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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.
Wikipedians do seem to operate on the assumption that existing content, even if completely made up, is somehow superior to any recent change, as though content gained legitimate merit and factuality simply by being in Wikipedia. There was a concrete example of this in the edit history of the Thoreau case mentioned in the Washington Post article. The hoaxer had made up a reference to make their nonsense stick. When the hoaxer later himself tried to delete the hoax again, another Wikipedian REVERTED them, saying, "Rv; the information is referenced; if you say it's wrong, prove it." Just because the content had been on Wikipedia for a few months, it was assumed it must be correct. Discussed in more detail here.
What you say is only true if lots of people can participate equally. Wikipedia has a lot of cliques and groups with agendas where editors support each other to promote a particular view or bias, so it's just as bad or worse than having a single editor writing the material.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No, the big problem with Wikipedia is politics. Wikipedia is the reinvention of communism, and it's proceeding just like Animal Farm and other Communist nations down the path to failure.
Heck, it's already at the "Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others" stage.
That's the main problem - you have editors and higher ups who now patrol their part of Wikipedia who are not interested in the truth, correctness or other aspects - just in having little power struggles. Heck, for a time there were massive parts being deleted for arbitrary reasons (usually along the lines of "this content is not suitable for Wikipedia" despite having plenty of similar content around). And these days, well, edit-reversions by the same power-mad editors have basically rendered any reason to edit it moot.
I mean, there's a small amount of contributors because everyone else got driven away. Try to fix a mistake and you'll et into an edit war with an editor who thinks their interpretation is completely correct even if it's obviously wrong.
Yes, it's an encyclopedia anyone can edit. Except that if you do so, chances are someone will revert it in a few minutes because they don't agree with what you edited, even if all you did was fix an error. "Everyone has equal edit rights, but some people have more equal edit rights".
The study of Wikipedia itself is quite fascinating, no many times you get to see political ideology put into play and see the results. Usually you end up with people getting hurt or humanitarian crises if you try to experiment.
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?
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