Slashdot Mirror
Spanish TV Channels Vandalize Wikipedia
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.
Update: 08/19 13:01 GMT by KD : Barrapunto is not affiliated with Slashdot.
Anyone can change it without anything to back it, generally changed by the whiny commie demoncrat terrorists to spread their communist lies. If someone crashes WikipediaBS I would not at all be unhappy. Hell, those demoncrats deserve it.
Bite my shiny metal ass.
for all the idiots: Mexico != Spain
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Has tripled in the last year.
Goofballs add bogus info to Wikipedia; said bogus info is promptly corrected.
This is news?
A Human Right
WIKIPEDIA... A free encyclopedia, so free ANYONE can edit it. Are child molesters using it to reach out to YOUR CHILDREN? The answer... coming up later this hour.
Some people speak Mexican, you know since Venezuela, Peru, and Colombia are all located in Mexico.
Hold the phone here...
"(Spanish Slashdot) has outed two TV stations in Spain..."
How on Earth can two television stations be of homosexual leanings? Also since when was the Spanish Slashdot site an authority on these things? Guess those Spanish speaking nerds just know something we all don't...:)
many of us are [nero-online.org] that they sideline GGod manners don't want to feel real problems that questions, then study. [rice.edu] centralized models the BSD license,
You open what is supposed to be all the world's knowledge combined in a site, except that the policy is to treat it like a public bathroom. That's fine, but why is it news every time someone gets caught taking a shit in it?
It's fine to let people contribute, but most articles need to be locked down when they are completed, and then you submit stuff to be added for peer review or something. There is no reason why 8 year old Johnny needs to be editing the live version of a page on something he knows nothing about.
Is there enough new information on Elvis arriving, that his page needs to be open to live submissions from anyone 24/7/365?
I think it's time Wikipedia put up clear disclaimers about the nature of the content to avoid a big-ass lawsuit. Remember, this is a country where an organization has to put "Do Not Eat" on Preparation-H tubes or risk being sued up the wazoo (in both a pun and non-pun sense).
Table-ized A.I.
I can't believe this is true! Why did no one tell me that Slashdot has a Spanish version? Seriously, looking at it is like looking at Bizarro Slashdot.
In case nobody remembers, Stephen Colbert's "experiment" proved the response time for fixing BS entries in wikipedia (that librarians are hiding something) in about 15 seconds. Why do they have to try the experiment otra ves? :P
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I think someone should write graffiti on big letters on the walls of these TV stations... purely as an experiment, you understand, to see how long it takes to remove it.
Me Spanish DotSlash Number 1 Fan
Don't you know I'm loco. --Wikipedia.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
"We were just testing to see how fast the emergency services would react..."
I'll probably be modded down for this...
oh really?
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Their slogan is not "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters", but "La informacion que te interesa"...
What does that make them, the spanish Drudge Report?
Other "experiments" kept from us:
Response time for vandalizing Sonic Hedgehog - 8 days
Response time for vandalizing Sonic the Hedgehog - 8 seconds
So in what other languages is there a /.?
Is there a "Schragstrichpunkt"?
or a "puntinoditaglio" ?
or perhaps even a "schuinestreeppunt"?
Vandalism by the media. I guess another entry for this article on Wikipedia.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I think the reason for the difference in response time to vandalism has not much to do with the expertise required (after all, most vandalism is not written with expertise and thus is plainly obvious to anyone), but rather with the overall traffic to the article, which influences the likely that it will be vandalised in the first place, which influences the number of editors who have acquired, in reaction, the habit of 'standing by' for reversions. In other words, highly vandalised articles naturally acquire several guardian angels, who have become habituated to responding in seconds. Rarely vandalised articles have to wait for one of the editors to make a routine check. Notice that this relationship between vandalism frequency and response time means that there may not much be difference in statistical reliability between a low response time article and a high response time article.
On Barripunto is "Cowboy Neal" known as "El Gringo Neal"?
Is there also a pink version of slashdot? Maybe one with "News for men, stuff that lubricates" or "News for girls, ponies that are cuddly".
That wikipedia outfit is a FAG encyclopedia company. They are faggery daggery doo boys, yes sir.
clicking on the Barrapunto link, I get an advertisement for something called "Dorkbot Madrid"
I think it's the first time an advertisement has ever made me want to buy something, particularly when I have no clue what it is.
Someone mod parent up, +5 inspired.
On Barripunto is "Cowboy Neal" known as "El Gringo Neal"?
No, but there is the stupid boy who thinks that every spanish speaking country does it with mexican accent.
