Comment by paulpauper

3 years ago

It was the Chinese Wikipedia. It's not like it would be vetted as closely as the English version, so not that surprising it stayed up so long.

14 comments

paulpauper

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hombre_fatal  3 years ago

Dunno. In uni I vandalized Wikipedia (oops, I mean created a hoax) with large, believable edits to generic/major articles like "Tree". My edits stayed up until I grew up years later, felt bad, and took them down.

I don't think Wikipedia is as closely vetted as we assume. For one, it's just so much cheaper to create content than it is to verify it. It's pretty amazing that Wikipedia is generally as high quality as it is with this in mind. And one reason why is that I imagine these types of bad actors (vandals making convincing edits just to be a jerk) are relatively rare.

I reckon most of Wikipedia's bad edits come from low-effort vandals and people trying to game high-value articles that have lots of eyeballs.

  • thaumasiotes  3 years ago

    > I don't think Wikipedia is as closely vetted as we assume.

    I keep finding gross errors in random pages that I visit for other reasons. For example:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_toast

    All of this article's references to French toast being described in the Roman Empire are straight-up lies. Interestingly, this is already noted on the talk page, but that has had no effect on the text of the article.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Shimei_and_Qin_Xianglian

    In the "History" section of this article, we see that the characters appeared in a book in 1595, and that they are based on a real-life official (and his wife) of the Qing dynasty, which began in 1644.

  • memsom  3 years ago

    The problem with Wikipedia moderation is that is all done by people that care about the subject. If you pick a subject that no one cares too much about, you can easily deface it with non true information.

    The other issue is the war cry "you are a sock puppet!" Many seem to use this to try to force their opinion to be heard. I saw this first hand once and it can get ugly.

    • technothrasher  3 years ago

      > If you pick a subject that no one cares too much about, you can easily deface it with non true information.

      I dunno, I tried a while back to see how it all works and made some edits on a few articles that I figured were pretty backwater. I wasn't defacing, I was trying to correct with valid info and attempting to follow the editing guidelines. It all just got quickly reverted by what I assume were bots, calling it 'vandalism'. I moved on.

  • akolbe  3 years ago

    Kozierok's Law accounts for much of this:

    "The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic."