has since transpired, replete with vandalism of the article, bizarre legal threats, long semi-coherent rants with LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS, a rich bounty of links to Ennis-run sites, and a legion of anonymous posters with exactly the same writing style as one another all strenuously affirming that they are individual and distinct "fans" of Sollog and not the man himself. Unable to accept that Wikipedia's policy of presenting a Neutral Point of View means that an article on Sollog would have to include both pro- and anti-Sollog material, and unable to force other Wikipedia editors to accept his version of reality, Ennis has taken instead to making hostile phone calls to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales at his home, and setting up his very own Wikipedia and Wales hate site.
Whether or not Sollog really did predict Princess Diana's death, the Oklahoma bombing, 9/11, the crash of TWA flight 800, the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, and most of the natural disasters in the US over the last few years, he doesn't seem to have foreseen his inability to control the picture that Wikipedia presents of him to the world.
See here for the current revision of the article, which may or may not be currently in a vandalized state.
The discussion is pretty big, and i really wont trust his own site in explaining it, so can anyone here tell me who he is, and what he has done (with proof)?
There's always the perennial objection that Wikipedia lacks credibility, but stories like this should show the skeptics how an open system like this actually works. In time, the thousands of eyes approach weeds out questionable content, leaving only publication quality articles.
It's hard to say what impact netizens like SOLLOG will have in the end. On one level, you might say his predictions would provide Wikipedia with yet another dimension of informative content -- the fourth dimension: time. That is, while Wikipedia can say something about the past, and now with Wikinews, the present, maybe SOLLOG will provide needed insight into the future.
On the other hand, such atrocious formatting can only damage the credibility and readability of Wikimedia. Editors will have to handle this issue carefully and balance these considerations. In the end, I'm confident the open model of editing will strike the right compromise between compelling content and responsible formatting.
A Proud Member of the Reality Oriented Community.
This is a great testament to wikipedia's power to create a true fair and balanced source of information. Imagine what would happen if we got our news this way too, where when you read some bullsh*t spin you could correct it and present the information with a neutral viewpoint.
The media is not going to do this, only the people can. So if you are not going to edit articles please donate some money to wikimedia so this neutral source of information can flourish.
At the moment, the article is blank. This version, however, is quite informative.
I like wikipedia. Not for the important things but the fun triva things like warp speed (how much is warp 3? ), stardate, chewabaca defense etc. I find them very accuarate
He'll keep trying to edit the page and the rest of the Net will point out what a lying sack of shit he is, just as we've been doing with Scientology. woof.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Like the old Usenet rule -- The first one to compare the other to a Nazi, automatically loses the argument.
Seriously, posting someone's home address along with photos of their family (not to mention numerous phone calls), could easily be interpreted as stalking. Should Mr. Wales decide to file charges, it might get interesting -- is he obstructing free speech? Or is he protecting his family from a known kook?
Chip H.
If Sollog is who I think he is, he was banned from the JREF forums quite some time ago for making absurd assertions about various "abilities" he posesses.
http://www.randi.org/
The JREF promises a US$1m reward for anyone demonstrating, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any supernatural, paranormal, or occult power or event.
To this date, no one has passed the preliminary testing - Sollog included.
This signature does not exist. It has never existed. It is all a figment of your imagination.
Here's a great site, and don't even think about modding this offtopic. Kooks have run amok!
thepeacock.com
I wonder if his utopian server can survive a slasdot frenzy!
So what does this mean for wikipedia? Well at best it can contain nothing more then a grey goo of widely accepted facts hopefully most of wich are "true". Group think.
At worst it will contain a complety random mix of hard facts, accepted facts and plain errors. Anybodies guess as to wich is wich.
Usually with "facts" we are given some info on the person claiming that the facts are true. Call me weird but I am more likely to take facts about space from an NASA engineer then from a farmer BUT I wouldn't trust a NASA engineer to tell one end of a cow from another.
A good example is the TV program "myth" busters. It airs on discovery in europe right now. It has two movie special effects makers trying to recreate urban myths and prove or disprove them.
Some of the "experiments" are valid enough but just a few of them are plain bad research. The biggest problem seems to be they consider themselves pretty hot stuff. While they might be able to fit some rockets to a car and disprove the jato myth but disproving the 'ice bullet' myth by freezing water in liqued nitrogen and noticing how brittle ice is is slightly less convincing. Anyone who knows anything about freezing knows that different speeds of freezing results in different ice crystals. Note I am not claiming that ice bullets exist. Just that there research to disprove it was lacking.