Most of the comments so far seem very upset that the TV channels did this, but it really doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Wikipedia is a community, a society like any other. It has its values, with accuracy being one of the most important, and someone did a social experiment to see how well that community adhered to its principles. Sure, it required being a little bit of a bad actor, but if Slashdot reported on a new study where researchers bumped into people while carrying several packages and found that Linux users were more likely to help them pick up their dropped items, I don't think the comments would be blasting them for assault.
This was minor public vandalism, of a kind the community sees every day, and a kind that it was built to correct. If they had launched a systematic campaign to spread disinformation throughout many articles, that would be a serious problem, but changing the date of Lennon's death to 2007 instead of 1977? If edits like that caused Wikipedia any kind of damage, it would have died years ago.
They picked up two the most famous cultural icons in the world for their experiment. Supposedly, those pages should have been watched by "million eyes" (remember the open software motto?). Comparing that to the graffiti on the wall, which requires much more effort to fix, is plain vanilla exaggeration.
/.
I guess the public ran of the steam of the Wikipedia anonymous fixing by corporate bastards, and now feels the need to pick on whatever left of the story. That is what exactly what traditional media does by beating the dead horse ad nausea. And now
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
OK, how about Van Allen radiation belt where fast editing has prevented corrections? Evidently the fanboys feel NASA is in the wrong, original research perhaps?? As this talk entry shows a glaring mistake has been known for over a year but noone can do anything about it.
I am sick and tired of these stories claiming Wikipedia editors are that good. Rather I see these editors as the direct descendants of the mob that burned the Library of Alexandria.
That's a reasonable argument, but I think you're missing the fact that correcting entries is part and parcel of what wikipedia is all about. I applaud people for testing that system. If we had more journalists who actually investigated things, maybe the media wouldn't have let the voting system become compromised, and wouldn't have let thousands of people die in iraq without mentioning it much.
Vandalising a wall with something relatively permanent is a different issue to this kind of investigation, though. A closer analogy would be something like calling a news station and reporting a false news item, or setting up a fake corruption incident, to see whether the media catches it. Sadly, they're more likely to add weight to such things these days, given how they just repeat press releases word for word most of the time.
"Both stations said they were performing an "experiment" to check the reaction time of Wikipedia."
Maybe someone should perform an "experiment" to test the stability of that TV station's websites.
Simply block all changes that contain upside down question marks and prevent users signing up if they have more than five first names and three surnames.
Except on the Spanish version, obviously.
If the TV channels really vandalized to see the reaction time of the community, the test is a success I think personnaly this kind of test is stupid if you don't warn Wikipedia Inc it self..
Dorkbot put on shows based around the intersection between art and technology - robots, electronic music, all sorts of weird and interesting stuff (their tag-line is "people doing strange things with electricity"). They have groups which hold meetings in cities all around the world. See http://dorkbot.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorkbot.
Blimey! There's a spanish /.! and its all orange! Nice.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
You?
Really, how do you decide? What do you reference to to decide?
Keep it open and flat as it is now. The moment you start putting restrictions on you'll lose contributors.
My post was supposed to be a joke about a classic wikiGroan. I guess the numbers I picked were too realistic. Sorry about that.
TV Stations need to understand that Wikipedia, and any other web service is NOT their own personal plaything, for them to run "experiments" on. Investigative journalism is one thing, but destructive journalism is quite another and is certainly illegal. That's like me walking into your business, pulling out one of your file cabinets, and tossing the contents across the floor because I wanted to see how fast your secretary could scramble to reorganize the files. Sorry if you can't "turn that into a report" on "how fast the Wikipedia community corrects bad info"...if that's even what they intended in the first place.
Both Google and Babelfish translate "CIA" as "the company". Hmmm...
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
It's ordenador, not computadora.
We're talking about Spain.
Today they mess with Wikipedia, tomorrow they will start an experiment with nuclear war. Spanish must be stopped now, for the sake of world peace and democracy!
"TV Stations need to understand that Wikipedia, and any other web service is NOT their own personal plaything, for them to run 'experiments' on" - isn't that to some extent what Wikpedia is by design, a "plaything" for every person who somehow feels the urge to play with it? Anything else would have had to include a more selective and more restrictive decision of who is allowed to contribute in the first place, instead of the concept of allowing everyone everything.
Although the reported activities of course have to be criticized, it's no wonder they happen. And the suggestion they could be likened to vandalizing a closed private business is way out of proportion, because Wikipedia's concept actually invites such activities and has no effective security measures against them.