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95% of User-Generated Content Is Bogus
coomaria writes "The HoneyGrid scans 40 million Web sites and 10 million emails, so it was bound to find something interesting. Among the things it found was that a staggering 95% of User Generated Content is either malicious in nature or spam." Here is the report's front door; to read the actual report you'll have to give up name, rank, and serial number.
I don't assume they included Wikipedia in the "user generated" category, otherwise that much non-bogus content would have definitely tipped the scale a bit.
In my personal experience however, even without wikipedia, I have not come across that much bogus stuff on forums and random comments.
You really think the 5% of population that has been alive in the last 100 years counts for that much population in history? Even considering the increase in population we could only go back to like -1000-2000. I'm sure there have been people before that.
Every single hour the Internet HoneyGrid scans some 40 million websites for malicious code as well as 10 million emails for unwanted content and malicious code.
So 40 million sites per hour is 960 million sites per day. While wikipedia says that there over 25 billion pages but can that number be accurate?
More likely they are generalizing the activity they are seeing on their fake/honey pot sites on the internet as a whole.
There were, but not many. Nowhere near the scads of people roaming the planet today. I've read that there have been several times in known history where there were fewer than a couple hundred thousand people; it's plausible that the past 100 years has had more people alive than all of human history, considering the multiple near-extinction events which have supposedly occurred.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
How much of it is user generated content that's copied from one site onto a zillion others?
the subtext is, the internet is dangerous so you need to buy their product.
"Ninety percent of everything is crud."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law
Anonymity comes into play I suspect. I'm not a psychologist though. It makes me wonder if there will be any attempt (or anyone with the compute power and gumption is more accurate I suppose) to fact check Wikipedia. I'm rather curious as to how that will turn out if it is done in a non-biased and total in situ way. I imagine it would take a great deal of work and then there are people who will lay claim as to it being constantly changed but the point that I'm considering is what is the accuracy level at a particular moment in time. I'm not interested in how accurate it may be in the future, just the now.
I don't actually hold any opinion on its accuracy and I refer to it for my own needs quite frequently. I'm mostly curious as it is one of the largest sites with user generated content and it holds an authoritative position in some circles.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Pepsi supports Israeli fascism while depleting your precious bodily fluids. And Snapple kills Afro-Americans seven different ways. http://www.snopes.com/business/alliance/snapple.asp
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
I've registered in Chicago, and it was very easy. Voting after that registration required a drivers license though.
But it doesn't interfere much with most poeple's use of the web.
It does interfere, however, with entrepreneurs who wish to establish an online company. Most intelligible domain names are already taken, and a large part (most?) by such domain spammers.
This is a really interesting question, and as your link points out, a very difficult one to solve given that we know so little of our own history. There is a lot of evidence human civilization was thriving until a comet strike about 13,000 years ago on the North American continent wiped out most of the worlds population and potentially raised sea levels dramatically, submerging their cities.
There is evidence that there were some advanced civilizations prior to the theorized comet incident. They might have had large populations. The problem is that this topic tends to attract the type of people that like to throw around terms like "Atlantians" and "Nephilim", so its really hard to casually research. Typing in "13,000" and "comet" to Google gets you mostly websites with black backgrounds with star fields on them, purple new-age-y fonts, and a lot of talk about Noah and aliens (contributing greatly to the 95% of the internet is bullshit figure above, I'm sure).
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
I'm not surprised. Wikipedia is great for niche articles like finding out what happened to Star Trek, The Experience. Such niche information wouldn't be viable for Britannica to cover, but anyone with an interest can put up an article about it. If you want real articles on things like science, DON'T GO TO AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. They're about as good at teaching you usable science as they are teaching you how to play the flute.
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