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GMU Prof Teaches How To Falsify Wikipedia — and Get Caught
Hugh Pickens writes "Yoni Appelbaum reports in the Atlantic that as part of their coursework in a class that studies historical hoaxes, undergraduates at George Mason University successfully fooled Wikipedia's community of editors, launching a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of a fictitious 19th-century serial killer named Joe Scafe. The students, enrolled in T. Mills Kelly's course, Lying About the Past, used newspaper databases to identify four actual women murdered in New York City from 1895 to 1897, along with victims of broadly similar crimes, and created Wikipedia articles for the victims, carefully following the rules of the site. But while a similar page created previously by Kelly's students went undetected for years, when students posted the story to Reddit, it took just twenty-six minutes for a redditor to call foul, noting the Wikipedia entries' recent vintage and others were quick to pile on, deconstructing the entire tale. Why did the hoaxes succeed in 2008 on Wikipedia and not in 2012 on Reddit? According to Appelbaum, the answer lies in the structure of the Internet's various communities. 'Wikipedia has a weak community, but centralizes the exchange of information. It has a small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining, and most users feel little ownership of the content. And although everyone views the same information, edits take place on a separate page, and discussions of reliability on another, insulating ordinary users from any doubts that might be expressed,' writes Appelbaum. 'Reddit, by contrast, builds its strong community around the centralized exchange of information. Discussion isn't a separate activity but the sine qua non of the site. If there's a simple lesson in all of this, it's that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism (PDF).""
The reason might be that noone read the Wikipedia articles. Once they have linked to them causing people to actually visit it, they were quickly debunked.
is that people (possibly wrongly) believe what they read on wikipedia, but nobody believes fucking anything they read on reddit! the rest follows from there.
We've all rightly been suspicious of wikipedia since its inception. This isn't really news to anyone on slashdot. Sadly, the type of person who really needs to read this article (those who aren't very technologically proficient), will probably never see it.
Further proof that we need the government to assure all of our online identities and stop those that would deceive us!
Truth-telling, I have found, is the key to responsible citizenship. The thousands of criminals I have seen in 40 years of law enforcement have had one thing in common: Every single one was a liar. J. Edgar Hoover
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
There is certainly now a disinclination to do anything to improve Wikipedia, largely brought on by the obsessives who make up the "extremely active editors". You can barely mention the most obvious facts without being accused either of advertising or original research. The casual multitudes that made the site what it is just get put off.
I really find this annoying because to me it shows a fallacy of thinking.
Why should you *not* show skepticism of other types of writing? Just because it's printed by some corporate major publisher is not a guarantee that the material is correct. You're putting a lot of faith in "professional" editors that also might not be fact checking or promoting a bias (Ann Coulter's publisher comes to mind here).
You should be skeptical of writing on the internet, but should be just skeptical of everything else. Everyone is human, everyone has bias, everyone has an agenda, everyone screws up.
I have to agree with Jimmy Wales on this - this is experiment is just as "insightful" as demonstrating to people that you can get away with vandalism.
Yes, it's not that difficult to troll Wikipedia. Just as it's not that difficult to scam old people, dump your trash in the forest, or scratch cars in a parking lot. You would most likely get away with it, but it does not mean that there is a huge security risk in parking lots that the world needs to be made aware of.
Society is based on the fact that most of the time, most people are not assholes, and therefore we don't need a policeman following everyone at all times. People don't troll or vandalise because they see it as the wrong thing to do - and the small risk of getting caught, and humiliated or punished is sufficient to discourage the less ethical ones.
That ought to really impress any prospective employers.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
My experience vandalising Wikipedia - and I do it every so often because it amuses me and because I think Wikipedia is one of the most harmful things the Internet has ever produced - is that Wikipedia is a power struggle game by the impotent.
So the number one rule for letting a vandalisation get through is to never openly disagree with "owners" of an article, i.e. those who make hundreds of edits to push their strong opinions. For example, you're not even going to get facts about Israel's atrocious behaviour in the Israel article, let alone bullshit. (However, it you write subtle bullshit which supports the position of the article owners, you're on to a winner.)
