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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.
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
.
It is easy to use Wikipedia,
It is that ease to use, rather than accuracy, that has made Wikipedia as popular as it is.
Woo-hoo! Slashdot beat Wikipedia. Slashdot didn't atrophy until 18 Sept. 2012.
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.
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.
The underlying problem is that it's possible for a single person to essentially "own" an article and reject any changes they don't like and perpetually block anyone else from contributing. This has led to a large collection of petty fiefdoms across the site and many of the local lords getting cozy with one and other so that if anything does get run a little further up the flagpole it still has a chance of being outright ignored or buried under bureaucracy and rule lawyering.
Wikipedia needs to change how their system works to allow for more collaboration and participation. I'd suggest a system where anyone can propose changes that are collected over a period of time until a group of individuals can work together to create new revisions of an article. Have other teams that are devoted solely to improving the grammar or readability of articles and others that are just looking to fact check the existing information to recommend removal of fallacious information. Perhaps even go so far as to assign people randomly to different teams and articles to mix it up and prevent the same kind of agenda-driven article ownership that we see so often now.
It's more a case of editors selecting the sources that confirm their point of view, and attacking the ones that don't as either not reliable enough or by relegating them to an opposing view footnote somewhere.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
As soon as politics enter it, nothing is reliable.
Technical subjects on wikipedia are never clear. They are jargonated, use obscure notation and never have a simple illuminating example.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
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.
Two classics. :)
1.Proof by ghost reference:
Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the reference given.
2. Proof by reference to inaccessible literature:
The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883.
*Kid Rock runs for Senate* Democrats: We must run Kid Scissors.
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?
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