Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Wars -- Lake Express Ferry
vhfer writes "Wikipedia Warfare has become the latest tool in the battle between rival lake transport systems. The Lake Express Ferry, which links Milwaukee and Michigan, bypasses Chicago traffic. The competing SS Badger runs from Manitowoc, an hour North of Milwaukee, to Ludington, Michigan. The article in the Milwaukee Journal details efforts by SS Badger supporters to highlight some of the delays and problems experienced by the Lake Express, in an apparent effort to divert some traffic to the Badger. Numerous edits to the article added links to news articles critical of the Lake Express, and some derided presidential candidate John Kerry's 2004 ride and the political value of it. The operators of the SS Badger deny responsibility for all the postings, and also say they aren't Internet savvy enough to alter a Wikipedia article."
After all, it seems that Wikipedia readers are more interested in much different topics anyhow.
My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
I find a good way to defend myself is to deny I have the ability to use a wiki.
If these guys say they aren't intelligent enough to edit an entry in wikipedia, why should we trust them to run a ferry?
Funnypics
...without a link to the Lamest Edit Wars in Wikipedia.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Is it just me, or does the headline sound like the title of a bad Anime?
"Giving first aid the already disheveled hair projection" -Anakin
Ah! The memories. When I was but a tad my dad would take the family in the stationwagon from Midland to Minneapolis, via Ludington to Manitowoc (famous now for aluminium cookware) on the C & O ferries. The SS Badger may hark from those days, it looks like it does. Back then there was a lot of traffic across the lake from Wisconsin, where automobile furniture (seats) and body parts were transported to Detroit with the assistance of several of these large boats which could hold several rail cars in their holds. They'd also take on automobiles and passengers for a nominal fee. They ran like clockwork, regardless of the weather and crossings in poor considtions could be the kind you spent clutching a paper bucket. I found chewing gum helped.
Nice to see they still run them. If the weather's fair I would consider a drive to Ludington (or Manitowoc) just for the ride. Ludington's a nice place to visit and camp.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This points out the biggest problem with Wikipedia, people are selfish. When questions of NPOV come up the disscusion offten becomes not what the NPOV is but who's oppinion will be included in the article and accepted as truth.
There is a Penny-Arcade comic that sums wikipedia up nicely I can't (due to a proxy) look it up right now...
Disclaimer: I am a huge Wikipedia fan... but I only "trust" non political geek culture (Comics, video games) to be relitivly accurate.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
May I just be the first to say:
Badgers? We don't need no steeenking badgers!
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Wikipedia works rather well at the core. Articles about science topics, or most history topics are OK. There are issues with current event topics, but there are plenty of editors working on those. the real problem that no one mentions with Wikipedia is on the fringes. there are 1.3 or so Million english articles. Some of them are poorly translated paragraphs from other languages. Some of them are straight lifts from a Press Release, and some of them are pretty incomplete. This is one such case. While editors can work on NPOV more directly with articles like George W. Bush or Jesus, there are only a handful of editors working on the fringes. I was hitting up the random pages button, and a few days ago, I stumbled across the "Miss Bikini of the Universe" page (no jokes, please). It consists of a few poorly translated paragraphs, a picture that's three years out of date (but attractive nonetheless), and a notice that Ukraine's candidate won the most recent one (which apparently was over the weekend in China somewhere), but no mention of the winner's name, DoB, etc. Now, I tried to do some cleanup - verb tenses, complete sentences, etc., but the page needs an awful lot of work, and frankly, I'm busy, and the orginal writer looks like he ran a few news articles through Babelfish.
I like Jason Scott's rant about Wikipedia over at ASCII. It is related to this next Wikipedia War in the following way:
"It's that there's a small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of twiddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have to become content defenders. Woe be that your take on things is off from the majority."
A related issue is that with some topics, you will *always* have debates. Certain wiki topics will always cause people to be at "war" with each other. I doubt this will kill off wiki technology, but eventually there probably will be some social conventions to handle disputes. Or, perhaps a more rigid technology will take the place of wikis. Who knows.
