31–40 of 96 posts
The article claims this is an example of a falsehood starting on Wikipedia, percolating to external sources, then perpetuating on Wikipedia because it's in those external sources. That's interesting. But what's more interesting is that this may be an entirely different case: a falsehood starts on Wikipedia, percolates to external sources, and then becomes true because it is pervasive . Then it remains on Wikipedia be…
Granted, there might be some edge cases (like when a Wikipedian was very fast in adding the fact after it became known) but that would seem to stop the feedback loop dead in its tracks.
It seems to me the problem is that people think there even exists such a thing as an authoritative source.
Really? What if we were debating where nollidge was born and where he went to school. Would you not be an authoritative source of information on these subjects?
To be fair, it's not like the statement "called the Brazilian aardvark" is not true. If it looks like an Aardvark and someone calls it that, then it is called the Brazilian Aardvark. There are many species of animals which are misnamed with regards to their taxonomy.
In standard usage you would only say it is called something if that were commonly used by many people. We don't update the encyclopedia every time the crank at your local coffee-shop comes up with a new pet phrase.
Now, with Wikipedia it is easier for the crank to get to the journalist. If the journalists had fact checked and never reprinted the "fact", it would have eventually been removed from the Wikipedia entry.
I once changed facts on wikipedia. We worked for a smartphone maker back when they were new, and we had smartphones and GPRS. So when we did a treasure hunt for team building, where there was multiple-choice questions hidden in a forest, every team thought themselves clever by searching for the answers on the still-young wikipedia. But my team was cleverer: we were editing wikipedia. There were a lot of confused low-…
Just thinking about how much fact checking I should commit myself to before now citing anything from the Internet.
Brilliant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is too pat a dismissal – it's intellectually akin to the way “all bugs are shallow” aphorism which is pithy, optimistic and wrong. While in theory Wikipedia becomes more correct over time, it's not a given and there are many articles which never receive enough expert attention to catch non-flagrant errors. Wikipedia also has the unique problem that it can become less correct over time, whether due to error or de…
Note that you can permalink to every version of a Wikipedia article using the history tab, e.g. the first version of the Hacker News article [1]. There's also flagged revisions which allows users to 'flag' a revision as the 'accepted' version [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hacker_News&oldid... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes
It's great for a journalist citing sources but it doesn't help with the problem where a writer on deadline checks Wikipedia quickly without exhaustively verifying the content and uses the information to inform their writing without directly quoting it.
The article links to a wikipedia article about the circular reporting phenomenon, and I'm pleased to see that someone has added "vicious aardvark" as another name for circular reporting. Brilliant.