The second rule is to avoid the lazy syophants. Such toadying slimeballs observe all recent changes everywhere for nonsense edits simply to bump up their contribution count, so you need to make sure that no change you make is obviously nonsense.
The third rule is to appeal to stupidity. People who contribute to Wikipedia are neither very smart nor do they feel very secure, so you want to make an edit which is wrong but which makes them feel bad for doubting whether it's correct. If the statement you make is obviously irrelevant, or points to a mainstream source (e.g. mainstream news site) then it is easy to check, will be checked, and will be removed. If it cites a primary reference written for Adults, particularly if it isn't a guaranteed click away, you're much more likely to get away with the edit.
The fourth rule is to eschew braggadocio. Mentioning an obvious troll - your own or otherwise - on any public forum will guarantee that the troll is fixed. As the Stasi well knew, every community has its willing informants.
If you're willing to openly flout research ethics, it's not very hard to produce disinformation in many different venues, most of which rely to a greater or lesser extent on trust.
Here are some other things you can do:
1. Create an authoritative-looking website on an .edu domain with false information about historical events. Odds are, bits of it will eventually start to percolate into the literature and academic talks, especially if you're well-regarded in the area, and the false information is relatively obscure.
2. Insert false historical facts slightly off the main article thesis into peer-reviewed articles. For example, write an engineering paper for an IEEE journal, and then insert a historical footnote with made-up biographical information. This will typically get a weak level of peer review, because IEEE journals will be primarily reviewing your technical contributions, not your historical footnote. Later, "launder" this false information into a more prominent position: write a more historical article, which cites the previous footnote as a source, thereby upgrading it. Now the peer-reviewed literature has confirmed your false information. Now you can really get it enmeshed in Wikipedia: write a Wikipedia article that cites your paper.
3. If you're invited to contribute an article or two to a specialist encyclopedia, one of those "Biographical Dictionary of [Field]" type things, insert false information into it. These carry some authoritative weight, but facts in them are rarely checked in detail, because the work of putting the encyclopedia together at all usually strains resources as it is, so authors have to be trusted.
If anything, I would say that Wikipedia is somewhat more resilient than many of these avenues are. The trick is that its resilience is somewhat eyeball-weighted: if you insert fabricated information into a widely read article such as [[George W. Bush]] or [[Byzantine Empire]], it will be noticed much sooner than if you insert it into a very obscure article that isn't linked anywhere, where nobody is even going to see it until some bored editor hits "Random Article" enough times.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
most users feel little ownership of the content.
This is probably because the admins are very quick to remind editors that they are the real owners, with a revert.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
This actually seems like a pretty plausible analysis. Reddit's culture of liars and attention whores is naturally going to make it a much worse venue for this kind of thing.
That is the reason Reddit picked up on it.
Just over a year ago, I posted (by request) some truths - was quickly lynched by several thousand users, branded a liar and a troll and forced out of the community.
Reddit users had just redefined the truth in their own image.
The dangers of community driven information - be it reddit or wikipedia.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
> But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism.
My personal take:
But on the world, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism.
You can't even be sure about famous dead people having said something; one must rely on certain folks, widely acknowledged as trustworthy, to be able to gather a meaningful set of facts. In the end, such people act more or less like certification authorities -- with much the same problems the latter have.
Would someone malicious post as anonymous? Maybe, but I'm betting not, exactly because the masses believe identity is authenticity... and have no effective way of keeping control on said identities (yes, I'm even talking about any nation).
So beware.
Now, which lesson to learn from this? Maybe change the way Wikipedia works, possibly with Reddit as an example. As a Reddit occasional reader, I can attest it works better than /., at least.
/.ers would have debunked it in 15 minutes. Just sayin'.
Wikipedia was only the medium in this case, and it was Reddit that caught it, not Wikipedia's crack team of editors, cough. This course is important, because what people treat as history is often false, and how it gets that way is import. Sure, this is extreme, but how many people were thinking about what history was false before they heard about this course?
is that people (possibly wrongly) believe what they read on wikipedia, but nobody believes fucking anything they read on reddit! the rest follows from there.
You make a good point. Next time I want to know what the atomic number of lithium is, I am going to check Reddit given their penchant for hard hitting fact finding.