Sorry to ramble. My point is just that we need to be careful that we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. In plain language, a wiki war doesn't mean that wikis are bad.
How to Download YouTube Videos
I hate how Slashdot rarely links to the ACTUAL THING THE ARTICLE IS ABOUT. Lake Express
Vince Papale, that's what!
Who wants to get in an edit war with me at the Edit war article. Then we can create an article called "Meta edit war" and get in a fight over whether that is a neologism! Ah, the wonders of Wikipedia...
I say we just rename both Ferrys after Stephen Colbert and call it a day.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Lake_Express
Lake_Express edits
SS Badger
SS Badger edits
Hilarious! Thanks for the link. My favorite after a minute of skimming:
Potato chips
Should potato chips be flavored or flavoured? What is the provenance of the potato chip, America or Ireland? Four-user revert war on these important issues results in the page getting protected and listed on RfC. As a compromise, the chips become seasoned.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
But the owners 8 year old kid is :P
Lake Express was definitely a victim of abuse by SS Badger. Pretty funny comments!
p ress&diff=72406828&oldid=72405352
p ress&diff=68850407&oldid=61693002
p ress&diff=72436565&oldid=72428201
p ress&diff=72437357&oldid=72436565
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lake_Ex
The ferry's operational season has been a bit of an embarrasement for the owner's of the company. When first launched the company announced that the ferry would operate each season until December 31. Because of lack of fall ridership and many press reports of sea sickness earlier in the year, the ferry's operations were ended in October during the first year (2004). In 2005 the company announced they had a plan to make it to the end of the year through better promotion. In 2005 the company was again forced to end their season early as the ship did not seem well equipt to make it in the Gales of November.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lake_Ex
http://www.milwaukee-muskegon.com/ Site comparing Lake Express and other Lake Michigan Car Ferries
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lake_Ex
not to mention that it crashed into the pier at muskegon without passengers aboard in 2005 april
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lake_Ex
In August 2006 several trips were cancelled because of waves and mechanical problems. The vessel was only running on three of its four engines and halted all trips for passenger comfort due to wave conditions. All ferry service was halted to fix mechanical issues on August 15 through August 18.
Mushroom
- These characters were randomly selected.
They are very different ships for different purposes. The Lake Express is newer, faster, and more prone to breakdowns and postponed trips due to the higher speed. The SS Badger is older, slower, and more reliable due to it being an 'old fashioned' coal-burning boat that chugs slowly across the lake. The Lake Express is pretty much assigned seating, enclosed from the elements, with very limited space outside on deck. The SS Badger is completely open seating and you can spend the entire trip outside enjoying the views, the rain, and the coal soot.
If you want to minimize your time spent on the water and travel in a new, state-of-the-art, fast boat, take the Lake Express. If you want to prolong the experience and enjoy being out on the lake, take the SS Badger.
The two companies can compete all the want, but I think they have two different customer bases.
What? Nobody (at least, nobody above +2) has posted a link to WikiTruth? Well, let me do so then.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Ha. Didn't think this would make it to Slashdot. (I didn't participate in the Lake Express wars, but I did recreate the entire S.S. Badger page because it was created, and persisted, as a copy-and-paste of the History section of their website. I did notice strange things happening in Lake Express at the time, though...)
A more difficult issue in Wikipedia is figuring out how many copyright violations are in the encyclopedia. I don't see how it's feasible for every copyright holder to keep tabs of their Wikipedia article(s); that's not very fair to the copyright holder. More distressing, it seems that the art of proper summarization and citation has been lost from the general community in our generation (aged early 30s and younger) for some time.
With regional, nontechnical and just plain unpopular topics like this, if I (as an editor) don't fix it when I see it, the odds are pretty good no one will fix it. Not to mention I may be introducing some unwanted, commentary-style bias that I'm unaware of. But it always goes back to "unpopular"... unless you have a strong contingent of editors on a particular topic, whether numbering 3 or 30, lightly-traveled topics are just not going to be as good as they could be.
Regarding having opinions on an encyclopedia... it would be a better place if people just learned how and where to pick their battles. My answer to this is "I really don't give a damn, just pick something; it's not that important!"
