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,{{citation-needed}} generally changed by the whiny commie demoncrat terrorists to spread their communist lies.{{citation-needed}}
for all the idiots: Mexico != Spain
It is for sufficiently large values of Mexico.
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.
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.
Just because it's a medium that allows anyone to edit stuff, it doesn't mean adding bogus information isn't vandalism. That's like spraying painting graffiti on a wall isn't vandalism because paint sticks to the wall.
How on Earth can two television stations be of homosexual leanings?
Vandalizing wikipedia is gay.
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'
The problem is if 8 year old Johnny can't edit the page, he won't bother. Anyone can fix a typo, but if it's too much work they won't do it.
The openness is the reason wikipedia succeeded. Not because being open gives better content, but because being open gives more content, and more content makes it valuable to more people, and being valuable to more people gives them more editors, and more editors usually gives better content.
Also, you're forgetting: any page with regular vandalism does get locked down.
The bottom of each page links to Wikipedia'a:
s claimer/
a imer/
s claimer/
l aimer/
s claimer/
General Disclaimer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_di
Which links to the specific disclaimers:
Risk disclaimer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Risk_discl
Medical disclaimer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Medical_di
Legal disclaimer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Legal_disc
and
Content disclaimer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Content_di
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.
"We were just testing to see how fast the emergency services would react..."
I'll probably be modded down for this...
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?
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.
"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.