[WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/how-the-professor-who-fooled-wikipedia-got-caught-by-reddit/257134/ Print: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2012/05/how-the-professor-who-fooled-wikipedia-got-caught-by-reddit/257134/ A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A beer enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe for Brown's Ale, salvaged decades before from the wreckage of the old brewery--the very building where the Star-Spangled Banner was sewn in 1813. A student buys a sandwich called the Last American Pirate and unearths the long-forgotten tale of Edward Owens, who terrorized the Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s. These stories have two things in common. They are all tailor-made for viral success on the internet. And they are all lies. Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T. Mills Kelly's course, Lying About the Past. Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually encouraged by their professor. Four years ago, students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully fooling Wikipedia's community of editors. This year, though, one group of students made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What they learned in the process provides a valuable lesson for anyone who turns to the Internet for information. The first time Kelly taught the course, in 2008, his students confected the life of Edward Owens, mixing together actual lives and events with brazen fabrications. They created YouTube videos, interviewed experts, scanned and transcribed primary documents, and built a Wikipedia page to honor Owens' memory. The romantic tale of a pirate plying his trade in the Chesapeake struck a chord, and quickly landed on USA Today's pop culture blog. When Kelly announced the hoax at the end of the semester, some were amused, applauding his pedagogical innovations. Many others were livid. Critics decried the creation of a fake Wikipedia page as digital vandalism. Things like that really, really, really annoy me, fumed founder Jimmy Wales, comparing it to dumping trash in the streets to test the willingness of a community to keep it clean. But the indignation may, in part, have been compounded by the weaknesses the project exposed. Wikipedia operates on a presumption of good will. Determined contributors, from public relations firms to activists to pranksters, often exploit that, inserting information they would like displayed. The sprawling scale of Wikipedia, with nearly four million English-language entries, ensures that even if overall quality remains high, many such efforts will prove successful. One group took its inspiration from the fact that the original Star-Spangled Banner had been sewn on the floor of Brown's Brewery in Baltimore. The group decided that a story that good deserved a beer of its own. They crafted a tale of discovering the old recipe used by Brown's to make its brews, registered BeerOf1812.com, built a Wikipedia page for the brewery, and tweeted out the tale on their Twitter feed. No one suspected a thing. In fact, hardly anyone even noticed. They did manage to fool one well-meaning DJ in Washington, DC, but the hoax was otherwise a dud. The second group settled on the story of serial killer Joe Scafe. Using newspaper databases, they identified four actual women murdered in New York City from 1895 to 1897, victims of broadly similar crimes. They created Wikipedia articles for the victims, carefully following the rules of the site. They concocted an elaborate story of discovery, and fabricated images of the trunk's contents. ...it took just twenty-six minutes for a redditor to call foul, noting the Wikipedia entries' recent vintage. Others were quick to pile on, deconstructing the entire tale. The faded newspaper pages looked artificially aged. The Wikipedia articles had been posted and edited by a small group of new users. Finding documents in an old steamer trunk sounded too convenient. And why had Lisa been savvy enough to ask Reddit, but not enough to Google the names and find the Wikipedia entries on her own? The hoax took months to plan but just minutes to fail. Why...One answer lies in the structure of the Internet's various communities. Wikipedia has a weak community, but centralizes the exchange of information. It has a small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining, and most users feel little ownership of the content. And although everyone views the same information, edits take place on a separate page, and discussions of reliability on another, insulating ordinary users from any doubts that might be
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On 16 May 2012 16:49, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote: Indeed. Why *are* the skeptical geeks now on Reddit and not Wikipedia? And why haven't they taken those who generalise broadly from a single example with them? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
This discussion has flowed onto Wikipedia's Administrator's Noticeboard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AN#False_articles_created_for_the_good_of_education Rob -Original Message- From: Charles Matthews Sent: Wednesday, 16 May 2012 1:34 PM To: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_ On 16 May 2012 16:49, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote: Indeed. Why *are* the skeptical geeks now on Reddit and not Wikipedia? And why haven't they taken those who generalise broadly from a single example with them? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On Wednesday, 16 May 2012 at 16:49, Gwern Branwen wrote: Indeed. Why *are* the skeptical geeks now on Reddit and not Wikipedia? 26 minutes? I'm trying to imagine how much the angry inclusionists would be soiling my talk page with accusations of BITEyness if I had IAR deleted this page after just 26 minutes. ;-) The question also presumes that Wikipedians are not also Redditors. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 2:34 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: And why haven't they taken those who generalise broadly from a single example with them? Are you denying the general decline in editors, even as Internet usage continues to increase? -- gwern ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote: On Wednesday, 16 May 2012 at 16:49, Gwern Branwen wrote: Indeed. Why *are* the skeptical geeks now on Reddit and not Wikipedia? 26 minutes? I'm trying to imagine how much the angry inclusionists would be soiling my talk page with accusations of BITEyness if I had IAR deleted this page after just 26 minutes. ;-) The question also presumes that Wikipedians are not also Redditors. I think this is important. The more and more I look at Reddit the more I realize that not only are they very similar to Wikipedians they ARE Wikipedians. In fact recently I've started wondering if a Reddit post may be an easier way to reach Wikipedians then a watchlist post or central notice ;) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l James Alexander @Jamesofur jameso...@gmail.com jalexan...@wikimedia.org ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
