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Comment by always_good | Hacker News Reader

My friends and I had a shameful game in uni where we competed to see who could make the most egregious edits to wikipedia without getting reverted.

What was surprising was just how easy it was. We started with minor edits in small articles, just adding our own name to some list of notable achievers.

Then, due to competition, we would add an entire paragraph that fabricated an event. Like adding ourself as a conquistador of some made-up novohispano population in some made-up location.

Imagine how compromised wikipedia must be by people with agendas more lofty than uni students passing some time.

Hell, just the other day I removed "See Also: Donald Trump" from one of the major fallacy articles. The history showed that the scathing political commentary was up there for over 8 months and nobody cared.

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"Shameful" is a good word for it. Stuff like this is a major reason --- maybe the major reason --- behind most of the limitations of the Wikipedia platform. It is, for instance, the primary cause of "deletionism": marginal articles are difficult to police, and so the project has to establish a notability cut-off so it can constrain the problem at least to articles where there are sources to tie claims to.

I'm not saying you should feel bad about yourself, but it's good if people can recognize what WP is up against.

You are confusing edits with articles.

Deletionists tend to confuse their personal ignorance (often of a website called "Google" [yes I know how notability works, no that's not an argument against not bothering to even trivially check whether an article can be improved rather than deleted]) with a mandate to sabotage Wikipedia.

People who remove cruft from articles, rather than speedy deleting articles that aren't about Pokemon, are not deletionists and should not be invoked as human shields for deletionists.

No, you've misunderstood my argument. The problem is that it's difficult for editors to remove "cruft" on articles about marginal topics, because there are so few (usually: zero) reliable sources to draw from. You can't start from a premise that "cruft" can be removed without removing classes of articles; that begs the question that deletionists answer.

> No, you've misunderstood my argument. I'm jumping in the middle here, but mind if I make a meta-comment?

Phrases like "you've misunderstood my words" can sound quite confrontational and, in my experience, tend to provoke defensive responses rather than Cooperative Idea Sharing TM.

I find ideas flow more freely and coopertively by taking the miscommunication blame on myself, "Oh, I must have been unclear. We're on the same page about X, but what I was really trying to say is..."

Anyway, that's just my feel on the meta-interaction above. Carry on.

It is easy to mess up public places. You can spit on the floor in a bus, throw trash on a street, vandalize Wikipedia. Or you can clean the trash and help Wikipedia. The choice is yours. There's no mystical powers coming in and cleaning up after you - just you and people exactly like you. So before complaining "nobody cared" ask yourself - how did I help? What did I do to expect others to clean up after me and feel entitled offense if they did not? Maybe if you and your friends helped instead of messing it up, there would be less need for somebody else to do it.

The important difference here is that this platform claims to be an encyclopedia, and any random vandal may not simply make an edit on an article of the conventional encyclopedia.

It would only be natural for us to take this resource as not-so-reliable, for that it is as easy a man to spit on the floor to infiltrate Wikipedia with false information. Yet, we usually don't. We usually just go ahead and trust what we see on Wikipedia, and maybe that's because it looks so convincing and reliable.

If Wikipedia cannot handle vandalism, maybe it should then warn it's users to realize that there is some higher chance than they might expect that the article they are about to read might have been compromised in terms of correctness, or has never been correct to begin with. Instead of displaying full-page banners, perhaps they should spare a couple of lines to such disclaimer statistics.

The General Disclaimer saying that very thing is hyperlinked at the bottom of every single page on the WWW site.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer

... which pretty much catches nobody's attention unfortunately. If Wikipedia does have the goodwill, then something has to be made to bring the average user's perception of trustworthiness down to the level of how much trustworthy they really are, and maybe even less. In the context of trust, false positives are worse than false negatives, since an individual may simply build up trust by referring to other resources and relieve their scepticism.

I'd say Wikipedia is really to blame for creating this false sense of trust on their platform. Not that they are completely unreliable, but they are less so than they seem to an average user.

You are manufacturing an absurd allegation. Wikipedia put the wikiness of their model right in the name. If an "average user" doesn't bother to research their resources [0] or understand modern language then the problem lies somewhere in our educational system, not in the number of disclaimers on internet websites. It takes a special kind of curious person to want to find information on a subject but not wonder where it came from.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

> It would only be natural for us to take this resource as not-so-reliable

But that is not what the author of the comment did. They regularly messed it up, and then complained that other people didn't clean it up fast enough. It's like throwing out trash every day out of the window, and then feel offended that there's lots of trash on the street. Of course it is, you made it! Stop doing it, and there would be less trash out. Start cleaning up, and there would be even less.

I'm ok if the person just has complaints, but if he has complaints about the thing he himself actively tried to break - no, you should not feel entitled to complain about that.

It is fascinating that some people talk about global topics like climate, evnvironment, etc. and then can't even resist messing up things that is under their nose, given to them completely free and extremely easy no to mess up - just use it as a normal person and enjoy! But no, he needs to vandalize it and then complain it wasn't cleaned up quickly!

You are complaining about basically some graffiti and likening that to environmental polution and the cause for bigger polution happening and not being cleaned up. Is that right?

No, I do not. You completely missed my point. My point is that people worry about global things, but not only do not contribute to more local - but no less important - things, but actually mess them up. Maybe if they did care more about local things, it would also be easier to make progress on more global things.

