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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.
That he will get first post on Slashdot.
Sollog the "Varnisher" is not someone to be messed with. ;-)
The owls are not what they seem
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 was a once upon a time when I figured that Wikipedia could work, become a sort of collection of the intelligence and expertise of the masses on the internet. I've run across enough blatent inacurracies over the last year or so, however, that I can't look at it as anything but a basic starting place for research now. Two main problems as I see it (this is hardly new revelation):
(1) Everyone's viewpoint tends to get reflected, even it's just plain wrong. For instance, look at the entry on the Children's Crusade of 1212 -- it presents three versions of what happened, but only one (the last one) is "right", meaning that it's the version backed by modern research. The ability to site sources or research or present an authoratative case is outclassed by the ability to have the time on one's hands to hit the "edit" button a lot.
(2) Not all articles get many eyeballs. The Wiki tends to work best when there are a lot of people looking at the article, so little-travelled articles can have downright bizarre inaccuracies. They fall victim to either misunderstanding, bad source information or the maliciousness of those few anti-social morons who think wrecking the Wiki makes them cool.
While this is an interesting model of the internet at large, it's not a good thing in terms of being a useful resource.
Just as Linux and other open source projects aren't really "open" in terms of accepting everything anyone throws at them, so must Wikipedia find a way to become more selective in what it accepts. The Wiki itself is such a good idea that there's just got to be a way to make it work, but frankly I can't work out a paradigm that will save it from the issues it has now.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Ten bucks says that in the next 10 minutes, it is modified about 1200 more times.
... that the top-rated comment in this thread will be +5, funny.
http://www.wikipediasucks.com/ probably qualifies as libel. Anyone want to set up a donation fund to take him out? (If Mr. Wales is interested in filing suit, that is. Unlikely, but we can hope?)
Beyond that:
Wanna slashdot his phone?feh. stuff.
Stooping to such levels as to make fun of a mans wife and child publicly on the internet lends ZERO credibility to an argument and makes me lose all respect for a person that would do such a thing.
Every single one of you will be dead by 2152.
You don't have to be psychic to have seen this coming.
http://www.wikipediasucks.com/ - check out the slant on his site, and you'll immediately have a good idea of his creditability...
feh. stuff.
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.
If one of Sollog's most famous "math discoveries" is The Fibonacci Algorithm, then why isn't it called "The Sollog Algorithm?"
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Shouldn't he have registered wikipediasucks.com in advance as his psychic powers would have allowed him to see the impact of his actions. Further, shouldn't he already have a slashdotsucks.com already? And, shouldn't I already have a reply to this message from him telling me I'm a fool?
God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
Time Cube is the only answer!
another shitty, boring "wikipedia-got-vandalized, holy shit!" story. this is not stuff that matters.
When I visited it, Wikipedia read "Sollog eats his nuts." I would assume that Sollog eats nuts since eating nuts is part of a balanced healthy diet. Whether they are his or not is a matter of speculation unless you are Sollog (prognostication may or may not be included).
Did he predict the Bush Re-election?
Crazy religious fanatics... When will they learn that their 'truth' is only one of the many 'truths' out there.
Why is it that some people can not accept that there are other beliefs out there? Why do they have to try any discredit anyone that disagrees?
Nothing new I guess...
- Think for yourself, question authority.-
Taken from Solog's google group page ...
"It is the fastes growing religion on Earth"
Perhaps Solog's vast mental powers in nearly every field diminish its ability to spell properly, or learn how to use a spell checker.
in AD2101 war was beginning...
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
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.
He's a pornographer AND an objectivist??? This guy is my new hero!
Well, you missed your chance put that on Wikipedia. The page has been locked, and just when the vandal-wars were getting interesting.
http://cyclocosm.com Pro cycling at its worst
For those of you wanting fruitcake this Christmas, may I recommend Collin Street Bakery?
If Collin Street Bakery is a bit too expensive for your liking, however, then you may wish to try Sollog's folks. They look well-stocked.
I bet he had a rough time at school.
Free Firefox news reader.
