The Biggest Hoaxes In Wikipedia's First Decade

jbrodkin writes "Wikipedia will celebrate its 10th birthday on Saturday, with founder Jimmy Wales having built the site from nothing to one of the most influential destinations on the Internet. Wikipedia's goal may be to compile the sum total of all human knowledge, but it's also, perhaps, the best tool in existence for perpetuating Internet hoaxes. Top hoaxes include a student who fooled the entire world's media with a fake obituary quote, Rush Limbaugh spouting inaccurate facts lifted from Wikipedia, the incorrect declaration of Sinbad's death, Stephen Colbert's African elephant prank, Hitler posters on the bedroom wall of a teenage Tony Blair, and several fake historical figures invented out of thin air. Wales has taken steps to head off vandalism including preventing unregistered editors from creating new pages and temporarily protecting controversial articles, but Wikipedia's very nature makes it susceptible to the hoaxes described in this story."

Comments

biggest hoax ever

[ILuvRamen]

If you think about it, smart people know how Wikipedia really works (or fails to work) and how it's a totally unreleiable source for information alone. Feel free to go see the quoted source in any article and then you've got something but wikipedia articles by themselves with no external sources that can be checked are the same reliability as a random forum post.
So really, the biggest wikipedia hoax was wikipedia convincing everyone from Rush Limbaugh to prosecutors in court cases and thousands of others that it was a bulletproof source for information. They make it look sooo clean and nice and professional and don't have any visible warning about the inaccuracy in most cases. If they'd just put on the top of every article in 36 point font: "WARNING: some random person wrote all this and it might be completely made up" then it would be okay but until then, it looks like the hoax continues.