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Spanish TV Channels Vandalize Wikipedia

Posted by kdawson on from the setting-fire-to-a-house-to-see-how-quickly-the-firemen-arrive dept.

strider2004 writes to tell us that Barrapunto, a Spanish tech news site, has outed two TV stations in Spain, one public and the other private, for engaging in Wikipedia vandalism for the sake of a story. (The link is in Spanish; Google translation here.) The public station introduced falsehoods into the Wikipedia entry for John Lennon; the private one vandalized the Elvis Presley entry. Both stations said they were performing an "experiment" to check the reaction time of Wikipedia. Both articles were promptly corrected by other editors.
Update: 08/19 13:01 GMT by KD : Barrapunto is not affiliated with Slashdot.

3 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Where's at? by ls354 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Some people speak Mexican, you know since Venezuela, Peru, and Colombia are all located in Mexico.

  2. Re:Wait ..... by Quino · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    in case anyone cares:

    If you're taught Spanish in the US, you're likely taught Mexican (or Latin American -- not actually sure as some South American Spanish sounds a lot like Spanish -er Spanish to me) pronunciation.

    One of the biggest differences is that the letters 'c' and 'z' don't sound like the 's' in Spain though they do in Mexico; Spaniards pronounce them like the English "th". For instance, the Spanish word for shoe is "zapato".

    a Mexican person pronounces it sort of like: "saw-paw-toe"
    a Spanish person pronounces it sort of like: "thaw-paw-toe"

    Both pronounce "santa" as we would with the normal English 's' sound.

    Not sure if that means that Spaniards (or maybe other Latin Americans) speak with a lisp :) though I can see why a Mexican person (for instance) might describe it that way, though it only applies to those two letters.

    Incidentally, though it is an interesting (IMHO) question posed by the Spanish TV networks (how well and how quickly, if at all, does the self-correcting mechanism on Wikipedia work), there seems to be understandable condemnation on Barrapunto for basically defacing the website to test it out, along with suggestions on how they could have done things better, references to Stephen Colbert, etc.

    Hey, it IS just like Slashdot, but in Spanish! :)

    Admittedly I didn't see anything about Cowboy Neal, goatse.cx, hot grits, complaints about a "lefty/liberal bias", Stephen King's death, posts interchanging "your" with "you're" or posts about woman-on-dog action -- though I did try browsing at -1 :)

  3. Re:Wait ..... by kypper · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Granted, I did see something about Netcraft confirming FreeBSD as dead...