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The Biggest Hoaxes In Wikipedia's First Decade

Posted by Soulskill on from the giraffes-turn-out-not-to-actually-wear-pants dept.

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."

4 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Founder Hoax by TaoPhoenix · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

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  2. Re:Is there a Wikipedia page for this? by OverlordQ · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes

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  3. Re:It would be very interesting ... by molo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Wikipedia:Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia

    It looks like about 50 errors were recorded.

    -molo

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  4. Re:Jimmy Wins by Vainglorious+Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's the same thing that happened to that other guy who made the discovery of 'Watson's Double Helix of DNA'

    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.

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