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How Many Hoaxes Are On Wikipedia? No One Knows
An anonymous reader writes The Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey has written a lengthy feature covering one of Wikipedia's most intractable problems: carefully inserted hoax information that is almost impossible to detect. Dewey's investigation starts with the recent discovery of the nonexistent Australian god "Jar'Edo Wens" (which lasted almost ten years), and discusses a Wikipediocracy post about a recent experiment by critic Greg Kohs, in which 30 articles received cleverly-chosen minor falsehoods. More than half survived for more than two months. Included is also a chart showing that editing participation in Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007. It is quite rare to see a feature in a major media outlet as critical as this, of Wikipedia and its little-known internal problems. Especially on the heels of a very favorable CBS 60 Minutes report. As Kohs says, "I think this has proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it's not fair to say Wikipedia is 'self-correcting.'"
It would be interesting to see them compare to other sources.
Because every couple of weeks I get bored and add something, and it's caught about 60% of the time - usually when I dare to try to edit a contentious[tm] article where even legitimate updates are reverted.
... Included is also a chart showing that editing participation in Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007 ...
As Kohs says, "I think this has proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it's not fair to say Wikipedia is 'self-correcting.'"...
I could have told you that, and have been telling you that.
.
The big problem with Wikipedia is that in spite of what the publicity says, it is only a small number of people who contribute, and a surprisingly large number of those people have an agenda for what they edit.
imo, with Wikipedia, truth is not the goal. A certain point of view is the goal.
1 - publish false claims on wikipedia about about things that matter to people and see if they still go unnoticed for 10 years. ("Sir Anonymous Coward, the inventor of world wide web")
2 - I could write a book with nothing but false information in it and publish it (so long as there is a publisher willing to do so), it would be up the readers to decide to trust my book or fact check it. I know of one that such book that has gone unnoticed for a couple thousand years
Inasmuch as the "revert" button is the first and last editing you're likely to see.
...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
pointing to corrections that haven't been done yet doesn't mean anything. if something is obscure and unimportant it can persist for years, with no impact. and then it's corrected. if it's important, it will probably be corrected in days or minutes
can anyone point to any other media that this isn't true about? (i'm not talking about corrections, that may never be made, simply that all media has a backlog of errors that need correcting)
and questioning wikipedia's veracity, alone, has no value
judge it against other options and their veracity
the traditional encyclopedia is subject to the editorial whims of professionals, and professionals can have agendas and are not automatically superior to a mass of impartial folk. emphasis on "mass." as thousands of editors, even if there's been a drop in participation, is superior to an overworked few with questionable biases
and please note we're talking about brief introductions to topics, not deep dives into esoteric academic specialties. wikipedia is never intended as a replacement for serious texts on topics. and if someone is relying on wikipedia alone for vital topics, that's the reader's fault, not wikipedia
wikipedia's innate superiority is the same reason we have juries instead of professional judges. professional judges can start deciding cases based on having something to prove: "i'm finding this guy guilty because i made the previous guy innocent" or "this guy is clearly innocent, but it's important to send a message, so i'm finding him guilty"
certainly, a million examples of bad juries can be found. we can find problems with the jury system that are truly horrible
as if that means anything. because all other options are worse
this is classic form of propaganda, half-truth, cognitive fallacy: criticism in a vacuum
outside of the context of other choices, anything can be made to look like shit
for example, we can criticize all sort so problems with democracy. there are many problems with democracy and they are real and major. it's just that our other options are clearly worse
likewise with wikipedia: you can list thousands of things wrong with wikipedia, some truly horrendous
but it's still superior to what came before and other current options
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Maybe it should be "Wikopidiocracy"? TFTFY
If you post it, they will read.
.
It is easy to use Wikipedia,
It is that ease to use, rather than accuracy, that has made Wikipedia as popular as it is.
