Comment by oefrha
3 years ago
I don’t see any similarity between the scandals beyond the surface level one person generating a lot of content on Wikipedia that was later reversed. Your linked article is about some teenager putting up mistranslated garbage. That’s very boring vandalism, notable only due to its scale. TFA is about someone creating a vast collection of plausible-sounding history out of thin air, which is fascinating and arguably more damaging for Wikipedia.
Even worse (or better, depending on how you look at it), she interconnected her made-up history with historical places and persons - e.g. the principality of Tver did exist, so it's probably hard to tell which of the details about it are fact and which are fiction. That's almost Dan Brown-level stuff...
The Scots Wikipedia issue isn't straightforward at all. For one, considering the sheer effort spent in 170 000 edits over a decade, it's quite possible that the editor was acting in severely misguided good faith. More importantly, it raised questions about the utility and proceedings of Wikimedia sites with low traffic; a substantial discussion took place in an RFC[0] that included proposed audits to prevent future incidents, but nothing really went through other than increased attention to the long-existing Small-Wiki Monitoring Team. And the off-wiki effects...poisoned datasets and damage to the language itself!
Perhaps proposals from the RFC will be renewed in light of this, though it's not the same situation as the Chinese Wikipedia isn't really small. It's known for questionable circumstances regarding adminship and other user behaviour, though, and is generally quite insular. So, unsurprising that this story hasn't received much attention outside of Chinese Wikipedia or news. On-wiki, the only pages for it currently are that on zhwiki and a corresponding page on English Wikipedia with a brief summary.[1]
Also, enwiki's own newspaper has a more informed article on the Scots incident,[2] also with some discussion (there's also an HN post). By the way, I remember an article or Wikipedia page about how journalism about Wikipedia persistently lacks nuance or understanding of its customs (basically a community-wide Gell-Mann amnesia effect), but can't find it now...anyone happen to just know it?
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Large_s...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fabricated_articles_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Media reporting on Wikipedia (with few exceptions, like Stephen Harrison on Slate) generally consists in regurgitating Wikimedia press releases. So issues like Wikimedia's dodgy fundraising practices that could do with investigative journalism for example often fall by the wayside:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
I and some others from the Signpost, the English Wikipedia's community newspaper, gave a presentation at the 2015 WikiConference about the lack of good Wikipedia journalism:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Journalism_and_the_o...
> and damage to the language itself!
What could this mean? Sometimes people do talk about the health of a language, but that almost exclusively refers to the number of living speakers.
Being freely licensed, the Wikipedia corpus is widely used as input for AI tools such as machine translation.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/
7 replies →
In both cases people pretended to be experts (history / scots), it worked and large amount of inappropriate articles stayed public a long time.
> I don’t see any similarity between the scandals beyond the surface level one person generating a lot of content on Wikipedia that was later reversed.
That's the similarity.
It's like saying you don't see any similarity between Maradona and Messi, other than both of them being very successful Argentinian players.