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
... to see a list of the top ten errors in Britannica (or any other respected paper encyclopedia) corrected in Wikipedia. I suspect that it wouldn't be hard to make at all; the only challenge would be choosing the ten best from a very long list. But of course that wouldn't play to the article's message.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
this always made me chuckle...
No, I don't think the act was funny or it should be joked about, before you start.
The founder of Orange Julius did not invent a shower stall for pigeons
Uhh, BULLSHIT. I spent the better part of my 50s grappling with the feather-matrix. -Harold Julius.
Yes
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Look carefully. He was masquerading as an expert in Theology... How hard is it to be an expert in something that is inherently 100% fiction anyway?
Am I trolling?
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.
I can't miss the opportunity to relate this little story: At my last command before I got out of the Marine Corps I was wasting time on Wikipedia one day and I decided to look up the new General who had taken command the week before, I was shocked to find out that he is in fact a "world renowned necromance, responsible for the de-vaginization of Ma Jaya", and that his death had been "fortold by Ma Jaya using the razor leaf technique". After I laughed until I had nearly pissed myself, I had to report it to our security manager as a possible threat against the general. Which was also hilarious.
Every chemist knows that pure ethanol is odorless and every reputable reference book describes it that way. And yet the wikipedia article on ethanoI to this day describes ethanol as having "a strong characteristic odor." I have tried to correct this obvious error but my edits are quickly reversed. Perhaps this is a small internet hoax that is being perpetuated so police can continue to attest that the "smell of alcohol" was on drunk drivers' breath? (That smell actually is from aldehydes and esters produced when ethanol is broken down in the liver.)
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
You sir are clearly unfamiliar with the US patent office.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
In fairness to Stephen Colbert on the African Elephant prank, the scientific data release a couple of months later did vindicate his claim that the elephant population had significantly increased. Oddly enough it created an element of truth for his concept of wikiality true as well.
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. - Albert Einstein
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!
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
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).
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.
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.