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Wikipedia: Long-Term Abuse

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Re: Wikipedia: Long-Term Abuse

#61

Post by samizdis »

29athrowaway wrote: post #55

They will never surpass this guy: https://nypost.com/2020/08/26/most-of-scottish-wikipedia-is-...

Except, perhaps:

Opening paragraph of article [1] linked below (full version is worth a read - sort of redefines the concept of dedication):

>For over a decade, a Chinese woman known as “Zhemao” created a massive, fantastical, and largely fictional alternate history of late Medieval Russia on Chinese Wikipedia, writing millions of words about entirely made-up political figures, massive (and fake) silver mines, and pivotal battles that never actually happened. She even went so far as to concoct details about things like currency and eating utensils.

[1] https://lithub.com/a-chinese-borges-wrote-millions-of-words-...

Re: Wikipedia: Long-Term Abuse

#62

Post by cunidev »

I have always been amazed by how Wikipedia resists, in general, so well to coordinated, long-term vandalism while keeping essentially any IP able to edit most voices without login, a trust/feedback system or such. I guesss the secret is in its very active moderator community, which is often not seen?

Re: Wikipedia: Long-Term Abuse

#64

Post by psi75 »

joib wrote: post #10

Some of these are hilarious. Favourite so far is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Chip... > The Chipmunks vandal, also known as the Alvin vandal, adds trivial detail about the Chipmunks fictional musical group's cover versions to song articles, for instance adding a Chipmunks cover version to the Rolling Stones' song "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". Not only the Chipmunks but the vandal also ta…

The first thing I did was look at their long page to see if I'm still on there.

I'm not. I suppose it's a good and a bad thing that my once-legendary trolls have been forgotten, but back before many of y'all were born, I was a god of trolling. The whole internet quivered when I swung my hammer.

Now I'm a boring normie: married, medicated, with two cats.

Re: Wikipedia: Long-Term Abuse

#65

Post by psi75 »

cunidev wrote: post #62

I have always been amazed by how Wikipedia resists, in general, so well to coordinated, long-term vandalism while keeping essentially any IP able to edit most voices without login, a trust/feedback system or such. I guesss the secret is in its very active moderator community, which is often not seen?

I was heavily involved with Wikipedia during the mid-2000s. The truth is, it was a very toxic community back then. (I have no idea if it's better now.) However, the product itself was (and is) quite good. Even for all the nonsense, it's still a marvel how high the quality of most of the articles is.

Re: Wikipedia: Long-Term Abuse

#67

Post by sethammons »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #31
joib wrote: post #10

Some of these are hilarious. Favourite so far is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Chip... > The Chipmunks vandal, also known as the Alvin vandal, adds trivial detail about the Chipmunks fictional musical group's cover versions to song articles, for instance adding a Chipmunks cover version to the Rolling Stones' song "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". Not only the Chipmunks but the vandal also ta…

Since this seems to be the curated "hilarious ones" thread, I'll throw in my favorite: "Prolific sockpuppeter with over 500 socks which inserts hoaxes about lions existing in Montana."

Hah! Well, we do have cougars / mountain lions

Re: Wikipedia: Long-Term Abuse

#68

Post by mhh__ »

bawolff wrote: post #42
mhh__ wrote: post #21

Speaking of Wikipedia abuse Larry Sanger just blocked me on Twitter

Larry Sanger hasn't been associated with wikipedia for more than a decade.

My point exactly. He was mouthing off about how bad Wikipedia is and then said or let slip that he in fact does browse it through a proxy.

Re: Wikipedia: Long-Term Abuse

#70

Post by photochemsyn »

Wikipedia is mostly useless as a reliable source of information. There are exceptions but for anything beyond superficial information you really have to look elsewhere. I generally block it from results.

One of the biggest problems is the broken links issue. Supposedly all information on Wikipedia is sourced to newspaper articles, books, research reports etc. but more often than not those source links are broken. It would seem to be a relatively simple task to write some kind of bot that would check Wikipedia links and report the number of broken ones at the top of each Wikipedia page.

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