This is basically crowd sourced media in general. The great achievement of web 2.0 is that PR companies etc can now pretend to be 'the people' while feeding us with the messages they want to broadcast. I find this very dishonest. At least when Scarlett Johansson tells me I should buy a soda stream on TV I'm not sitting there wondering if she is actually an expert in carbonated beverages and should be trusted.
For a master class in how ridiculous it is, just go read any comment page on the Guardian associated with an article about Russia. What scares me is that they various mrvodkas on there probably think they are being subtle compared to their local media.
The obnoxious cliques of senior editors with god complexes make it virtually impossible to correct anything of substance. And Jimbo cares fuck-all about it as long as enough people click the donation button.
Sure, you can get into revision wars over whether to use the word "which" or "that" in a given context; but fixing a factual error? Good luck!
"Citation needed!"
"But the old, wrong version didn't have a cite either."
"Doesn't matter, it stays, and my minimum wage burger flipping ass has just banned you for daring to challenge me, you pompous PhD-wielding expert in this particular field!"
A few years prior to his death, I was looking up some obscure entry to be startled to discover that Norman Wisdom, a nonagenarian British comedian, was alleged to have invented a key device referenced within the article. Corrected and thought no more.
However, someone had big plans for Norman, as after his death, similar sets of spurious facts had been seeded all over Wikipedia, some making it to his published obituaries - see
http://www.theguardian.com/media/mediamonkeyblog/2010/oct/05/norman-wisdom-wikipedia-mirror
Wonder if they're still there?
http://www.raphkoster.com/2014...
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Wikipedia has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
I know of at least one hoax from the 80's, invented for local political purposes, that made the local papers, got a memorial built to it, and now appears in several web pages and at least one documentary as fact, with all kinds of made-up details filled in. No Wikipedia page yet, but I'm sure that eventually will come.
And I guess most people here are too young to remember how seriously UFO's and Bigfoot used to be treated back in the 70's.
The only thing really special about hoaxes appearing on Wikipedia is that they can get thoroughly debunked when/if they get found out, and this is much more likely to happen with enough eyes on the issue. Without a user-maintained knowledge base, hoaxes used to be pretty much unkillable.
Encyclopedias are meant to be descriptive. Some of this problem is people who think an encyclopedia defines truth. Some of the problem is people who think if it's in Wikipedia it must be true. (A subtle but important difference). And some of the problem is biased editors within Wikipedia itself.
I think as a society we need to maintain paid content reviewers for a competitor to Wikipedia. Field experts who aren't doing it for power or to push a POV but because someone is paying them to fact-check. I'm not endorsing any one company but I think if we continue relying on Wikipedia as a source of truth Bad Things will happen.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
"With a million pairs of eyes, all bugs are shallow. And Wikipedia offers us the fulfillment of the visions of Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Roscoe C. Jacobson, and Tim Berners-Lee."
Who bloody well cares if there are "hoaxes" on wikipedia.
The amount of truth out ways it by the magnitude of a galaxy !
I have learned about physics,geometry, heat flow, information theory, hyperbolic spaces and extra dimensional space.
Also human related things like geography, social hierarchies, economics. literature and CONSPIRACIES THAT ARE FACT.
Please just go away mainstream media.....
Is economic system self-correcting?
Is government self-correcting?
Is humanity self-correcting?
I suspect that the answer is NO. After we have claimed all available, easy resources, we just continue with killing each other.
Wiki just reflects that.
It's much better that biblical approach, imho.
If people want to monkey with Wikipedia, have at it. We're told over and over again that Wikipedia is not a suitable reference; however the references on the page can sometime be useful.
And then there's http://www.dailydot.com/lol/am...
The person in the story inserted a little fake factoid into an otherwise proper article. This little factoid ended up very quickly
- cited in a lesson plan by a Taiwanese English professor
- cited in a book about Jews and Jesus
- cited in innumerable blog posts and book reports, as well as a piece by blogger Hanny Hernandez, who speculated that Amelia Bedelia’s tendency toward malapropisms was inspired by Parish’s experiences in Cameroon, as “several messages can be
misinterpreted between a Cameroonian maid who is serving an American family.” One blogger even speculated that Amelia Bedelia wasn’t a maid, but a slave.