I didn't miss your point by much, I just didn't mention it because I didn't know how to express any better that a lack of respect is often symptomatic for a lack of insight; because in this case, a juvenile gray hat hacker spirit was at work to gain insight, even if approaching from the wrong end because of some bias. And I don't see any assumption of that bias in your post either. I suppose it's the assumption that they can't do no harm and are being hilarious. I don't see how it's not. I'd argue the harm was local, but the fun was global, to put it in your terms. You seem to think the opposite.

I would argue that anyone who takes wikipedia at face value and trusts everything they read there without further verification, research, or compatible pre-existing knowledge is not a very discerning individual. Wikipedia is not being coy about their identity, I'm pretty sure everyone knows it's edited by strangers on the internet. If you want an encyclopedic source you know you can trust then buy an encyclopedia.

> I'm pretty sure everyone knows it's edited by strangers on the internet

I can assure you that there are at least some who are unaware that even they can edit a Wikipedia article. My housemate (a computer engineering student) didn't. My girlfriend seeking her doctorate degree didn't. My 2 roommates who managed to get to the first 100 at our national examination, also didn't.

Who did they think wrote Wikipedia? I'm not sure that much concern should be taken for people who don't care at all about the sources of the things that they reference; not that it's not bad that they'll be confused by bad information, just that if people aren't concerned at all about sources, they're going to be confused by a lot of things, not just Wikipedia vandals.

Printing something in a book doesn't make it true, and putting it on a website also doesn't make it true, no matter how professional and authoritative-looking the css is. You trust something because you trust the motivations and expertise of its sources.

Can confirm, many do not know. Even more people never actually think about it and certainly do not think about it in a way that they may be part of the project and take part of the responsibility on themselves too. It is a pity, since there are many communities with awesome self-organizing cultures that achieve great things, and free open knowledge is one of those things that most of people, otherwise of different opinions and persuasions, can agree on.

You have a choice. You can engage in conversation with peers as if you might want to understand the reasons for their actions. Or you can preach at them and blame them as individuals for system problems.

Those individuals, and a few thousand more like them, _are_ the system problem.

And the way I see it the only way around it is cultural indoctrination.

It doesn't have to be a negative concept. It can be as simple as picking up a can as you walk by it on the street, and otherwise having a completely normal life. People with you can then see "huh, I can contribute just a little bit, feel good about it, without going full hippie high-viz jacket and tongs with a trash bag every weekend."

Yes. Small things help. Or at least not making it worse. One doesn't have to be a Greenpeace activist to not throw trash on the street, normal everyday behavior would be enough in this case. If only all other societal problems were so easy to solve!

How far the entitlement can go? Not only people expect that their vandalism is promptly cleaned up and feel offended when this does not happen, they also feel offended when being reminded of it being vandalism! Yes, I blame individual for individual's action to make the world around them worse. It's not some vague system, it's somebody deciding to do it and doing it. Just don't, and no system would have anything to do with it.

The answer is to do both. Continually fix systemic issues as best as we can, but also help individuals become more empathetic, wise, and responsible, as best we can.

> Or you can clean the trash and help Wikipedia

That sounds very noble but imagine every time you lifted a bit of litter you had to argue with someone about why it should be put in the bin. Sometimes even when you win the argument they take it out of the bin and throw it down again.

That's how many qualified-to-contribute people feel about Wikipedia now. I run all my web searches with '-wikipedia' as I lack any confidence in its pages. But that's only half the battle, it doesn't address people who arrive on topic-specific fora with statements like 'Wikipedia says that..'

It is to some measure an existing problem (though there are a lot of ways to contribute which are nearly 1005 uncontroversial, especially in more minor spaces - Wikidata, Wikitravel, Wikisource, Wikiversity, etc.) but it's definitely not the problem that the comment author describes. He didn't try to clean up anything. He didn't meet any adversity in doing so. He didn't try to pick up the trash. He threw the trash there and complained why other people - which are volunteers - are so lazy as not to promptly clean it up.

There is a bunch of networks that operate on the idea the the majority involved are good actors and the detection rate of the bad actors is statistical good enough.

Take the tor project. It is very easy for a exit node operator to be bad. If you wanted to you could go and compete on who make the most egregious changes to traffic before the tor project bans the node. If the wast majority of operates did this then the project would die. Similar, torrent sites and BitTorrent is easily poked at by bad actors that either insert malware or do other bad things to the network. It too only operates on the basis that the wast majority do not have the intention to bring it down.

Of course the same could be said by HN. If a wast majority of users ganged together to push a specific agenda then it would likely take a while before the moderators could intervene. The upvote/downvote and flag system operates on the concept that the majority of users operate as independent agents and do not intend to try bring HN down.

In the end however for all the weakness and dependency on the statistical good nature of people, sites like those tend to be resilient in the long run.

Me and my friends did exactly the same when we were 15. One of us added "Hannah screwed her dog" to the Wikipedia article for Paper. I remember being surprised that it lasted for a few weeks.

I'm happy to say that wouldn't stay up for long anymore. At least not something that obvious.

When the bot doesn't catch those, there's almost always a couple of people looking at every change as they stream by, but that's an uphill battle that mostly catches the obvious bad edits.

The rate of change to recent change reviewers is too high to catch the more sophisticated vandalism as it happens, that's when things start staying up for weeks or months until some random person browsing the page notices, and hopefully fixes it.

> it lasted for a few weeks.

Citation needed...

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