How 5-year Wikipedia hoax fooled even the subject's own company | Hacker News Reader

How 5-year Wikipedia hoax fooled even the subject's own company

ken-jennings.com

66 pointszach22 comments

Wait, he's using an ad campaign as proof that somebody believed this stuff. Read his links. I don't think the ad company was fooled. They wrote, "As Wikipedia will attest to, it's all true – even Freed's inflatable shrimp trap." They just liked the article and didn't see any reason to correct it.

How many hundreds (thousands?) of other articles like this are sitting out in the Wiki-ether right now, wreaking havoc and just waiting to be debunked?

Don't think this is new. For all of history there have been pervaders of disinformation. The only difference now is the media with which it is distributed.

Another difference is the low barrier to entry for editing. This, I think, is a more important difference because it not only leads to much faster corrections but also allows almost anyone to participate (in most cases).

Yes. Bruce Schneier has been warning about semantic attacks on the Web since before Wikipedia was founded.

http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0010.html

I think it also happens in subtle ways with changing knowledge. I recently got done with "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack Weatherford. Looking at the Mongol entries in Wikipedia, I wonder how much is sourced from European sources using Mongols as a political statement against their own rulers and how much is taken from documents that came available in the last 15 years.

These sorts of things are actually good, and a reason to continue using wikipedia in preference to other sources.

Here's the horrible truth: no other encyclopedia is any more accurate. However, if by using a "professionally edited" encyclopedia you are lulled into a false sense of trust then you are at a disadvantage. If instead you use an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone and everyone on the internet, perhaps you will retain your senses of judgment and critical thinking. Perhaps you will double-check "facts" that seem a little fishy.

That, ultimately, is why wikipedia is a better source of information in the long run. Any source of information compiled by any group of people will be full of biases and errors. It's infinitely more important that the public become more savvy information consumers, improving their critical thinking abilities, than that any given source of information is incrementally more "accurate" than another.

Indeed, it's somewhat disconcerting the extent to which people don't apply similar skepticism to other sources. There's a lot of people who say you shouldn't trust Wikipedia because it's just edited by people on the internet, and then they'll go read one single book by an "expert" on a subject, and assume they now have a correct view of the subject.

In many cases, when reading one book, even by an expert, you've gotten a much more biased view of the subject than Wikipedia, because nobody makes a name for themselves by writing a book that regurgitates the neutral consensus. A new book by a historian, for example, will frequently make controversial new claims, which may or may not end up being accepted by other historians in the long run.

In some ways I agree with this sentiment, but in others I think it's deeply flawed.

Your argument relies on a couple of deep assumptions, the main one being that the general public know how Wikipedia is made.

Based on my (albeit anecdotal) evidence, I suspect that the vast majority of internet users (non-technical) may not know much at all about Wikipedia. They just look something up on the internet, find it on something that calls itself an 'encyclopedia', and believe it. They know nothing of who has created the page, or the checks (or lack thereof) that go into each page.

Search for a random subject on Google - e.g. 'Canada', and click on the first result (Wikipedia, of course). How would any user know about the methodology behind this encyclopedia? Twice on the page it refers to itself (prominently) as "The Free Encyclopedia" - to me, as a non-technical user, that might sound like a reliable (albeit free) source of information?

I don't think there is any need to distinguish between technical and non-technical users. Both generally just go by what is on the page rather than checking the references.

I don't buy it. I guess your implicit argument is that normal encyclopedias are better than Wikipedia, but overestimate the extent to which that is true, so errors are good news because they remind that errors exist.

That seems kind of weak. If I eat at a local greasy-spoon and get sick, I'm not going to say "This is just a reminder that I know eating here makes me sick, whereas I would be taken by surprise if I got sick at a nicer restaurant."

"An investigation reported in the journal Nature in 2005 suggested that for scientific articles Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy in Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors"."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia

See especially the section on comparative studies. There have been more studies and more recent studies than just the 2005 study quoted above.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Compar...

Note that the references are provided. Your assignment is to read them and correct any errors you find in the article.

Precisely. The sad truth is that despite all of the perceived (and real) inaccuracies in wikipedia, there does not exist a more accurate single source of information on such a wide variety of topics. Wikipedia may see the occasional hoax, and may see its fair share of biases et al but other sources have the same problems. How many encyclopedia's parroted Washington Irving's hoax that the western world believed the Earth was flat prior to Columbus's voyages, for example?

In the event that a wikipedia user remains unsophisticated and does not acquire a degree of critical thinking the worst case scenario is that they are subject only to more or less the same degree of inaccuracies as any other encyclopedia. This is why wikipedia is a superior encyclopedia, because in the best cause it engenders critical thinking and in the worst case it's equivalent to just about any other source, so on average wikipedia users come out ahead.

Your argument reminds me of the security industry's maxim that "No security is better than bad security." If you think you are protected (from threats or from bad information) when you actually aren't, you'll exercise much less caution and be more likely to get swindled. Contrariwise, if you are aware of the weakness, you'll be more careful and thus compensate for it.

The whole concept of "truth" is a bit fishy in the first place. This is obviously an extreme case, but there are lots of edge cases, where something that is fact for one person may be ludicrous to another.

What makes Wikipedia different than Merriam-Webster, is that you don't know (easily at least) who the author is, and thus you can't verify the purposed facts. This makes the source less scientific.

Be skeptical of your sources, always, but keep in mind that the more heavily visited pages that are about more well-known subjects and some people consider important are going to have more educated eyeballs checking them.

For example, I don't think an obviously made up "fact" would last very long on the page for red-black trees.

Exactly. The whole story only proves no one really cared about the Julius Freed article in the first place.

This reminds me of some unintentional errors. Neil Gaiman recently noticed something on Wikipedia that he had made up in a novel being treated like fact.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/05/one-book-one-twitter-o...

Ken Jennings posted a follow-up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1397287

Turns out DQ did know the Wikipedia entry was false, but still liked the concept of some of the far-out claims, and wrote a script around them.

Have possible links between prankster Joe Cassara and ad firm space150 been investigated?

Ken Jennings, in his follow-up post, says:

  "They had no connection with the original hoaxer"

http://ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=1900

Note that it wasn't actually "the subject's own company' that was fooled. It was the PR department of the company that had acquired the subject's own company. Why they wouldn't just ask them about noteworthy inventions instead of using wikipedia, or at least verify with them, is beyond me.

Wait, I'm seeing a connection here. I can just hear it...

"Some say... that he invented a tiny shower suited for pigeons. All we know, is he's called The Stig!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com