- cited in the Amelia Bedelia entry on the website TV Tropes and Idioms, and Peggy Parish’s Find-A-Grave page
- cited by Mr. Amelia Bedelia himself: Herman Parish, Peggy’s nephew and author of the books after his aunt passed away in 1988, who apparently told a reporter from the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier that his aunt based “the lead character on a French colonial
maid in Cameroon.”
Once again, Wikipedia can be a useful overview of a subject and a launch-pad for further research. But after all these years of Wikipedia hoaxes (and Wikipedia maintains a list of hoaxes; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...), the mantra must be "trust but verify".
Because, in Wikipedia's own words:
Misinformation on Wikipedia misleads readers, causing them to make errors with real consequences, including hurt feelings, public embarrassment, reprints of books, lost points on school assignments, and other costs. With some articles, like medical topics, they could lead to injury or death.
Having worked on this problem for a while, ive found exactly 5 total hoaxes on wikipedia (no more.) Please remove the following articles:
1. Edward Snowden: is not actually a person, this is an old wives tale. E. Snowden is a hybrid cultivar of the genus Aechmea in the Bromeliad family.
2. 9/11: Although commonly thought of as a terrorist attack that claimed the lives of several thousand americans, this too is just a silly rumour. 9/11 is a town and municipality located in the province and autonomous community of Navarre, northern Spain.
3. Barack Obama: This fools several laymen and scholars alike! Obama isnt a president, but was a motor race set to Formula One rules, held on 30 July 1950. The race was won by Argentinean driver Juan Manuel Fangio after a distance of 68 laps.
4. Christmas: Again, not a holiday at all. He was actually a Polish Air Force Captain and Allied double agent during World War II, using the codename Brutus. After having been offered safety by the Germans, he was sent to England as an agent. However, he made himself known to the British authorities. He was de-briefed by the British (MI6) and Polish authorities about the security lapses of his organization in France. And thats why we have Christmas trees today!
5. Computers: could NEVER have been real, and most of us know this one to be true. The computer is actually a Ukrainian professional football coach and a former player. As of 2009, he works as an assistant coach with FC Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk.
Good people go to bed earlier.
...."I think this has proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it's not fair to say Wikipedia is 'self-correcting.'"
It's fair to say Wikipedia is self-reenforcing and subtlety is lost.
To me, Wikipedia is a cult - you can keep sending them money, contributing to their belief system, and you can never leave (I'm serious, they have no way to delete an account)
What source of information is flawless and can be believed without question? Why do people exhibit good critical thinking skills when it comes to Wikipedia, but swallow wholesale what they get from Encyclopedia Britannica, CNN, Fox News, the Bible, etc?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Any historical media that is exclusively digital can be forged. Once we have molecular level 3-D printers, all physical historical artifacts can potentially be forged and altered. We have to look at a possible future where there in no way to verify any historical fact, an historical fact being anything that happened more than a nanosecond ago.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
they are prepping us for the closing off of public open editing
Well said. Here is another example of Wikipedia re-writing history with the new, Wikipedia-based version, being regurgitated by Associated Press, among many others. Never mind that an innocent basketball player was defamed.
The Bhutanese Passport hoaxer, by the way, also worked on other "projects" that promptly infected Google's "Knowledge Vault", like all these Wikipedia hoaxes do.
Some of these hoaxes have entered academic literature. In such cases, Wikipedia actually destroys knowledge.
Oh, the guy who tried to start a business accepting money from companies to write their Wikipedia articles for them, which got rightly rejected by Wikipedia? And has been shitty with them every since? Yeah, he's the kind of person I'd go to for a rational discussion about Wikipedia.
