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.
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?
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?
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
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
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.