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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.
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 So you do not cite Wikipedia, you cite the article it points to.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
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.
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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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.
I'm sorry.
https://www.google.com/search?...
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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.
I think the best part of this whole debacle is everyone has apparently believed this blogger about her first hand account of her memory of an event from several yeas ago when she was admittedly stoned without batting an eye. The problem isn't Wikipedia. The problem is terrible critical thinking skills. The fact that the edited article is about a literal minded person just makes the irony even more delicious.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
'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.
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.
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.
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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...
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!
....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.
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.
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.