Wish I could mod you to infinity. Britannica for generations portrayed itself as objective because it hired subject matter experts to write its articles. But anyone in any given field knows that there is no one "objective" individual capable of writing a truly neutral article. People should have a healthy skepticism of *any* source, no matter how authoritative they portray themselves as.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
This can happen anywhere. I certainly remember learning about the Tasaday in elementary school.
I find it completely ironic how the MSN throws Wikipedia under the bus. I was recently called by a major MSM print magazine to verify some facts in a story, some of the facts they were asking to verify were clearly laid out in a Wiki page that I myself had edited. Now after referring the editor to the Wiki page they said "we don't accept Wikipedia as a verification", and my response was "I already confirmed to you that the Wikipedia entry is factually correct", they then asked me to verify the facts listing them in the email as opposed to referring them to the Wikipedia site. So, I kindly did a screenshot and put it in the email saying "this is correct".
Now the irony is, I pointed out how the framing of the other facts that they were questioning, was in fact misleading. I also pointed out that they had not included very important facts, which I did list out, which would correct the misleading framing of the story and make it clear in the reader's eyes. Not only did they NOT include the facts that I pointed out in the printed version, but they grossly exaggerated the position and framing that they chose. I guess that sells more magazines.
The MSM industry is broken, corrupt, for sale, and in the hands of corporate giants looking to frame whatever story they want to spin. It is in their best interest that Wikipedia is relegated to a source than can never be used, and whose credibility is diminished to zero in the eyes of the public masses.
Is a fake article about a fake mass murderer 100 years ago a sign of lack of credibility? Or is framing a story around living people that demean them in order to create an "interesting story" that will sell magazines and swing public view toward a desired consensus a sign of lack of credibility? The MSM has zero scruples, and I wonder if there a grant around this research professor? Would be very interesting to know if there was a grant, and who paid for it.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
Subject says it all.
r/askscience
Now that there is a news story about the hoax, it will merit a Wikipedia entry about itself. - Neat!
That's why science operates using peer-review. For a traditional encyclopedia that means that they should have multiple subject matter experts who check each others' work.
For wikipedia, it means that when conflicting edits arise, they should be resolved based on the presence and quality of references presented, with peer-reviewed scientific sources being ideal.
Methinks you didn't actually read the comment you quoted.
...and right now Wikipedia "peer review" amounts to a pissing match between jerk editors. It's past its peak unless this gets fixed.
It isn't that difficult to fool Wikipedia, this is the same people that says Windows NT wasn't designed for the Internet, except this says different.
AccountKiller
I don't believe anything I read on reddit or slashdot. Does that mean I'm suck in an infinite loop? Does that mean I'm suck in an infinite loop? Does that mean I'm suck in an infinite loop? Does that mean I'm suck in an infinite loop? Does that mean I'm suck in an infinit
stack overflow
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
George Mason University curriculum:
"Lying About the Past" - a course for ex-Enron accountants, prerequisite for finding another job
"Lying About the Future" - strongly recommended for a successful career in politics
"Lying about the Present" - a required course for MBA majors
There have been any number of cases where scientists have falsified data that has become the basis of further research. Some of it going undetected for decades. But the example on wikipedia is one where normal skepticism would not be very rational.The topic was chosen NOT to be treated with skepticism. If your sole goal is to get away with lying, its pretty easy to find something where no one is likely to call you on it.
That said, I think the point that Wikipedia hides much of the discussion about the topic from the typical user is well taken. Its a weakness of its "authoritative" style that it needs to resolve disputes rather than leaving that up to reader. But that is also one of its strengths. If you really want an in depth understanding, you need to go beyond reading an encyclopedia. That was true even in the days of print. You can find some real howlers in old Encyclopedia Brittanica's.
...I just don't trust the content anymore. If I'm trying to figure out if the actress I just saw on TV is the daughter of Raquel Welsh, yeah, but anything where there's some vested interest in hiding or distorting the truth (politics), I've learned to stay far away from it. I like learning new things and simply don't have the time to be auditing as much as I'm learning.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The problem with Wikipedia is that they want things to be NPOV and want to use credible sources for if it should be included in the Wiki at all. The content linked to (often newspaper websites) have a high amount of amnesia as articles are moved to archives behind paywalls, and it violates copyright to keep copies of the articles in the wiki.
