I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax: There it was, five and a half years later, being tweeted as fact by relatively well-known members of the New York City media establishment.
I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax: There it was, five and a half years later, being tweeted as fact by relatively well-known members of the New York City media establishment.
And trolls still wonder why we mock them when they link Wikipedia as “evidence”.
So began as well the Global Warming hoax. Sorry about that.
In the early years of Wikipedia, a friend of mine added himself to the list of co-founders of a major enterprise software company. We’ve seen his name all over the Internet repeating that “fact”.
I just checked the Wiki entry and his name is still there.
Sorry, that should say:
We’ve seen his name in articles all over the Internet repeating that “fact”.
I’ve edited so many wikipedia pages it’s not even funny. They’re obvious bs though. You’d be an idiot not to spot it if you read carefully.
her title is false. It was no accident. She admits that she maliciously and willfully intended to decieve and falsify the entry. The fact that she was “stoned” makes no difference. She could have chosen not to do it. Consequently her crdibility is as weak as her lame, late self confession.
So What ?
The point Chris is that you can make up any crap you want and post it there and people not only believe it but continue to use it as a reference source.
Nold. I know that. I ruthlessly deduct marks for any student who uses wikipedia as a primary source, particularly at a Masters level. It is not reliable for that very reason. A good source to point one in the general direction most of the time. But requires verification. My point was her self serving appology/boast (not sure which it was). Her starting a falsehood on the Wikipedia page was not accidental. It was by intent. She admits it. Therefore she is part of the great stable of those who make wikipedia unreliable. And I am not sure I would be telling the world that, uless it fed some sort of twisted leftist angnst where you have to offer up public confessions after the fact.
Agreed, Chris, wikis can be ‘a good source to point one in the general direction most of the time’ but I already knew that. What I didn’t realize is that googling something I’ve read in a wiki and then finding many corroborating hits isn’t actually double checking the info in a wiki. I have to go to the cited sources from the wiki page and dismiss all unsourced ‘facts’ since I can’t be sure of their validity and can’t double check easily. (Disclaimer: I suppose I could double check by learning how to track edits on wiki and writing other website owners to ask for their source material and I would if I was a researcher, I’m just using wikis to get a quick overview of something I’ve read about somewhere.)
The scary thing in this article was the family member (and current author of the series of books) posting the fabrication as fact. If I was looking for corroboration and found it from that source, I’d figure I was had found the confirmation I was looking for.
As for the accidental, I read that as she deliberately vandalized the wiki but accidentally became the source for the false information since she assumed someone else would correct the ‘obvious’ (to her) falsehood (especially since the person she was writing about was living at the time.)
Ha! I use Wikipedia fairly often. It is usually reliable – but even I have found at least one definite error and a possible second (I simply do not feel the urge to double-check that one). I will certainly go on using it, but with some caution about citing it as a source.