The poster seriously mis-represents the "Child Crusade" article. It seems to be a VERY GOOD article on the subject and NOT fraught with competing viewpoints. The several "viewpoints" are important to the topic and should be
mentioned.
He criticizes Wikipedia as "inaccurate" but provides no evidence.
Though he does mention Linux. That should give hima a "+4 insightful". Too bad hed didn't mention Apple, then it'd be "+5, informative".
Does anybody else picture "Dr. Orpheus" from the Venture Bros. cartoon when you read about this guy? Complete with the methods of speaking and all? I sure do, and it's funny.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
As someone whose father is one of the survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing, it really pisses me off when someone sez "I predicted the whole thing".
Bullshit.
It's easy to sit around on your ass and "predict" after the event happens. But had he known one GODDAMN thing about OKC, he MIGHT have warned everyone ahead of time.
Last I checked, Dad never got a phone call.
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
I think I too will set up a personal home page on WikiPedia just like this Sollog cornflake.
/. and a page full of rejected submissions.
Of course, my only achievement in life is positive karma on
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
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.
You're a fool.
-Sollog
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!
He's taken his Ennis enlargement pills again, I see.
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.
Is a completely available domain name. Now, who is going to buy it up?
Memories become legend, Legend fades to myth, and even myth is forgotten by the time that age comes again.-Robert Jordan
The year is 2678, and I am using the greatest invention of the millenium to post to slashdot from the future!
HAHAHA!
And I *still* can only get a damn ~500,000 uid. Must be something with slashdot.org rejecting my 512bit IPv19 address...
Nope, sorry. There's nothing wrong with your ipv19 to ipv4 gateway. At the request of several prestigious software archaeological societies and organizations, we in the 37th century set up a temporal filter rejecting all registration requests to slashdot from the 27th century prior to the issuance of slashdot id 516229, ipv19 or otherwise.
Of course, I would have had a slashdot ID of #1, but those rat bastards in the 43rd are blocking all packets temporally synced to all timeframes prior to slashdot ID #11483.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Sollog's real name is John Patrick Ennis (Born born July 14, 1960). Thats right folks, Sollog is John P. Ennis.
he is a total dick..
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
What is wrong with ./?
His name is John P.Ennis and no one is cracking jokes about it?
Did I miss a memo or something?
te-hee
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Da Blog
His real name is John P.Ennis.
No troll would pick a name as obvious as that.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
"It has come to my attention that Jim Wales is harassing TOH Members with return phone calls if you call him."
What a fair assessment of "harassment"
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Browse through the featured articles and you will be hard-pressed to find anything worse than that which appears in commercial encyclopedias. In fact, most of it will be vastly better and more up to date.
Experts are part of the public too. I suggest you edit an article that deals with a subject you are expert in, that's what Wikipedians do.
Newsflash: Insane, opinionated crank on the internet. News at 11.
This is not news. It's funny, his wikipediasucks site is distressing, for making fun of the guy's daughter, but this is not news.
Nothing to see here, move along. My guess is that if this hadn't involved wikipedia, but instead one of the many, many other wikkis out there, this would never have been "news".
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
The Wikipedia article currently mentions a Sollog follower who said "something" would happen "tomorrow" - supposedly referencing 9/11. Even if his prediction *did* mean 9/11 was coming, if I read that post on 8/31 what good would it do me? Even if I assume "something" means "something big", how do I use such a vague prediction for my benefit? If a prediction cannot benefit those who hear it, what's the purpose of making the prediction at all?
The answer I'm dancing around is that I think Sollog is just in it for his own ego and publicity. If that's true, then this whole Wikipedia mess is actually benefitting him by giving him *more* publicity. The answer here is to probably just ignore him completely.
from http://www.247news.net/2004/20041211-wikipedia.sht ml
.agrippa.
"I sat in an office of AIS and saw three different people on one high speed connection post about Sollog. They were all called the same person and Sollog. Then I went to local Starbucks and saw another person post to Wikipedia pro Sollog statements and they too were called Sollog."
