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An Accidental Wikipedia Hoax
Andreas Kolbe writes: The Daily Dot's EJ Dickson reports how she accidentally discovered that a hoax factoid she added over five years ago as a stoned sophomore to the Wikipedia article on "Amelia Bedelia, the protagonist of the eponymous children's book series about a 'literal-minded housekeeper' who misunderstands her employer's orders," had not just remained on Wikipedia all this time, but come to be cited by a Taiwanese English professor, in "innumerable blog posts and book reports", as well as a book on Jews and Jesus. It's a cautionary tale about the fundamental unreliability of Wikipedia. And as Wikipedia ages, more and more such stories are coming to light.
You will invariably come across some who think they know, some who know, some who pretend to know, some who know they don't know and some who just want to mess with you. It's still better than not asking, for fear of not getting distilled truth.
Where people claim to have added information to wikipedia as part of a hoax when in fact they didn't.
then again, a joke update written about something as obscure as jumping spiders by a coworker some years ago was found and removed within HOURS of its posting. Wikipedia still, due to the competitive nature of its maintenance, beats out well established entities such as encyclopædia brittanica, et cetera.
Well there is your problem right there. This Wikipedia scare mongering creates a cloak masking real problems. You are never going to stop, nor should you, people form using the most comprehensive information source ever. Complaining about how it is not perfect is just hurting any valid points to be made. The point being, Wikipedia is not a source of anything, it is the product of a series of sources. So you do not cite Wikipedia, you cite the article it points to. If people had told me that back when I was in school, I would actually used that idea to get better sources, instead of just scoffing at the idea of not using Wikipedia (which was and continues to be a ridiculous idea).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Especially if you are a professor you should know better. Wikipedia articles cite sources. Well, some of them do. If they don't, you should raise an eyebrow.
If you see a statement in a Wikipedia article that you are thinking of repeating or relying on for something, look first to see: does it cite a source? In this case it did not. In that case, stop here, you should probably not trust the statement. At least not if it's something that matters at all. If it does cite a source, then things are better, but there is still one more step before you should rely on it for anything more than barroom trivia (like, say, publishing an academic paper): you should probably take a glance at that source and see if it really says that.
Incidentally, this will help you use other reference works as well. There are a lot of errors in printed books as well, especially more popular books (those "Who's Who In the Roman World" type books are riddled with incorrect facts). The way to avoid being tripped up by them is to look for references first, and check references second. (How thoroughly to do so of course depends on what you're using the information for.)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I do love the smell of collateral misinformation in the morning!
It was mildly amusing that the author's wiki account was suspended. Better late than never..
Whatever will we do with this incorrect fictional character biography?
Has anyone verified that this actually happened, or are we taking the words from a blog literally true? You know, the way Amelia Bedelia would.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
About five years ago, I had a friend who was in school getting his Master's in Topology. I haven't spoken with him since then (due to both of us being busy and losing contact) but my guess is that he's got his PhD by now. At the time, there was a Wikipedia page, which I can't seem to find today, that was a list of well-known eccentrics - by that I mean people displaying eccentric behavior, not painters or electricians or any of the other multitude of ways that term is used.
I used to joke with this guy that he was becoming like John Nash, the schizophrenic game theorist (see: A Beautiful Mind) and writing math on his walls at night. He showed me the list of eccentrics, and I put him (his name is John Lynch) on there stating that he was known on the Boston University campus for covering his dorm walls in obscure mathematical formulas.
That edit lasted at LEAST three years, but I hadn't thought about it until now. If someone can find that article (assuming it's still up somewhere) I'd like to see if his name is still on it.
Spot on... Wikipedia is only as unreliable as WE are. If we see an error and don't fix it, we're part of the problem.
The fact that this went unnoticed and unchanged all this time shows a fundamental flaw in the process: not everything gets reviewed. If the majority of editors spent more time reviewing articles and less time reverting my edits in nitpicks over "policy," Wikipedia would be much improved!
