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."
That's the error rate per article, not for the amount of information. Which, as I recall, the very same study found to be 8x larger per article in Wikipedia, making the error rate tremendously lower.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Pay no attention to how well overall Wikipedia actually works.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
You sir are clearly unfamiliar with the US patent office.
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Wikipedia is fantastically useful, if used properly.
If used improperly, it is just as unreliable as... any other page you stumble across on the internet (including on slashdot).
Incorrect method: read an article, and trust it implicitly as the absolute truth. Frankly, this is something that should be avoided for reading any article, regardless of who published it.
Correct method: read the article and provisionally consider it to be true. If you feel in the slightest bit uncomfortable about anything in it, do the following:
1. Check the history tab and look at the last few edits to see if there has been recent vandalism injected into it (always recommended).
2. Check the discussion tab to see if anyone is complaining about anything in it (this step is pretty optional most of the time).
3. Click the references on parts you question and read the referenced articles.
4. Click some external links and see if it checks out.
Recommended method: read the article and edit it as you go. Each time something sounds a little strange, do a bit of research and make it better and/or insert references. Do some copy-edits too. By the time you have completed the article, you will be a basic expert on the subject, and you will have substantially improved the article for all future readers. You rock!
Couple of days ago I heard somebody on the radio make, what I thought, was a good point. The very fact that Wikipedia is well known to be [somewhat] unreliable had the positive effect of making people question all their sources, not just Wikipedia. If you get burned a couple of times while citing from Wikipedia, maybe you'll be a bit more careful overall with what you cite. It's an optimistic view to be sure, but I liked it.