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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.
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.
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.
http://www.wikipediasucks.com/ - check out the slant on his site, and you'll immediately have a good idea of his creditability...
feh. stuff.
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?
The problem with libel laws is that it is not libel if you aren't lying. Saying that something sucks is an opinion.
Apparently not "Sollog", which kind of lends credence to his detractor's arguments that he can't predict jack, does it not?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
Bias and innaccuracy reflected clearly in arguments on the talk page still beat bias on behalf of a corporation, because it is clearly visible to anyone with interest. Some pages may be victims of controversy, but the vast majority presend the most coherent and well balanced information available on the Internet. So long as individuals are aware that Wikipedia is a work in progress, they can avoid the pitfalls of collaboration. Bias isn't the problem... invisible bias is.
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
Look at it like this.
It's released under the GPL, and all revision are stored. There is correct information on Wikipeida, and lots of it.
In the future, someone could easily compile all of it, do quality assurance and fact checking, choose the best revisions, etc. and then release that with their name behind it with the tag "as correct as any other encyclopedia, but with a whole lot more."
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
Visit Tim's Journal, yes?
To add.
There could be like two sites. Wikipedia as it is now, is like a Beta, and then you have the assured Release version. When articles are deemed to be correct and of acceptable quality they can be thrown into the Release version, which is not editable.
What wikipedia needs is to implement /. style moderation! Then every point of view will be represented fairly! Ni!
OK. I know that this is slightly off-topic, but I have to respond to this comment. This whole fiasco is a demonstration of why Wikipedia is NOT reliable. It could be 100% accurate today, but somebody will screw with it tomorrow and mess it up. Yes, I know that it can be changed back. But then you can get into silly little wars like this. Also, the many eyes theory works great for simple stuff. If sombody missed the date of birth of George Washington, it would likely be caught. If somebody missed the mass of Tungsten by 2%, it might slip by.
In my opinion, Wikipedia needs cement. A new article would be like wet cement. You can change it any way that you want. But, as it ages, it becomes harder and harder to change.
One possible solution would be to have a "trustability" number associated with each article. As the article ages, or gets read, the "trustability" increases. Then, only people who have a high enough trustability rating themselves can change it.
Sounds like a neat idea, right? Maybe not. People can be experts in a very narrow field. A PhD student might be studying molecular biology, and perfectly qualified to change an entery on chemistry. But he might not (and probably would not) know jack about Russian Literature.
So, in short, the system is subtly broken in a sense that will always allow people to question its content. How do you allow only qualified people to make changes? The "many-eyes" has only produced an article that changes every five minutes, at least in this case.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
He's taken his Ennis enlargement pills again, I see.
I'm gonna have to call "missing the point" on that one. I'd say the text quite clearly favors the third version, and gives it the last word. You can't very well debunk without telling what you're debunking...
rj
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.
No thats whats good about libel laws. This stemmed from the fact that in the 1770's in england libel was still libel even if what was said was true. So if you were a nanny and you molested children and I told your clients that you molested children and they fired you, you could claim libel against me and that was acceptable to the court I'd be paying you for lost wages even though you had no right to there services.
The founding fathers realized however that this is crap, newspapers and citizens need to be able to report the truth no matter how damaging it is to public figures.
If you want, go back to a society where you are afraid to speak the truth about public figures for fear of getting sued. I sure as hell won't.
I agree. That's Wiki's strength .. mountains and mountains of information you wouldn't otherwise have a source for. If the "information" you're looking for is not particularly important, Wikipedia can be highly amusing and informative.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
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
Wikipedia could [...] become a sort of collection of the intelligence and expertise of the masses on the internet.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened.
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.
This is pretty much true for any encyclopedia if you're writing for anything other than a high school class.
The ability to site sources or research or present an authoratative case is...
...greatly bolstered by knowing the difference between "site" and "cite", and being able to spell "authoritative" correctly.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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.
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.
Well, that is how the kooks think and operate.
I hearby nominate the above "kooks think" for the award of Slashdot OXYMORON of the DAY!
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.