I can see how this would be considered frustrating. However, it seems to me that the Wikipedia idea is still a valid one. This article can now be changed, corrected, as it were. And overall, most people that come along and care about the information are going to try to correct it. If this were in a physical book, and wrong, it's wrong basically forever.
Encyclopedias are (were?) expensive, and for instance, my folks bought me a set when I was young and didn't get a new set for probably a decade or more. But I always "knew" that they were correct. However, teachers always made you have several sources, not just an encyclopedia. That cross-checking should be in place even today with Wikipedia. In fact, this could help fix a broken entry.
Of course, they need a process to stop "back-and-forth" changes of things. I think they need to have some indication that over all, an article is getting more and more correct, and thus should be harder and harder to change. I don't know, maybe they have something like this in place.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
This is not a cautionary tale about the fundamental unreliability of wikipedia. This is a cautionary tale about the fundamental unreliability of human knowledge. That Taiwanese English professor, those "innumerable blog posts and book reports", that book on Jews and Jesus - all of them accepted the account as given. That makes them *also* unreliable, together with the plethora of tertiary sources that might cite them. The fact that the untruth was initially added to wikipedia and not some other location is irrelevant. The real problem is the tendency of mankind to accept things as given without checking up on it.
It's a cautionary tale about the fundamental unreliability of Wikipedia
As opposed to what? The things that people "knowledgeably" trade, like the one about us using "only 10% of our brains"? Or the things that we "know for sure" about ancient history? A few uncaught jokes in Wikipedia, and suddenly it's no more reliable than hearsay? (Or how else am I supposed to interpret this "fundamental unreliability"?) Sooner or later, someone would have attached a [citation needed] to that anyway.
Ezekiel 23:20
Take a look at Snopes once, huh?
Every time somebody says something, it passes through the public mind. Sometimes it gets down five people and dies; others, it becomes an ever-growing ball of horse shit, and people start claiming that it takes 8 pounds of honey to build a honey comb that holds 1 pound of honey when, in reality, beeswax is pretty cheap in terms of hive storage economy.
There are so many untrue things on Wikipedia just by way of almost everyone believing them--things that are printed in earnest in College textbooks and technical manuals, repeated by experts in field, and yet readily testable as not-true. These are just like Aristotle claiming heavier objects fall faster--and, 3000 years later, Galileo drops a grape and an iron brick at the same time, and both hit the ground simultaneously; did nobody think to check something other than a rock versus a feather? Today, we have the same.
To make matters worse, anyone can purchase a domain name, set up a Web host or lease hosting, and publish anything they want with nobody able to edit it or mark it as suspect or inaccurate. Between word-of-mouth, books printed by whoever the hell wants to, Web sites with no validating authority, and forums where inaccurate posts aren't edited by moderators or community and are often supported by a circle jerk of clueless idiots, where do you expect to get any authoritative information?
Wikipedia has the public access problem in a different scale: anyone can post anything on the Internet or in books or private magazines without contradiction; but, on Wikipedia, you get only as much contradiction as attention, amplified inverse to plausibility. That is to say: if what you post is not obviously wrong and not on a high-traffic article, it will probably fall through; if what you post is ridiculous or is on a high-traffic article, someone will notice the inaccuracy.
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Yes yes, wikipedia is "fundamentally unreliable". But didn't someone do a study and find that Encyclopaedia Britannica was MORE unreliable? Considering how many factoids are in wikipedia, my guess is that the overall reliability is probably pretty excellent, and the discovery of an error, even a deliberate an egregious one like this one, doesn't change that.
Maybe the REALLY unreliable factoid is the claim that wikipedia is unreliable. We should learn that anecdotes do not make good statistics.
A former coworker once vandalized the list of fatal bear attacks (he added a friend of his to the list). Wikipedia has since been corrected, but not before the name Nick Ruberto (who is alive and well) appeared on several other lists of bear attacks (on some lists he appears as Nick Roberto, but all other details are the same.): https://www.google.com/?gws_rd...
According to my ex-coworker, he received a one-year edit ban once discovered, which was increased to a lifetime edit ban when he appealed.
...due to the competitive nature of its maintenance...