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
This highlights a more fundamental problem than the fact that Wikipedia is vulnerable to edit wars, and that is people's/company's/political party's disregard for truth. I have a good friend who was part of a recent high-profile gubernatorial race. I was surprised to hear from him that they had to constantly guard the wikipedia page about their candidate as it would constantly be vandalized. Is it just me, or do you also get a kind-of "sick" feeling when you hear about these kind of things? This is especially true when you take a step back and think about what the potential Wikipedia (and other sites like it) holds for improving the lives of people all over the world. When you look at it from this perspective, well written, unbiased articles, in my opinion, hold a certain level of sacredness. And when you see it being defiled you can't help but to feel disgust.
Now, I know, this example is "small peanuts" in the grand scheme of things. However, it just makes me sick when I see this kind of intentionally malicious behavior focused on something with a primary goal to improve the lives of all.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Snake!
All Your Memory Are Belong To Java
In Manitowoc at least I know there are quite a few tourist locations that depend on car-ferry traffic to survive, when they heard about competition to the badger they many felt quite threatened, The badger represents a rush that makes up most of their visitors, My girlfriend who did tours on the USS Cobia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cobia Says that the Badger represents about 60% of their traffic when it was in service.
Manitowoc is a small town, and not exactly a tourist destination in itself, But thanks to the car-ferry which dumps it's passengers right into the downtown, a few things can stay alive that keep your attention for an afternoon. (A few blocks of downtown, an old time ice cream shop, a naval museum with submarine, and an art gallery.) Before they go to Door County (A real tourist area)
The fact that people are trying to put propaganda into wikipedia doesn't surprise me, and the fact that nobody from Milwaukee probably cares doesn't either. A few hundred people coming on a boat wont exactly make or break their economy, But here its the rush that keeps anything tourist related open.
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
On a plane!
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
This is absolutely, smack-bang on target. Wikipedia is largely complete now, and very little improvement is going to happen with most of the articles on important topics. They're as good as they're ever going to be, so if the article on gerbils gets 500 edits this year, that's 100% wasted effort, just running to stay in place. After several years of participating heavily in WP, I finally decided to give up, and only keep an eye on one biographical article I care about. Recently, the only activity on that article has been:
- A long, time-consuming argument about whether converting US-style punctuation to British style was mandatory or optional.
- Vandalism by someone who keeps getting his account temporarily blocked, and then as soon as it's unblocked, he systematically goes around vandalizing articles by inserting the letter "r" into words.
- An attempt by someone to convince us on the talk page that the subject of the article was a Freemason, even though there's loads of verifiable information showing that he wasn't.
Wikipedia these days is like the world of The Matrix -- a diabolical system to suck effort out of millions of people. The only difference is that in The Matrix, the energy isn't wasted.Find free books.
The folks at the SS Badger may not be smart enough to do it themselves, but they sure as heck thought it was a good idea to do it when they first hired their SEO/domain squatter/adwords bottom feeder "consultant" to stir up bad publicity online. This story's a good lesson on what happens when half-brains hire low-class bottom feeder "new economy" douchebags to game the online system.
Regarding the Badger's guy, Christopher Van Oosterhout, here's his game:
1) register mispell and keyword domains
2) build keyword spamming websites to skim traffic of legitimate businesses/websites.
3) sell advertising to competitors of the company whose traffic is being leached.
4) run adwords for CPM and CPC money.
5) if that doesn't work, run negative information and try to extort money in an effort to sell the domain/site to the company he's targeted. The Badger got in bed with Van Oosterhout (of Torresen Marine) on the promise that his 5-pronged approach would be used to damage the Lake Express and only now are feeling upset as the public at large are getting a taste of their manipulation scheme. Christopher's info will follow at the bottom of this post.
How the SS Badger and Van Ossterhout worked in 5-point fashion here:
1) milwaukee-muskegon.com was registerede :www.milwaukee-muskegon.com
2) content is added to the site to build keyword relevance and pagerank - much of the content pulled from Lake Express materials or worded to reflect keyword searches. Cached at : http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&sa=G&q=sit
3) SS Badger advertising banners were featured promiently on the milwaukee-muskegon.com website, especially on pages that featured "passenger" complaints and testimonials centered around the Lake Express.
