Long-Term Wikipedia Vandalism Exposed

Daveydweeb writes, "The accuracy of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, came into question again when a long-standing article on 'NPA personality theory' was confirmed to be a hoax. Not only had the article survived at Wikipedia for the better part of a year, but it had even been listed as a 'Good Article,' supposedly placing it in the top 0.2-0.3% of all Wikipedia articles — despite being almost entirely written by the creator of the theory himself."

Comments

Re:Wikipedia should NEVER be cited

[GreatBunzinni]

but the stuff I've written, even if heavily sourced on Wikipedia is so obscure I could just make up anything about that and it would likely fly.

People frequently make the mistake of thinking that this problem is exclusive to wikipedia. That is false. That problem plagues every aspect of Academia that it isn't even funny. Everyone who spent his fair share of research hours in any university library already stumbled on contradictory information, incorrections and even outright lies on publications adopted by the libraries and in even cases by the courses themselves. These are publications which were heavily edited and in some cases even reeditions.

Moreover, academic fraud is always popping up. Things like falsifying results and messing up with the research variables pop up from time to time. If that type of fraud happens on academic circles where the scientific method is intensely applied and revered, why does it shock anyone when someone makes stuff up in a wiki? But thankfully in a wiki there may be quite a few eyes monitoring the development and, when necessary, edit the text and correct that. That doesn't happen with a book.