This so-called "feature" has turned out to be more of a problem than a feature. You have competitive hovering mods removing any content they happen to disagree with, even if that content is accurate.
Sorry, Wikipedia is good, but it is not all its fan-bois crank it up to be.
You got a cite for that little factoid?
I'm sorry.
https://www.google.com/search?...
.
Andreas submitted it here, but the author of the Daily Dot piece is not wikipedia-obsessed.
You got a cite for that little factoid?
Yep, here ya go:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5471141&cid=47565811
In the olden days, as my children like to call them, we learned that you only use an encyclopedia. For those too young to remember, and encyclopedia is a set of articles about stuff, like Wikipedia. It came in a large set of books. It was edited by a much smaller, and, we assume, more educated set of people than Wikipedia. But even so, we recognized that a small summary article could not sufficiently convey the complexity and nuances of the subjects we were eager to study. We also understood, that such a large volume of knowledge was likely to contain oversimplification and plain errors. That is why the articles included a bibliography of sources, so we could find those books and expand our knowledge more completely and accurately. Somewhere along the line, we grew lazy. We got used to the instant gratification of the internet. Somewhere along the line we decided it was too much trouble to GET OUR HEAD OUT OF OUR ASSES AND READ A FUCKING BOOK.
Sorry
This isn't about Wikipedia being unreliable. It's about authors being unreliable. Check your fucking sources, or get a job at MacDonalds.
Spot on... Wikipedia is only as unreliable as WE are. If we see an error and don't fix it, we're part of the problem.
Bt when you encounter a lemma about a childrens book you don't know, you usually assume it's just a book you don't know! Which is usually not an error, unless you can claim to know all childrens books. (and the standard pronounciation is pretty far from the prank call like "I'm a liar" that's probably supposed to be)
bickerdyke
The fact that this went unnoticed and unchanged all this time only shows that nobody f***ing cared.
I'm so done with this "Wikipedia has incorrect information and thus it's not worth anything" BS. The brilliance of Wikipedia is that if you know about something and can cite some high quality source, you can ethically edit an article. Some people edit articles imperfectly, but others will come by and improve.
While we like to think that being absolutely perfect is the best option, it's impossible. Getting that last 5-10% of absolute perfection requires a massive amount of work (time, money, etc.). When striving for anything error-free, perfection becomes the enemy of good and we don't have the massive community within Wikipedia to actually add new articles and information. Instead of perfection, it's the agility of the Wikipedia community that brings the greatest value. They can add, remove, and correct anything-- and so can you. You just have to care enough to do so and do so with informative source material.
Our entire culture of information exchange is unreliable.
People believe things simply because they're told them. They discount ideas, facts and people simply because it runs contrary to their beliefs, incorrect facts held as true or it simply because runs contrary to what they want to believe.
'Heartbleed'.
It took 4 years before it was discovered, and even then, it was only found because it was a security-related bug. Shallow bugs don't cause the Internet to break.
"Linus's Law" is a failed hypothesis; it is not a theory, and certainly not a law. The distinction is important. At best, it could be rewritten as "Linus's Oft-Repeated Wish."
John
I also RTFA about that here, and yes, it was long but I read it all.
It said that Wikipedia had more errors, but much longer and complete articles than the Britannica, so error rate was lower overall.
What a BS complaint. "I posted something untrue on a self-publishing site". Gee, color me oh-so-impressed.
All the more amusing is the comments system, which only offers logins though FB or TW, and as a part of this, gains your friends list and the ability to post on your behalf. That's so the software in question can post lies (adverts) with your name on them.
Maybe the Wiki caused the term "truthiness" to be created, but it certainly didn't create the concept. People have always, and always will, greatly prefer to believe whatever they believe other people like them believe rather than anything resembling the truth. The fact that the comments system is based on taking advantage of this invalidates the entire argument of the article.
rv to previous version - source must be notable
Well written wikipedia pages have sitings.
And really well-written pages have citations.
Wir sind geboren, um frei zu sein - Rio Reiser
The information for 99.9% of wiki pedia articles is useful.