3b) the same content was posted on Wikipedia, by "anonymous" editor 24.11.28.42 (An IP/editor that also worked on adding Wikipedia links to a Torresen marine sales site). The IP belongs to Comcast in Muskegon, MI - home of Torresen and VanOosterhaut.
4) adwords appeared throughout the site.
5) in the article, Van Ooosterhaut admits that he attempted to sell the site to both the Lake Express and SS Badger, although the claim of trying to sell to the Badger seems a bit far fetched as the value of Milwaukee-Muskegon.com for a company running a Manitowoc-to-Ludington route seems a bit odd. Seems like a botched cover story that directly implicates him of working for the Badger.
A nice added touch is that Van Oosterhaut offered "free" Lake Expres photography through his keyword spam/ shakedown site. Free Lake Express photos -- all you have to do is link to this site. A pagerank and keyword spam (on "Lake Express") tactic.
Here's hoping there's a special place in hell for these squatter-email/search spammer types and the people that hire them.
As promised, here's my notes on the guys behind this scam/wikipedia attack:
Domain name: TORRESEN.COM
Registrant: Torresen Marine, Inc. 3003 Lake Shore Drive Muskegon, MI 49441 US
Administrative Contact: VanOosterhout, Christopher domains@torresen.com 3003 Lake Shore Drive Muskegon, MI 49441 US +1.2317598596 Fax: +1.2317551522
Domain name: MILWAUKEE-MUSKEGON.COM
Administrative Contact: Muskegon, Milwaukee christopher@vanoosterhout.com Milwaukee Muskegon Muskegon, MI 49442 US 231-206-0551
Don Clingan vice president of marketing for Lake Michigan Carferry lmcdon@ssbadger.com
43. Masturbation
44. Wonder Woman
Possible link between these two?
[The Universe] has gone offline.
The spelling is "Gandhi". I could get anal about getting that right.
I doubt, therefore I might be.
Man people look up some sick crap on Wikipedia. I mean, the C programming language?! I can only hope it's just a bunch of curious teenagers, and that they'll grow out of it in a few years.
of course you can have error bounds greater than the measurement itself. Means you have a really unreliable measurement, but still...
:)
poor example, but
think about measuring 0.3mm with only a standard ruler, accurate to the mm.
i can say it's about 0.3mm, but measuring it with only my ruler, i could probably say it was ±0.50mm, truthfully.
that gives me 0.3mm ±167% (0.5/0.3 *100 - it's probably how they do it with their numbers)...
hope that makes sense?
Surfed through the edit wars pages and that was interesting though I didn't find the one on chips. It seems that a wiki is by design vulnerable to 1) edit wars and 2) wasting of critical resources, namely the time of authors and administrators, and the perceived reliability of the wiki, by such wars.
Being a wiki admin I suppose means you are asking for it and shouldn't be surprised at having to arbitrate such battles, but unless the number of admins increases at the same rate as the wiki's articles and readers this is a losing battle. It seems that many of these may be resolved by choosing least common denominator, ignoring the battle and maybe relying on the wiki's search engine a bit more to show related articles.
How about creating a forking wiki? I am not aware such a thing exists yet. Based on the recognition that unlike a static encyclopedia with a static board of editors and publication date, the wikipedia and other wikis are organic entities and involve people with divergent and yet possibly valid opinions. For example see the wars on UK/US terms, historical interpretation (not revisionism), etc. While the U.S. Wikipedia seems quite cool-headed I don't think that is guaranteed for other languages either.
So a forking wikipedia would allow each main article to have links to different versions if there is more than one valid one, basically allowing readers to see both sides of the topic. It would be up to an admin to decide on whether a view is valid enough, since it seems that only a small percentage of pages would have more than one view. You would have to ensure somehow that holders of one view do not edit the other in a prolonged war by locking it.
This sort of functionality might be useful in cases such as description of historical persons and events (e.g. battles), and possibly unpopular but official views held by contemporary governments about history, geography, etc.