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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
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.
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.
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!
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?
I'm okay then. I'm married!
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
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
He's a troll who succeeded in getting a entire slashdot story about him.
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".
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
So all of this is self-inflicted. The harder he pushes, the harder the site pushed back. It's quite funny really.
He's taken his Ennis enlargement pills again, I see.
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+
Read the Wikipedia article as well as its history for a start.
Then what may interest you is that WikiPediA Sucks is run by himself (as said in article), but also that most of the proofs that is said against wikipedia comes from a single source, that is, Adoni Corporation.
you shall note too, that The E undergroud, which sells "SEX and DEATH video" (cited from the website), is also owned by the same company, as said here and here, with sollog.com proof here. THIS IS THE SAME CORPORATION, if you read whois carefully. So he accuses a guy of being associated with BOMIS (which is true or false, i dunno, whatever) and is HIMSELF SELLING porn and death videos over the net. That kills all credibility he might have before.
This is just the peak of the iceberg, though, but I'm too lazy to write much more, but it gives you a general picture of the guy (actually, I'm against him, so maybe some member of TOH would want to reply, and I'll appreciate the opened discussion with him/her).
Of Code And Men
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.
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
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
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...
The "author" of most (all?) of the "news" on the 247news site, David Alexander, is Sollog himself. No doubt all of you are shocked and surprised by this news. Here's one reporter's amusing tale of dealing with Sollog and Alexander: http://www.citypaper.net/articles/022102/sl.howcol .shtml
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!
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.