Slashdot Mirror
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.
... 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
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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"
The amount of truth out ways it by the magnitude of a galaxy !
Sounds like Wikipedia is an appropriate reference source for someone of your capacity.
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?
It would appear that you're another of the judgmental types who have formed an opinion -- and a strong one at that -- without access to most of the facts.
For example, I didn't "try to start" a business, I actually started one. And it continues to serve clients today, nearly nine years later. What percentage of 2006 start-ups do you think are still open for business today? The practice of writing content in exchange for clients' payment was not "rejected by Wikipedia". Indeed, the practical justification for MyWikiBiz was underscored by the pre-existence of Wikipedia's own authorized "Reward Board", where (you guessed it), clients could and did (and still do) pay editors for content. Indeed, if the business practice was "rejected" by Wikipedia, why did Jimmy Wales (the co-founder of Wikipedia) publicly endorse MyWikiBiz?
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pi...
Further, my business practice from the start was to DISCLOSE ON WIKIPEDIA every one of my paying clients, so that my edits could be appropriately scrutinized. Jimmy Wales authored a new plan that would put a layer of separation between that disclosure and the provenance of the articles on Wikipedia.
The only thing you seem to have conveyed even remotely correctly is that I have been "shitty with them". But, I'd argue not "every (sic) since". I started getting shitty with Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation and the abusive administrators on Wikipedia when Wales reneged on his mutual agreement with me, and furthermore when I began to discover how much hypocrisy takes place in the Wikipedia community environment. For example, Wales dictated that "interwiki transclusion" links that included thousands of links to his for-profit enterprise Wikia site, should be "do follow", while all other external links should be "no follow". SEO specialists instantly know the enormous financial kick-back that this decision represented for Wikia and Wales. He later denied that he gave that order, but the head code developer for Mediawiki explicitly confirmed publicly that Jimmy Wales told him to switch on "no follow" for all but interwiki links. When you see such a liar and grifter making (literally) hundreds of thousands of dollars off his exploitation of Wikipedia, while I was shamed off the site as a paid editor who wanted to disclose all of his conflicts of interest, yes it rankled me, and it still does.
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.
Some of the misinformation that I inserted in the experiment was persisting on pages that got tens of thousands of page views. Granted, not every page-viewing session means that the specific misinformation will be read and cognitively evaluated by the reader, but let's just say that even 5% of page views led to a reader acquiring the misinformation. This still means that little old me was able to misinform a few thousand readers with an experiment that took me about four or five hours to set up. Had I not halted the experiment, many thousands more would have been misinformed.
You may comfort yourself with the notion that "there are very few people in the world" who will do what I did. But, then you discover the "Qworty" editor fiasco. Then the "Wifione" editor fiasco. Then the "Jagged85" editor fiasco (an editor who falsified so many articles, the Wikipedia community created a "cleanup template" to paste on the articles he touched, in hopes that it would facilitate restoration to truth). Each of these editors manipulated numerous pages, affecting thousands of people's intake of "knowledge". Nonetheless, the Wikimedia Foundation stands back, cajoling the volunteer editors to "keep up the good work" fighting vandals, while doing nothing themselves to implement features that would stifle vandalism. And the Foundation's savings account increased by nearly $6 million last year, and as long as that donation trend continues -- nothing will change.
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
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.