When I was in grade school I was taught that the speed of sound increased with density. The examples were air, water and steel.
Actually, the speed of sound goes *down* with density, for the obvious reason that there's more atoms to get through. It goes up with springiness, which transmits the motion more rapidly. The science textbook from school simply selected three examples where the later was true - steel is much springier than air.
This utterly wrong "fact" is still being taught today.
The wiki took two weeks to correct carefully hidden wrong information? I'm supposed to be worried about this?
Where N is the number of statements, across all pages, that could be construed as factual whether or not they are true.
The actual number of hoaxes is likely smaller.
I'm pointing this out just to remind people that the number of hoaxes on Wikipedia is finite.
Sincerely,
Captain Obvious
I dunno . . . more than half of "cleverly-chosen minor falsehoods" inserted into 30 articles are corrected within 2 months? That sounds more like **is** self-correcting than **is not**.
Nothing is perfectly self-correcting and that holds up here, too. But through the mid-2000s we kept a shelf full of encyclopedias dating from the 1980s or so. I'm pretty sure that thing was packed with various bits of incorrect, erroneous, outdated, and incomplete information, and strangely enough, not one snippet of it ever self-corrected in the 20 years the encyclopedias sat on the shelf.
You missed the third and most important reason in TFA
Yorhmum
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
On the rare occasions that a "hoax" article such as "Jar'Edo Wens" stays around, it's because no one is visiting it.
No visits means it wasn't actually fooling anyone, so there was no hoax. It was just a dusty page, so dead and forgotten that no one had even thought of tagging it for deletion yet.
Truth is that there are very few people in the world who will bother inserting 30 hoax factoids into Wikipedia, and most people that try would get spotted quickly. It's very easy to spot suspicious contributors, and once you do then it's easy to check their other contributors. (Or they could edit anonymously, which also attracts heightened scrutiny.)
(Wikipedia does have problems. "Hoaxes" are mostly a distraction topic. Corporate and party-political editing is probably the big problem yet to be really exposed.)
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
Wikipedia is the best site on the Internet for finding which books and print articles will have good information on a topic that is not heavily covered online.
Yes, there are pitfalls to using the Wikipedia. Many of those pitfalls can be avoided if you know how to use it. Examples include examining the history page, which is available for each article. It will give you an idea of the maturity of the article, if certain details are under contention, and whether something is likely to be a hoax or agenda driven. In many cases, sources are provided. Examine those sources. Determine whether the sources are reliable, and have been interpreted in a reasonable manner.
Oddly enough, people question the Wikipedia when it gives more information about the providence of the writing and content than virtually any other source, yet people insist upon making blanket statements about how unreliable it is. All that really says is that people want an authoritative source rather than a verifiable source. They want someone to tell them what is "true" rather than giving them the tools to assess what they are reading. That is dangerous, because it is far too easy to put yourself in a bubble of misinformation by choosing inaccurate sources that cannot be assessed.
The problem is that there are a few, very active, and very stubborn power users that know how to use Wikipedia and navigate it's internal processes. They posses incredible power to make all their favorite articles conform to their own vision.
Every time I go to edit something, it immediately gets reverted by a major contributor, who cites some rule or process that is described on a page I've never seen before and don't know how to find.
Wikipedia should just stop with the charade. They should stop saying it's open to everyone. It's more like an open source project that only accepts edits from it's developers.
Wikipedia's biggest problem is the brain drain. They're no longer relying on the wisdom of the masses. In this case, if you get a prankster who puts in the time to get some Wikipedia cred, then they can put in pretty much any hoax they want.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
And I'm not telling you where...
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
"Wikipedia has any value whatsoever.'
With wikipedia, you get what you pay for.
What good is a source of truth if it's not accurate?
Wikipedia was not meant as an existential discussion on the meaning of truth; it was meant as a crowdsourced source of truth. What details do you consider important or unimportant? Why would one detail be not worth correcting?