Only politically charged articles and obscure articles are suspect.
I can see how something that might be true but which is very hard to verify as true or false on a non critical subject (like this book character hoax) would last a while. But I'd never encounter it in my use of the Wiki.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There must be competition to see who can write the most inscrutable math article that's gotten way out of hand.
Play Command HQ online
I'm shock that nobody questioned this un-cited fact for this important book about a servant and her duties. Is anyone thinking of the children? This does not bode well for our civilization.
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
All the errors whether intentional or not occur in printed media as well.
There seems to be another effort underway to discredit Wikipedia, I'm amused by the claims of errors and inaccuracies and frankly they pale in comparison to some I've seen in printed books.
The nice thing about Wikipedia is you can hop right on there and fix it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Obviously the only thing to do is to actually write a book about Amelia Bedelia's antics. Then all would be well with the world.
/ off to write a wiki article about how humanoid sexbots will free humanity from its chains
Linus's law works perfectly well; it simply has an implicit assumption that most people don't realize: a bug is known to exist. It was never about bugs leaping out of the woodwork at passersby, it was about bugs being unable to elude a sufficiently large number of searchers.
Is that Ms. Dickson didn't correct her attempt(s) at humor after she sobered up. That no one else ever bothered could be taken as an indication of the significance of the subject. While the books may be popular, the author's life clearly isn't (yet).
The contexts in which her entry was cited ("Jews and Jesus" - really?) probably also indicate a lack of significance.
I'm not very good at the HMTL linky thing, so I'll skip that, but interested parties may want to check the Wikipedia article on the late Ron Stewart, former hockey player in the NHL. If you go through the history of edits and look at the original article, you probably don't have to know much about hockey to realize that the article content is absurd with multiple references to his supposed love of pottery and other ridiculous claims. Yet the absurd and unsubstantiated claim from the original article that his father was a lumberjack and Stewart grew up in Mobile, Alabama (there is no way an NHL hockey player of his era could have grown up in the Deep South of the USA and made it to the NHL) persisted for over 3 and a half years before finally being removed. The current article on Stewart seems factual.
http://xkcd.com/978/
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
My point is there are not enough searchers working on our behalf, primarily because there is not enough incentive. (The NSA and Chinese may have found the bug years ago, for all we know, but they have a strong incentive to find vulnerabilities. Not enough people are paying White Hats to find these bugs and get them fixed.) Linus' Observation uses the clause "given enough eyeballs", which implies to the reader that someone is actually providing the appropriate number of eyeballs required. That implied assumption is made every time someone says "Open Source software is more secure than proprietary software, because of Linus' Law." But it simply hasn't proven to be a realistic assessment, or a very effective guarantor of security.
There's an unwritten corollary at play here: "given enough code, you won't have enough eyeballs." And that's something else keeping Linus' Observation from becoming a valid hypothesis. It even applies to this story, as well. "Given enough Wikipedia articles, there aren't enough fact checkers."
John
Nothing you read should ever be assumed to be true. It does not matter whether it is written on Wikipedia, on a dead tree, or some other website. Critical thinking and fact checking are paramount. Does it smell like BS? It probably is.[1]
[1] This statement was retrieved verbatim from a 6,000 year old marble tablet in the hills of Shangri La. So it must be true.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
You have competitive hovering mods removing any content they happen to disagree with, even if that content is accurate.
Even if that content is accurate and sourced and being written by an expert in the field. It's for this reason that I no longer even try to edit Wikipedia for any reason. And it's why I don't really trust it for anything important - the system as it is allows non-expert keyboard warriors to be the bottleneck for information. That's ridiculous.
I wouldn't say "the assumption is infeasible" makes it invalid, merely impractical. But I agree with everything else.
Years ago, this myth was exposed by an article in the New York Times. And yet the myth keeps getting repeated. A couple of years ago, I saw this nonsense being perpetuated- ironically, in an article in the Times. I wrote the editor of the article to complain that he was repeating something that the Times itself had debunked, and that they should publish a correction; they never did (the Times are a bunch of smug, lazy hacks).