An earlier /. article had someone noting that 1 article about a person had the wrong birthdate. It turns out that this is a common mistake with all kinds of works listing 1 of 2 dates. The only correct way to handle this is to list both dates and clearly states that it is unknown wich is correct perhaps with theory as to why.
Sadly there is no way to stop anyone from then thinking "oh I know the right date" and remove the second date.
Wikipedie at the moment is a nice "lightweight" reference especially for "modern" stuff. For depth almost anything else is better but just perhaps you might find a good link to start at wikipedia.
Relying on wikipedia is like getting your medical advice from a guy down the pub. He might just be a doctor, he might just be a big mouth or you might just be talking to a quak doctor.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I like how he pisses and moans about being "slandered" by everybody under the sun, and then sets up a hate site slandering Wikipedia.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Raymond Karczewski and Edmond Wollman are two other kooks of the same calibre. Both are worth googling - just for fun.
The owls are not what they seem
That's essentially the model that h2g2 uses, it has a vast "unedited" Guide that's quirky and idiosyncratic and funny and sometimes untrustworthy, and an "edited" guide that contains articles that have been looked over by staff and been approved. Articles are plainly marked by whether they're in the Edited or Unedited sections.
For this to work in Wikipedia, they'd probably have to introduce a flag that will identify a page as Edited. Searches would probably have to turn up Edited first, or prominently in some way, maybe with a little icon by their titles. Anyone would be able to modify an Edited page, but the result would be an unedited version of that page. Each pages' last approval would be the "official" one for that page.
I note that he has linked to a site "247news.net" that looks at first glance like an at least vaguely official news site, but if you look more closely is run by Sollog himself. He has links back to his other sites at the top.
D'oh!
Hang with me for a little while, this may seem disjointed -- but the parent posting actually has far more to teach us about Wikipedia and the nature of internet research than the actual article does. So here are a few observations that might bring my response to this post into context:
A couple days ago I got into a long debate with a PhD candidate/teaching assistant about how to teach an introductory college course on sourcing and reliance on internet materials in an introductory research course. Having taught something similar, I was surprised when she suggested that there is little (perhaps even nothing?) on the internet that can be reliably cited to. Or, to give her more credit (the actual argument was far more nuanced... or at least it seemed so after a couple of beers), her point is that there is always a more authoritative source available than the internet. And since students should be required to cite the most authoritative source they can find, it is extremely rare that the internet copy of a source should be cited to. Citing to the internet, in her opinion, is a crutch for citing to "real" paper publications (or even proprietary internet databases, CD-ROM compilations, etc.)
So while I clicked on the article more out of amusement value then anything else, the parent poster provides an awesome example of the strengths and weaknesses of both arguments. Coming into this thread, I'd heard of the "Children's Crusade" before, but it was just a historical tidbit that I'd picked up somewhere and really knew nothing about.
I was intrigued by the parent post's rather categorical dismissal of two of the three explanations -- and not know what those explanations were -- I clicked through and read the article.
The first paragraph of the article states that "Several conflicting accounts of this event exist, and the facts of the situation continue to be a subject of debate among historians."
Okay. So from the very beginning we know we are dealing with an "event" where the facts are not entirely clear. But scanning the rest of the article, it seems clear that whatever happened happened in the early 13th century.
The first two versions are then laid out. It's a real tear jerker -- young children coming together in a spontaneous uprising to fight the forces of evil -- who then meet a gruesome end. (Sound familiar?.) And it's this version of the story that this painter was thinking about when he put ink-to-canvas or what Kurt Vonnegut was thinking when he subtitled Slaughterhouse-Five "Or, the Children's Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death", or why the term was incorporated into the title of the classic submarine movie Das Boot or why the incomparable Neil Gainman used it as a title for one of his comics.
History is not just comprised of facts. Myths and legands sometimes have a far greater impact on our physche than do Cold Hard Facts. This is a perfect example. This significance of the Children's Crusade is not whether it actually ever happened. The historical "fact" is an interesting academic question that makes for a fun historical sluething exercise.
So, back to the article. After depicting the historically and culturally significant version of the Children's Crusade, the article goes on to say "Some historians speculate that the entire crusade is fiction, as there is no real evidence that any such event occurred, in the 13th or in any other century. Research done in the early 1980s indicates that the Children's Crusade began as a misinterpretation of a 1212 religious movement among the landless poor...
Even more, you can easily recognize sites he made, they all have the same style (centered, usually two column, sometimes the left column has 1 or more pictures). So he has a review of his 'book' on a different site, which is obviously his own site as well (it also only carries reviews of his books).