The last thing I read about faking information on wikipedia was some life detail about an author - that even her relatives believed! It wasn't important, except that it was.
If Wikipedia cared, it would put this banner across the top instead of their fundraising banner: "The information presented may or may not be accurate. All the information here should be verified by other sources before used."
Some years ago I did some extensive editing to an article about the history of the village where I live. I quoted from the website that I had created on the subject, which was based on research into a wide range of original documents in the National Library and county archives. I am chair of the local historical society.
The edits were rejected because of 'plagiarism' of my own website text! At that point I gave up on wikipedia as an editor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groton,_Connecticut
It contains paragraphs of "history" which is completely unsourced and of questionable accuracy and is oddly specific. It's been that way for years with only a warning banner. The whole thing reads as a hoax.
Wikipedia is perhaps the most cited source of information in all the various Slashdot Wankfests.
Wikipedia, where any moron can say anything, as this article plainly points out.
So the next time someone calls you names and cites Wikipedia to back up their point, feel free to call them a fucking moron.
Until I found the entirely-serious non-hoax article claiming that most of the leading Nazi party members were gay, and the holocaust was actually the homosexual agenda's plan to exterminate the jews for refusing to accept their sinful nature. That's when I realised that nothing I could possibly make up would be one-tenth as silly as what they actually believe.
The Coati (a small member of the raccoon family native to Brazil) is also known as the Brazillian aardvark. The reason that it's known as the Brazillian aadvark is that someone made the phrase up and added it to Wikipedia - but the coinage gained traction, because journalists copied it, and this led to a citation for that name being added to the article. Now wikipedia is in a quandary... there are, thanks to lazy journalists, people who know the coati as the Brazillian aardvark, because they read that in a newspaper... so is the hoax now true?
Does it become true if the dord of references to that name reaches a certain level?
Does it become false even though people do use the term, just because the etymology of the word was a hoax?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
The problem is overzealous inclusionists who insist on keeping everything, even with insufficient sources to establish notability. Every god must automatically be notable if you can just find one lousy source. Every small community in every country is considered automatically notable if they can find any source to indicate it exists. Yes, "automatic notability" is a thing on Wikipedia - they have rules within rules within rules.
Less is more. I get the whole "but check your sources! starting point!" argument but that's what a search engine is for - an encyclopedia should strive to be accurate and this can't be done with a million BS non-notable subjects like Jar'Edo Wens.
The Australian god "Jar'Edo Wens" is a really poor example. Why not use other hoaxes like the Christian god with multiple-personality disorder? That hoax has been going on much longer, and he is just as non-existent.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This is the same old elitist bullshit being smuggled out through the back door.
Fundamentally, there are a lot of people out there who don't want Wikipedia to be part of the answer. Whatever standard Wikipedia achieves, the bar is raised at least a hook higher.
I was brought up with "Gerry Germ". This is how insanity was introduced into my grade three class back in the 1970s.
Some of my unfortunate classmates probably grew up to become the adults who try to spray the entire world with 99.9% germicidal carcinogens. Aside from the shocking innumeracy (readily vaccinated in just five inquisitive minutes wielding your dad's miraculous eight-digit calculator, during which one discovers the small difference between zero point zero repeating and 0.001 as multiplicands), there are about six other layers of illiteracy here. We have subsequently learned that our own bodies are outnumbered 10 to 1 (if you count cells) or 100 to 1 (if you count genes) by our personal Gerry Germ symbiotes.
Nevertheless, we continue to hold wacky beliefs about our standards of personal hygiene, and absolutely ludicrous beliefs about what we ingest or acquire from the external environment. Yet somehow we live.
The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of information we encounter in daily living has never been up to to the germ-free standards of my grade three Gerry Germ indoctrination.
Common sense is the human ability to walk past something yummy that's being lying on the sidewalk for an hour that you just stepping on, and not licking it off the bottom of your shoe.