I do think Wikipedia is probably worse for this than most other sources of information, but the bigger problem is that people are insufficiently skeptical. We assess information based on how well it fits what we already know, and what we want to believe- instead of trying to verify it. Slashdot is a perfect example of this- people constantly prefer to pull bullshit facts out of the air to support their opinions, rather than spend two minutes to read the original article or look up a statistic online.
Yet when I once tried to remove some text describing a certain type of LCD technology as being lesbian, the editors had reverted my fix within an hour; LCD panels are apparently truely lesbian and I should not have wanted to hide that fact.
More likely, some Wikipedia editors are just very protective of "their" pages and will revert any edit without verification. After several removals of these obvious kinds of jokes, typos and some none-controversial, cited additions were immediately reverted without any reason given, I stopped editing Wikipedia.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The number of times the hoaxer says, "we were stoned" makes me think her next project is to google bomb herself with the keyword "stoned"?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The picture of the character at the Wikipedia site appears to be real, and was uploaded by someone else entirely.
The reference to the author, Peggy Parrish, appears to be real, a real person, a real author.
Numerous other links to Amelia Bedelia books, stage plays, movies, etc. appear to be valid and real, and date FAR earlier than this purported hoax.
I submit that EJ Dickson, the self-proclaimed hoaxer, is hoaxing us all with a hoax about a non-existing hoax!
The person you are talking about was Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall who wrote "Men Against Fire" about WWII experiences, which is where the low direct fire ratio theory came from.
And yes, it was very controversial and got debunked, but I've heard that factoid repeated to the present day. I think it gets repeated because it sounds both interesting and believable at the same time to people who haven't been shot at. For those who have been shot at (and shot back), it obviously does not ring true.
For extra irony, here's his Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
books, which are never updated and only rarely publish errata - and when errata IS published, it is never stored with the book. I'd love to see someone walk into a school, open a textbook and denounce every "hoax" inside. Bonus points if it's a school in an "underprivileged" area, which most likely uses older books!
My brother went to look something up in an encylopedia the other day... but it was not there, because it was something that came about or was discovered after his encyclopedia set was published.
It's a real problem, because Wikipedia's trustworthiness depends on its verifiability policy. Everything in Wikipedia is supposed to be traceable to a reliable source. Unfortunately, Wikipedia itself has become so trustworthy that supposedly trustworthy sources are becoming too uncritical about trusting Wikipedia.
Back circa 2004-2005 a respected editor added a statement to an article saying that Rutgers had been originally been invited to join the Ivy League but had declined. This interesting, plausible, and credible statement was in the article for a while, but was eventually challenged.
The editor originally had trouble providing a good source, but eventually came up with a newspaper article in a New Jersey newspaper, one that would usually be considered a reliable source. Other editors were inclined to accept, this, until one of them realized it was a fairly recent article, contacted the reporter, and asked for the reporter's source.
The reporter replied that he had read it in Wikipedia and used it (without attribution).
Now, it's not clear whether or not the statement is true. The last I knew, the editor said he had gotten it from an old issue of the "Targum," the Rutgers University newspaper, which would probably have qualified as a reliable source, but since he was unable to provide volume, issue, date, or page numbers, the statement was not verifiable at that time and was removed.
But it is an clear example of circular reference--an unverifiable statement almost being kept in Wikipedia, based on support from a "reliable" source that had gotten it from Wikipedia.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"Yet when I once tried to remove some text describing a certain type of LCD technology as being lesbian, the editors had reverted my fix within an hour;"
Yea, got a link to the talk page and such about that, eh?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Go check out the grow lights section on Wikipedia. It's so much repeated and poorly-sourced advertising-as-fact that almost all of that information is WRONG.
And this is why I will never help/donate/edit Wikipedia. There's no way to stop the controlling interests. All information on Wikipedia should therefore be assumed false.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'm not convinced Wikipedia is somehow profoundly not an encylopedia. Part of the reason your post doesn't convince me is because you criticize Wikipedia for not being "on par with the Brittanica" without specifying what you think exactly that par is, or what exactly you think "the concept of an encyclopedia is". It's difficult to have a conversation about these things without understanding what you view those things to be.
