Comment by 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.
> 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.
There's one reference to it on the French toast page and it wasn't made up by the Wikipedia writer. There's a very similar Roman dish, and the original Latin cam be found here (recipe 3): https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/De_re_coquinaria/Liber_VII_-_...
This was translated by Joesph Dommers Vehling, whose translation can be found here (recipe 296): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29728/29728-h/29728-h.htm
Vehling added "[and beaten eggs]", and equates the recipe with French toast, but makes it clear his addition is precisely that: it's bracketed and in lower case.
You seem to want to disagree with my comment, but I can't see where you're disagreeing.
I should note that there are indeed multiple references to the Roman Empire on the page; take a look at the sidebar.
This is the text in question from the History section:
> The earliest known reference to French toast is in the Apicius, a collection of Latin recipes dating to the 1st century CE, where it is described as simply aliter dulcia 'another sweet dish'.[8] The recipe says to "Break [slice] fine white bread, crust removed, into rather large pieces which soak in milk [and beaten eggs] fry in oil, cover with honey and serve".[9]
There are two sentences, and both of them are lies. There is no reference to French toast in the Apicius, and the quote given in the second sentence -- as you've already noted -- doesn't come from the Apicius. Wikipedia is supporting the claim that a 1st-century work refers to French toast by citing material originally written in the 20th century.
The idea that French toast appears in the Apicius is something the wikipedia author just made up, yes.
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If the bracketed note is simply a suggestion by the translator, at the very least it shouldn't be included in the quote in the Wikipedia article because it's misleading.
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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.
> 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.
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."