However, the Wikipedia article on Bomis, Wales' company, mentions that they also sell "erotic images" over the internet. Several non-WorkSafe links off the article to computers off Bomis.com are persuasive evidence.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
...he's gonna want a glass of milk...
Further proof that not everyone deserves to be given freedom of speech using someone else's printing press.
The Houkster "Oh yeah brother, what you gonna do when Houk O' Mania runs wild on you? Besides wet your pants in laughte
Which is exactly how every encyclopedia ever written was created. The writers of the Encyclopedia Brittanica weren't voted into office, They were simply the self-proclaimed "experts" of the time. Also, Wikipedia does go through many editorial reviews by its users.
I don't see Wikipedia as being any better or any worse then printed encyclopedias. I wouldn't necessarily trust the very first version of any given Wikipedia page, just like I wouldn't trust a printed encyclopedia until it's been given a once-over by editors.
The argument that only paid writers should be trusted to give credible information sounds too much like a similar creed that only paid programmers, working on closed source, can be trusted to write secure software.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
um, that is done to libraries. gluing pages together, cutting them out, destroying books and stealing them. that's done to libraries around america to censor views and ideas people disagree with.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
More like the progeny of Ted Holden and Robert McElwaine. Once upon a time there were no spammers, but there have always been kooks.
echo 33676832766569823265328479713269.8639857989Pq | dc
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)?
He's the guy from the fourth book of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker Trilogy - you know, Sollog, and Thanks for All the Fish.
I know that was bad, but I couldn't help myself.
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...
Like the old Usenet rule -- The first one to compare the other to a Nazi, automatically loses the argument.
And Son of Godwin: Terrorists.
You can't take the sky from me...
Congrats to Sollog, he's really showing /. trolls what it MEANS to troll. Forget the GNAA, forget Fr1st Ps0t and Hot Grits. Sollog has developed a religion and a following (ok, maybe a virtual following) around his trolling capabilities.
Truly an American icon!
This person posted pictures of Wales' wife and child, insinuating that they were, respectively, a Fetal Alcohol Syndrome baby, and a porn model.
What justification could possibly made for such personal attacks on his family?
On an unrelated note, I find this story disappointing. The title clearly promises a "Psychic War" but in fact, it's just some psychic waging a virtual war.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
Give up?
The answer is "screw you". Hehe.
Ah, that was fun. Back to work.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Yum Pie!
I think it's time to write that book I've been meaning to write about God's secret messages in pi. I am convinced that if you express pi in binary and then print it out, you can search it for not only all knowledge previously known, but images of virtually anything.
In fact, I'm pretty sure there's a picture of a picture of a grilled cheese with Michelle Pfeiffer on it at index 3,444,738,956,368,665,431,233. And not only that, Jesus is a mere three billion and 6 away from that!
That means something. God put those pictures in pi in order to tell us he loves us.
Let's say I walked into the library and marked up their encyclopedias with red ink (making legitimate corrections, in my opinion). Would you consider that credible?
Before I respond, I'll call straw-man, since you're assuming that one person's edits are analogous to a community of hundreds of committed editors and thousands more of casual editors. Think about it - the encyclopedia came from draft articles, marked up with red ink by a few people, and published nicely.
Then I'll answer: yes, I would consider this credible, if I see the corrections as worthwhile. If you wrote "LOL PWNED" and "BUSH SUXXORZ" on the book, of course not. If you corrected an article that I see is definitely flawed or lacking information, I would assume that you are probably more correct than the encyclopedia.
"A bunch of people on the Internet think it's good" does not constitute an editorial review.
"A bunch of people in a corporation" does? What is your definition of editorial review? How does it differ from a definition of WP's review where the wording is equally biased to the other side (given that the editors have shown themselves to be committed, and that several are quite accomplished in their subject)? WP is not reviewed by random people on the Internet, as you suggest.
This article explores just how successful one troll can be in disrupting the flow of things for a while -- and how the entire world can witness it.
No; this article suggests how even the most determined troll cannot stand up to Wikipedia, whose community knows how to write an unbiased article and remove personal attacks or self-praise.