I know that I don't get the same freedoms with Brittanica I get with Wikipedia: I'm not allowed to distribute verbatim or edited copies of Brittanica entries. These freedoms translate into practical outcomes for most people, most notably the main means of keeping Wikipedia viable and an (apparently) mainstream source of information. By contrast, if someone wants to build on what they view as Brittanica's articles they have to negotiate with Brittanica to do that (and I've never seen anyone do this) but I know of projects that build on Wikipedia. Many articles I find interesting and worth listing in an encyclopedia are simply missing from Brittanica but are present in Wikipedia, such as why Brittanica thinks "GNU/Linux" and "Linux" are the same (which is both inaccurate and unfair) while maintaining that the former is an operating system and the latter a kernel (which is accurate and fair).
I have no changelog for Brittanica, so I have nothing to point to there that compares with what I can get in Wikipedia's changelog. TFA implicitly shows the value of changelogs for identifying how long edits have remained and who edited what when.
As for editing by non-experts: I don't know who edits Brittanica's many editions (including the paper editions) nor do I know what their qualifications are. I find this to be roughly equivalent to Wikipedia because I don't know who edits Wikipedia either, nor do I know their qualifications.
I remember some years ago reading an article by a Brittanica affiliate who essentially proposed to weigh Brittanica and Wikipedia on an evaluation of one obscure point he knew something about. Not only is that bad surveying, but it invites critique that can be used against Brittanica just as easily. I recall being struck by how behind the times Brittanica was the last time I saw it, particularly on the free software movement, a topic I know something about. I found the lack of coverage in Brittanica telling. Where Brittanica had something to say on the matter, I found Brittanica made the usual errors and confusions people make when they've only been exposed to "open source" (such as attributing what Richard Stallman's actions with "open source" despite historical contradiction and Stallman's own words and deeds); open source movement's philosophy, practical outcomes, or history isn't the same as free software and it's a shame history and contemporary evidence weighs so lightly for Brittanica.
Digital Citizen
Complementary medicine and therapeutic nutrition are a dangerous POV mess of misinformation, opinion and attack at wikipedia. Hellbent on preserving the expensive pharmatopia that we live in, and die of.
Hear hear. I HATE Wikipedia for math.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
....no one, not even the Wikipedians, has any idea how many there are. No one can even hazard a decent guess, although after 3+ years of heavy study of English Wikipedia and the "people" who run it, I can state with reasonable certainty that there are thousands of hoaxes on it at any given time. They tend to be subtle bits of misinformation, difficult to find and often lasting for many years.
Violates WP:OR.
WP is a joke it becomes more and more so every day. Contrary to it improving what is happening is that the people overlooking the site are diminshing. It mostly runs now with scriptkiddies that can remove SUCKS COCKS and NIGGA but are unable to distinguish crap like "By 1345, during Richard II reign" in their Feature Articles. The good articles even manage to place national parks in the wrong country.
How many Slashdot stories are untrue? Does anyone have any idea?
Queen Victoria loved to eat licorice. Perhaps that's why she spent so long on the throne. It is a laxative, you know.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Just how corrupt is your vocabulary? Volunteering does not usually equate to doing freebies for commercial interests.
The last "real" edit I did (other than basic syntactic and grammatical cleanup) was when I noticed a domain belonging to a software company I was researching pointed to a green tea site in China. So, trying to be a dutiful user, I edited the article to point at the last Wayback machine snapshot of the old site.
The result, you ask?
The edit was reverted to the green tea site in less than 24 hours.
I then decided to do nothing more with Wikipedia, but clean up the bad writing that got on my nerves. I swear that half the contributors on en.wikipedia.org are English As A 45th Language types.
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
Actually, it would be inclusive of that, but I'd say that students and interested netizens are some of the heaviest users of wikipedia,
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The amount of wrong added to WP increases hourly, by the time that you have fixed one wrong a hundred other wrongs have been added. I don't mean POV wrongs but factual wrongs. Then if you fix the wrong someone the following day comes and unfixes it. You do no one any favours by fixing the crap, as that just hides the fact that the place is full of wrong.