Yet with information about the world, the idea is that the ignorant and uniformed are just going to stick any piece of information into their mouth that they pass by, so all information in the world needs to be currated by food-safety professionals (aka all the authors dripping with expertise and credentials who might have succeeded in authoring Nupedia before the heat-death of the local universe).
Fundamentally the reason that this cloaked nonsense in Wikipedia is lying there undetected is that it's almost entirely immaterial. If a person holds a transient belief in the Australian god Poopoocaca, how much does that affect this year's RRSP contribution level? About 0.00000001 times as much as the five minutes with dad's expensive 8-digit calculator they unfortunately bypassed as a young child.
And you know what? The lunacies these people believe make 99.9% of the content on Wikipedia look like an oasis of sanity by comparison.
Wikipedia needs to bump that up to 99.99% exactly as badly as the germicidal soap in my bathroom needs to bump itself up to a 99.99% bacterial kill rate. As if the human condition is nothing but 1000 lb sand-dampened power supplies with a -100 dB bullshit noise floor at 60 Hz.
Now if I can just find an industrial-strength soap (so far recognized as safe) to rid me tout sweet of all the preening assholes from which this elitist crap originates in the first place, I might start clicking the "buy" button.
In school they won't take citations from it, the media at least in the UK mocks Wikipedia as a credible source, and celebrities typically can get full control of their site, almost as if it's their twitter feed.
No one knows if you made 30 or 500 edits. Or if twenty previous tests were flops. (To do it properly, you should have informed someone before doing the test.)
And then you chose which pages and which facts to edit. (With a clear interest in these changes going unnoticed.)
No one knows how selective you're being in these posts which feed your business's interests.
There is nothing reliable, scientific, or objective about your tests.
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
Now you're caught.
I checked the history of the page where you wrote about sacrificed Welsh Corgis: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind...
The last time anyone contributed to the information content of that article was a minor edit in December 2012! The edits since then are to add or remove spam or vandalism.
You've proven my point: your silly edits only last if you stick them in an article that's getting no attention.
Moreover, the repeated spam removal edits show that even an article that no one is working on still gets its spam and vandalism removed!
You hid your edits in dusty little corners of Wikipedia and you're pretending they're representative.
You're a fraud. Your "research" is debunked, it has no value. Away!
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
I occassionally write for a site called http://gullible.info/ which anti-fact-checks all posted information, guaranteeing that it is false. The key bit is that it _sounds_ true. The site is for our own amusement at others' gullibility through the user forum, and not to intentionally spread falsehoods across the world.
Years ago, a "fact" was posted saying that Timothy Leary, while high, said that he discovered a new color which he called "gendale". A long time passed, and this "fact" eventually made its way into Wikipedia by a well-intentioned person (not someone who realized that Gullible.Info posted fake information). The information was soon recognized as likely false and certainly unsourced, and removed. However, in the interim, Timothy Leary had died and the British newspaper _The Guardian_ had published the "color discovery" as part of Leary's obituary. So, a while later, the "gendale fact" made its way back into Wikipedia -- again by a well-intentioned person -- this time being sourced! It was not removed until the editor of Gullible.Info found this a year or so later, and removed the information from the article and explained why. In this case, Wikipedia worked as it should, but still ended up with incorrect information for a significant time. And, of course, the "gendale fact" still floats around out there.
A different spin: instead of "more than half [of 30 cleverly-chosen minor falsehoods] survived for more than two months" how about saying, "After only two months, nearly half [of 30 falsehoods written specifically to be minor and fiendishly difficult to spot] had already been reversed."
I would say that is pretty darn good, considering the millions of articles there. It's certainly a step up from the misinformation allowed to stand as truth on biased "news" sites and kajillions of unedited blogs. Obviously no serious researcher or problem-solver would accept Wikipedia info blindly, but for finding out 98% of what you'll need to know about any conceivable topic, it can't be beat.
You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house.