Something needs to change, and I'd rather the attitude of the super-nerds running the system change to be more inclusive of content and stop telling new people to the site to "fuck off, you didn't edit the page correctly" or "nobody gives a shit about X" . It's not worth time to contribute to a site that will erase your work and tell you off in 30 seconds after you spent several hours researching, formatting, etc an article.
Bitter I may sound, but I'm coming from the angle of running a site with millions of readers, that went from promoting wikipedia when it was new, to telling people to not even go there in 2008. TVTropes pretty much replaced Wikipedia for the kind of content that people were being pissed on by Wikipedia editors. However TVTropes is mostly run by geek minorities (eg LGBT, Furries, etc) and take things to extremes when trying to fit things under a trope label. At least they take "word of god" as a credable source, unlike Wikipedia, which WP considers sock puppeting.
There's also the fact that the Reddit community tends to be extremely skeptical and call bullshit on pretty much anything.
It's like trying to pull a Candid Camera stunt on Alan Funt.
Yeah, I'm old, get over it.
This is an interesting exercise, and surely points out for the deft among us just how malleable online "reality" can be, especially in the hands of an organized conspiracy.
That said, is this a real course? I mean, really? As in, a college course, whereby one receives credit to be put toward receiving a degree from said college? Why are we teaching people to be despicable liars? Shouldn't we be encouraging people to act in exactly the opposite way?
Or do you get extra credit for "Lying about your past"?
You lost me at corporate. Always anti-corporate here, never fails.
Does it mean it is true?
I don't believe anything I read on reddit or slashdot. Does that mean I'm suck in an infinite loop? Does that mean I'm suck in an infinite loop? Does that mean I'm suck in an infinite loop? Does that mean I'm suck in an infinite loop? Does that mean I'm suck in an infinit
stack overflow
Boy, have you got a short stack...
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
Not as short as your bus, Oscar.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
stack overflow
Sorry, that's a different site.
At some point, you're going to have to trust someone, unless you want to spend years researching all the chemical properties of molybdenum yourself. So we set up tiers of trust, which generally is determined by the amount of review, the expertise of the review, and how many times that review(s) have been wrong before. Of course, once you get into the social sciences, then you have to deal with the biases (as you said), plus competing models of thought (psychology), vague facts (history), processes (politics), etc.
So I'm still going to go with book/magazine/journal over the internet, since at least there is some oversight.
Ooh, just thought of a car analogy! Internet- car manufacturers touting their models. One step up- Consumer Reports review said models.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
tldr-- The 2008 "hoax" isn't really a hoax, and the 2012 attempt at a hoax failed spectacularly. So what's the story here?
There's an old episode of the "Dana Carvey show" where two snickering guys make an order at a fast food drive-thru, pay at the window, and then quickly drive off without receiving their food. They then laugh at how easy it was for their "hoax" to succeed, and how the employee looked when they didn't take their food, all the while oblivious to the fact that a hoax isn't really a hoax when _they_ are the only ones who end up looking foolish.
Same thing is going on here as far as I can tell. If there were _any_ amount of nodes linking to that fabricated page from the first "hoax" it would have been mentioned in the article (because that would be a hoax in the real sense of people who _aren't_ the pranksters being affected by bad information), so I'm assuming that noone linked to it or cared about it. Wikipedia's whole strength is predicated upon the initial ease with which _anyone_ can edit or post a new entry, and since space isn't limited like a 19th-century encyclopedia, or a scientific journal, it is insignificant that an article that isn't linked nor read by anyone other than the pranksters can sit there for awhile. (Sitting there costs $0; removing unlinked, unread garbage costs greater than $0.)
And for the second hoax, notice that the moment the students tried to create a meaningful link to their fake articles on Reddit they were discovered. The professor disengenuously interprets this as a plus for Reddit and a minus for Wikipedia, when what it actually shows is what I described above: creating unlinked, unread entries is easy (again, by _design_), and linking them is hard. As the article states, the first thing a Reddit user noticed was the age of the Wikipedia articles. Now if the students were able to fake the age of an article, or do something that isn't actually assumed to be easy by design, that would be news. Otherwise this is just a classroom of fools laughing at today's equivalent of typing 59009 in a calculator.