Hercules had an easier task of cleaning out the stables than we have of fixing wrong on WP.
The article headline, "An Accidental Wikipedia Hoax," implies that the EJ Dickson's deliberate hoax was accidental. The story later shows that the "accident" was how she found out the hoax had been a success.
>
[...] The point being, Wikipedia is not a source of anything, it is the product of a series of sources. So you do not cite Wikipedia, you cite the article it points to.[...]
Careful. While you can use Wikipedia as a meta-index to find references, you can only cite those 3rd-party references if and only if you actually obtain a copy and view the content yourself.
Otherwise you are merely shifting from hoping that the content to Wikipedia is accurate, complete, etc. to hoping that the citations are both a) Real, and b) the Wikipedia content that cites the 3rd-party source, is accurate in its portrayal of the cited work's content.
For example, I could cite the Gutenberg bible (or pick your favorite "lost" historic title found only in the Vatican library) as the reference for the existence of aliens on Earth, and given the rarity and inaccessibility of such a reference, very few, if any Wikipedians have access to counter such citation. And that Douglas Adams ripped off "42" and "the meaning life, the universe, and everything" from Al-Khwarizmi's Hisab al-jabr wÃ(TM)al-muqabala, Kitab al-Jabr wa-l-Muqabala. Not necessarily true, but hard to disprove.
Khyber, I can tell by the expletive in your subject line that you are very passionate about this issue. Wikipedia has in the past shut down anonymous editing rights to several IP address ranges that are known to be from the US and Russian legislatures. It would go a long way to lowering the hoax rate, and spin from controlling interests, if anonymous editing rights were blocked for everyone.
You should at least flag it as missing a reference. In the days before I gave up on Wikipedia because too many idiots thought it was some sort of hilarious fun to post weird stuff about things like Amelia Bedelia, when I was checking recent changes and I saw something like this without citation I'd make at least a Google search to try and verify it, and if a site came up I'd put in the reference myself, if not I'd look at the editor's prior edits to decide whether to believe them or not.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Wikipedia editors, however, have a very slanted set of interests, and as a result errors in articles about Linux, Star Trek, or porn stars will be corrected in seconds, while errors in articles about arts or literature can remain indefinitely.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
You seriously think that other sources are free of errors? Newspapers for example??
At least with Wikipedia when errors are found they can be removed.
Also, in any GA/FA quality article there's lots of references; you can actually go to those sources and check stuff.
Just because there's a lot of non GA/FA quality articles in there doesn't make Wikipedia useless, it just means it's still being written.
I mean, Encyclopedia Britannica has been going for more than one century; Wikipedia is only just over a decade old, and is literally a hundred times bigger it covers much, much more; but it's about as reliable as EB.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"WP treats newspapers as a reliable source. You wrong about EBs reliability vs WP. Perhaps you are relying on the well debunked Nature article of some 8 years ago. The articles chosen were mainly mainstream science articles, and they treated all errors similarly regardless of severity. So for example a factual error such as saying that Origin of the Species was published on the 25 November 1859, counted the same as saying that its author was Charles Dickens. OK not quite so blatant but I'm sure you get the point. One FA had for three years "in 1345 during the reign of Richard II". You state that WP is 100x bigger than EB as if that is a good thing. However, that EB doesn't have 1000s of My Little Pony articles doesn't make WP better. Millions of WP articles are one sentence stubs that will never be expanded, and in themselves are worse than useless, as the Google juice pushes sites that may expand on the information down the listings. Example a stub article on some species of Lichen, that was constructed by some bot scrapping a biological database is unlikely to be expanded on WP. A site dedicated to the study of lichens may well do. WP and its mirror scrapper sites will ensure that the lichen site is off the first google hits page. Play the WP game press the random article link 20 times and see how many 1-2 sentence stubs you find, disambig page, and pages which are plastered with problem templates. Don't tell me its a work in progress I want information today that isn't loaded with bullshit and ignorance.