Slashdot Mirror
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."
Let's try the hoax in the summary that Jimmy did it all. The correct answer is:
The earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993,[1] but the concept of an open source web-based online encyclopedia was proposed a little later by Richard Stallman around 1999. Wikipedia was formally launched on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger using the concept and technology of a wiki pioneered by Ward Cunningham.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/History_of_wikipedia
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Yes
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
You should go argue in the discussion, which currently states:
Distinctive odor of ethanol?
As students we did class experiments on this. Statistically, the smeller could not distinguish between ethanol, methanol and isopropyl alcohol. Nor could they distinguish the breath smell of persons who had been given a glass of alcohol-free beer or ordinary alcoholic beer. The ketotic diabetic is often described as having the "odour of alcohol" (ketones). So from where the "distinctive odor"? Is there a reference? It seems to me to be a general sort of "alcohol-ish smell sensation", not distinctive of ethanol at all. --Seejyb 10:15, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
what? no way. EtOH absolutely has a distinctive odor. maybe the students in your class were not accustomed to the specific odor of alcohol solvents but it is certainly different than isoprop. and MeOH. I often work with these three chemicals (and acetone) and the difference in odor between all of them is very VERY readily detectable. --Deglr6328 19:49, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
agreed, isopropyl alcholol and ethanol are entirely different odors. Ethanol is a less pungent sweet odor where as a isopropyl (rubbing alcohol) has a much more prominent harsh pungent odor. Kyanite 06:18, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Wikipedia:Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia
It looks like about 50 errors were recorded.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I dunno, the pair of names "Watson and Crick" are often associated with the double helix; the real scandal is the lack of credit given to Rosalind Franklin.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Then why does this Material Safety Data Sheet for 200 proof ethanol state that it has an "alcohol odor"?
http://www.deconlabs.com/msds/200%20Proof%20Ethanol.pdf
I would contend that Wikipedia's biggest hoax of the decade hasn't been revealed yet.
I know of several hoaxes that still exist on prominent pages.
My son tells stories of the days he was in high school (2005-2006 or so), where they would have competitions to insert random "facts" into articles and see how long they would last. It was a game they played.
He told me that he happened to go to school with a baseball player's son, and in July 2006, someone had inserted that "Johnny Bench is the only major league baseball player who was also a professional bowler." As my son tells the story, Bench's son removed this false information many times, but his legitimate edits kept getting reverted by the Wikipedia staff. It doesn't appear on the page now, but it was on the Wikipedia page so long that it has been repeated around the web many times (Google '"Johnny Bench" bowler' has 184,000 hits).
And now one more! Did you hear that Johnny Bench was a professional Bowler?
I find it hilarious that a trusted source, his own son, couldn't get the mis-information corrected in Wikipedia. Maybe Quora has something up on Wikipedia. Maybe Wikipedia should add the "trusted source" feature that Quora has (identifying the contributor and their credentials).
The problem here is that Rosalind, at that time, was a technician. Though her x-ray techique was extraordinary, it's not a scandal but just a common problem with scientific credit attribution.