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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.'"
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Truth is explicitly off the table on Wikipedia
Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth
The "Verifiability" policy hinges on the definition of "reliable sources". On Wikipedia, that overwhelmingly means "Newspapers" and "News websites". You can take the rest from there.
Outright falsehood can and will be published on Wikipedia as long as they are told by "reputable sources". The editors don't care. They edit articles for agit-prop purposes, according to whatever ideological script they happen to be reading from (it varies from article group to article group). Expert opinions, primary sources, published literature? Out the fucking window if some blogger at the NYT says autism causes cancer or whatever their latest Netflix bingeing brain fart.
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.
I have to agree. The experiment cited modified 30 articles with minor and cleverly-chosen falsehoods, and more than half were fixed within two months.
From that, Kohs then claims, "I think this has proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it's not fair to say Wikipedia is 'self-correcting.'"
Um, WTF? That statement proves he's not very good at making accurate statements. If he added a time period to that, and maybe some disclaimer about the popularity of articles being modified, then it wouldn't be much of a point, but it'd be closer to true.
You conveniently leave out that Kohs himself (that's me) reverted 6 of the false edits himself, when it became clear after more than 45 days that nobody else was likely to do it anytime soon.
You're also being rather unfair to say that Kohs' statement -- a sound-bite that the Washington Post journalist selected from a lengthy telephone interview -- which you then rip away from the context of the article, "proves" that I'm not good at making accurate statements. Why don't you peruse the actual spreadsheet of the 30 articles, which speaks for itself on my ability to convey accurate information?