If you spot something is a blatant hoax and delete it after 26 seconds I think you'll find that even the most ardent inclusionists are as intolerant of hoaxes as we are of attack pages. WSC On 16 May 2012 19:38, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote: On Wednesday, 16 May 2012 at 16:49, Gwern Branwen wrote: Indeed. Why *are* the skeptical geeks now on Reddit and not Wikipedia? 26 minutes? I'm trying to imagine how much the angry inclusionists would be soiling my talk page with accusations of BITEyness if I had IAR deleted this page after just 26 minutes. ;-) The question also presumes that Wikipedians are not also Redditors. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
There's no great drop in the number of editors: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ENglish_Wikipedia_active_users_%28September_2011%29.png The number of new articles appearing has been dropping, but it looks like we're just running out of things to write about- the rate of decrease of new articles is much more than any reduction in editors. The number of editors is fairly static, although there were about 25% more people volunteering in 2006 when there were lots of new things to write about. On 16 May 2012 19:41, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 2:34 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: And why haven't they taken those who generalise broadly from a single example with them? Are you denying the general decline in editors, even as Internet usage continues to increase? -- gwern ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- -Ian Woollard ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 8:47 PM, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.com wrote: The number of editors is fairly static, although there were about 25% more people volunteering in 2006 when there were lots of new things to write about. Staticness is a serious problem: the world is not staying still. We can't keep up with a growing world with a editor base that is static in absolute terms. Productivity improvements like anti-obvious-vandalism bots offer limited gains which can keep our heads over the rising water, temporarily, but they don't change the bigger picture. As I demonstrated earlier with my external link experiment, editors are not keeping up with even the clearest, best intentioned, highest quality suggestions. How can you hope that this means that more sophisticated and difficult tasks like anti-troll, vandalism, hoax, etc. are still being performed to past standards? Incidentally, I have been finishing an experiment involving the removal of 100 random external links by an IP; I haven't analyzed it yet, so I don't know the outcome, but this gives us an opportunity! Would anyone in this thread (especially the ones convinced Wikipedia's editing community is in fine shape) care to predict what percentage or percentage range they expect will have been reverted? Or what percentage/percentage range they would regard as an acceptable failure-to-revert rate? -- gwern ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 1:47 AM, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.comwrote: There's no great drop in the number of editors: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ENglish_Wikipedia_active_users_%28September_2011%29.png See http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm Editors making 100+ edits a month in English Wikipedia were at 5,000+ in early 2007, and are now down to less than 3,500. German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish core editor numbers are stable, on the other hand: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaDE.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaFR.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaES.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaPT.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaPL.htm Russian is booming: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaRU.htm Japanese (another project with a strong popular culture bias) is declining too: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaJA.htm Another interesting variable is editor retention, measured as the percentage of all Wikipedians who still make 100 or more edits a month: 0.45% in English WP 0.59% in Japanese WP 0.73% in Spanish WP 0.90% in German WP* 0.99% in Polish WP* 1.01% in French WP 1.49% in Russian WP* * The German, Polish and Russian Wikipedias have flagged revisions. (I am currently looking at this data to see if there is a correlation between flagged revisions and editor retention.) Andreas ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 2:21 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 1:47 AM, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.comwrote: There's no great drop in the number of editors: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ENglish_Wikipedia_active_users_%28September_2011%29.png See http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm Editors making 100+ edits a month in English Wikipedia were at 5,000+ in early 2007, and are now down to less than 3,500. German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish core editor numbers are stable, on the other hand: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaDE.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaFR.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaES.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaPT.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaPL.htm Russian is booming: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaRU.htm Japanese (another project with a strong popular culture bias) is declining too: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaJA.htm Another interesting variable is editor retention, measured as the percentage of all Wikipedians who still make 100 or more edits a month: 0.45% in English WP 0.59% in Japanese WP 0.73% in Spanish WP 0.90% in German WP* 0.99% in Polish WP* 1.01% in French WP 1.49% in Russian WP* * The German, Polish and Russian Wikipedias have flagged revisions. (I am currently looking at this data to see if there is a correlation between flagged revisions and editor retention.) Andreas I forgot to add the editor retention figure in Portuguese WP: it's 0.62%, based on the latest reported month (April 2012). ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 3:02 AM, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.comwrote: On 17 May 2012 02:21, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: Editors making 100+ edits a month in English Wikipedia were at 5,000+ in early 2007, and are now down to less than 3,500. Sounds about right. German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish core editor numbers are stable, on the other hand: It's a bit like mining coal. If you've only got a few miners, then as you ramp up the miners, the coal output will grow, and then level off and shipped coal will be a flat line, because there's plenty of coal for each miner. That's what's happening in the other Wikipedia's. The haven't got enough contributors to mine all the information out and put it in Wikipedia; the number of new articles will be flat. If you've got a lot of miners, then the amount of coal shipped will climb up to a peak, as you get the easiest coal out, and then it gets more difficult to mine more and the mining will fall again. That's what's happened on the English Wikipedia, with a much bigger number of English speakers and editors we've been able to create most of the encyclopedic articles we need and polish them up fairly well. So the fact that the English Wikipedia's growth is falling is a result of wild success, not failure. There's only really a finite number of general ideas out there that humans have come up with, and you can only put them in Wikipedia once. I think that analysis is optimistic, for several reasons. Editor numbers started falling when en:WP had well under 2 million articles. The number of articles has more than doubled in the five years since then. Editor numbers in the Japanese Wikipedia, meanwhile, are following a similar pattern of decline, even though that project is still well below 1 million articles. This suggests that there can be other reasons than running out of stuff to write about for a decline in editor numbers. Lastly, it is not as though there is little work to do in the English Wikipedia. There are backlogs in multiple areas; including over 600 pending submissions at Articles for creation. Given that en:WP now has 4 million articles, a healthy core editor base is essential to ensure maintenance. A declining core editor base combined with a rising number of articles is not a good development. Andreas ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 9:14 PM, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote: Incidentally, I have been finishing an experiment involving the removal of 100 random external links by an IP; I haven't analyzed it yet, so I don't know the outcome, but this gives us an opportunity! Would anyone in this thread (especially the ones convinced Wikipedia's editing community is in fine shape) care to predict what percentage or percentage range they expect will have been reverted? Or what percentage/percentage range they would regard as an acceptable failure-to-revert rate? First shouldn't we guess as to what percentage of the links were actually good in the first place? ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 10:49 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: First shouldn't we guess as to what percentage of the links were actually good in the first place? I must say, I didn't expect to see someone rationalizing the results even *before* they happened. But no, you don't need to guess: you edit Wikipedia, you already know what external links usually look like, and how many are bad on average. (From actually doing the deletions, my own appraisal is that 10% were at all questionable, and I felt pretty bad deleting most of them.) If you don't, you can go click on Special:Random 10 times and ask yourself, 'would I delete the last link in the External links section?' If you think 2 links are rotten, then perhaps you should be predicting that - since everything is well, and any result is acceptable, and the status quo is perfect - only 80% of the edits will be reverted. I look forward to your percentages. -- gwern ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On 17/05/2012 2:21 p.m., Andreas Kolbe wrote: Given that en:WP now has 4 million articles, a healthy core editor base is essential to ensure maintenance. A declining core editor base combined with a rising number of articles is not a good development. Andreas I strongly agree. Better still, a higher level of protection is needed for what is already on WP, i.e. some sort of peer review such as flagged revisions, or pending changes, or editor rights etc. Alan ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 10:58 PM, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 10:49 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: First shouldn't we guess as to what percentage of the links were actually good in the first place? I must say, I didn't expect to see someone rationalizing the results even *before* they happened. No need to get personal, I wasn't rationalizing anything. But no, you don't need to guess: you edit Wikipedia I do? If you don't, you can go click on Special:Random 10 times and ask yourself, 'would I delete the last link in the External links section?' If you think 2 links are rotten, then perhaps you should be predicting that - since everything is well, and any result is acceptable, and the status quo is perfect - only 80% of the edits will be reverted. I certainly wouldn't try to make a prediction about the percentage of links which are bad based on a biased sample where each link was the last one in the External links section. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On 17/05/2012 3:49 a.m., Gwern Branwen wrote: Indeed. Why *are* the skeptical geeks now on Reddit and not Wikipedia? I take (took?) a hard line on keeping articles when doing new page patrol, especially for an unreferenced article from a new contributor. WP is under continual attack from spammers, scammer, vandals, mischievous students, tests of WP's systems by journalists and academics etc. Given all this, and the fact that it is time consuming to chase up the veracity of the article contents WP needs to change. (Unfortunately instigating change on WP is next to impossible.) The current deletion processes are way out of date for what WP now is. Also, the onus should be on an editor to supply refs (unless it is not contentious) rather than the overworked regular editors to chase them up. Alan Liefting ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
Some time ago {{fact}} I had real trouble getting an admin to delete a
blatant hoax.
Alan
On 17/05/2012 12:09 p.m., WereSpielChequers wrote:
If you spot something is a blatant hoax and delete it after 26 seconds I
think you'll find that even the most ardent inclusionists are as intolerant
of hoaxes as we are of attack pages.
WSC
On 16 May 2012 19:38, Tom Morrist...@tommorris.org wrote:
On Wednesday, 16 May 2012 at 16:49, Gwern Branwen wrote:
Indeed. Why *are* the skeptical geeks now on Reddit and not Wikipedia?
26 minutes? I'm trying to imagine how much the angry inclusionists would
be soiling my talk page with accusations of BITEyness if I had IAR deleted
this page after just 26 minutes. ;-)
The question also presumes that Wikipedians are not also Redditors.
--
Tom Morris
http://tommorris.org/
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