(Ann Coulter's publisher comes to mind here)
I would include them in the mix, but I certainly wouldn't exclude other media outlets. Sometimes for fun I read through a half dozen or so Google links to the same news article, their bias jumps out at you. Fox, NY Times, LA Times, Al Jazeera, Asian Times, BBC, CNN ... it doesn't matter which you pick, the story will be subtly or not so subtly biased.
Is this the point where someone is supposed to point out that an encyclopedia isn't a source?
The Kitty Genovese case was the announcement to the world of that sort of community involvement had ended. It had been coming for a while, but that was really the big thing that people could point to. You might not remember this, but it was where a young woman was screaming she was being stabbed for something like a half an hour before finally succumbing to her wounds. Nobody came to help or even called the police.
But the other side of the Kitty Genovese case is that the media constructed a narrative -- "38 people watched and did nothing" -- that demonstrably wasn't based in fact. There were maybe 2-3 people who (probably) knowingly ignored it, and at least one who tried to help. Most of them had no idea of what was going on.
It's worth thinking about why the story became what it did. From the media's point of view, mayhem sells -- "if it bleeds, it leads" -- and a ghastly, horrifying story is made all the more attractive when you add the "38 witnesses" angle. From a political point of view, there are certain...advantages...to making people feel fearful, cynical, and isolated. When you combine that with the right mix of anger and indignation, it can be very useful indeed.
Maybe if you believe no one cares, it's partly because the people who control the narrative want you to believe that no one cares.
It is a quote from Louis Armstrong, the first man on the moon.
Just check wikipedia if you don't believe me.
Or check http://xkcd.com/202/
No brain, no pain.
Where's the control for this experiment? How about posting a similar but completely factual article? I bet you'd get the same results -- no response on Wikipedia, and a dogpile of people on Reddit calling "FAKE!"
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Some people find it harder to edit Wikipedia. The syntax is plainly confusing. There are many people out there who can help improve content, making it easier could convince them to do it. It's probably being worked on, a WYSIWYG editor complete with templates, citations, etc. would help There could e an advanced mode for those familiar with the syntax.
Yoni Appelbaum writes in his article that the first created urban ledgend was "the exploits of Edward Owens"
This was called a hoax on youtube three years ago.
Following the links in the article: Video of Edward Owens' House and Gravesite
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9OWh24YWLE
"its fake- it was somewhat of an experiment to see how long academia could go
on perpetuating a hoax before someone came along and actually debunked it
through research instead of just believing everything thats out there.
vezidane in reply to scottieraz (Show the comment) 3 years ago" (sic)
Odd others didn't follow up on it, the video shows up on a search.
You are quite right, but I think the main idfference is that if you get a printed book/article, it can't be changed, so it is (a) more likely you'll try to get it right and (b) much more subject to subsequent cross-checking.
It is also a general fault of the education system that people don't seem to be able to distinguish between fact and opinion, and this applies particularly to non-arts courses where people seem to think that subjects like maths or physics deals in absolute truths. If I read (say) a history book, certain things are facts and others are interpretations, and you need to read several different accounts before you can work out which are which. And this is what you are taught if yu study history.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If you blindly accept an article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica or any other single source as neutral and definitive, you have missed out on a proper education, and should take steps to correct it.
I hear there are some great, free online resources for this, such as Wikipedia.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Just because there is no objective, absolute truth, doesn't mean that all imperfect sources are equally useless.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Anyone who is careful about their sources of information and willing to use Wikipedia as a source, is going to validate the references used in any Wikipedia article of interest. An experiment to forge wiki articles and references, or misdirect reference links to forged websites only indicates the problems with the internet as a whole, not entirely the problems with Wikipedia. To attack Wikipedia in particular, and not internet sources as a whole is likely being prejudicial (and maybe elitist as well) to the public having expansive (and nearly instantaneous) levels of information at their fingertips via the Wikipedia model.