A Chinese woman wrote millions of words of fake Wikipedia history
sixthtone.com
sixthtone.com
I didn't like it the moment I heard this, but now contrarian mode has kicked in:
Why isn't this destruction of essential information infrastructure? Why isn't this a 'fuck you' to the millions of volunteer hours W is based on? Why isn't this potentially infecting millions of minds with lies?
Why isn't this absolutely deplorable?
(COI Statement: i am a wikipedia editor for 15+ years, I am a member of my local wikimedia chapter)
lol
That's not merely destruction but creation with volume.
The thing to remember is to check the cited sources whenever the information is remotely important to you.
See https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday... or this from Charles Seife:
"Wikipedia is like an old and eccentric uncle. He can be a lot of fun—over the years he's seen a lot, and he can tell a great story. He's also no dummy; he's accumulated a lot of information and has some strong opinions about what he's gathered. You can learn quite a bit from him. But take everything he says with a grain of salt. A lot of the things he thinks he knows for sure aren't quite right, or are taken out of context. And when it comes down to it, sometimes he believes things that are a little bit, well, nuts. If it ever matters to you whether something he said is real or fictional, it's crucial to check it out with a more reliable source."
—Charles Seife, Virtual Unreality, Appendix, "The top ten dicta of the internet skeptic", Dictum no. 1.
I am only asking because I understand that most of the higher mathematics pages on Wikipedia are written by actual mathematicians – and pretty much unreadable to anyone who is not a mathematician and already fully conversant with the topics concerned.
Maths inasmuch as WP can cover it surely didn't make heaps advances in the last decades, except perhaps in the pedagogy department (that I can source, but it is literally decades) and category theory to give the whole thing structure (also pretty much cut and dried as soon as Bourbaki, I believe, though reception may take a while).
What he does not describe is my disability to understand most topics good enough to find out if a source is reliable or not. That a paper got into a famous money-making journal certainly is not a guarantee for reliability.
Why not suggest instead to check more reliable sources. Would that sound too diminishing, and an indefinite determiner is added as buffer?
Well, if I tried learning linguistics only from Wikipedia I won't ever find out.
I am not saying that this is funny or anything, but I feel like it's irrelevant. I assume many articles contain lies or are downright fabricated. This just confirms my assumption, and makes me think of how many things like this one are left to discover yet.
I would not believe anyone who claimed they did not believe something they read online. What is the distinction between online and offline these days as a source of information?
It made sense when online was a bunch of random people with no businesses or editors behind it. But when all major organizations and institutions have an online presence, it seems meaningless to differentiate online and offline.
Wikipedia, despite all odds, has proven the most effective distributor of facts of our time. Shame on those who undermine its credibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Tone
But the story is perfectly real: the link to the community discussion on Wikipedia checks out.
Chinese state media do enjoy reporting – often intelligently – on Wikipedia's foibles (I've been quoted by them a number of times). And I have sometimes wished Western media were equally diligent about digging up stories like this, rather than always reflexively singing Wikipedia's praises. Wikipedia would actually profit from the scrutiny, as I and some Signpost colleagues pointed out at the 2015 WikiConference:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Journalism_and_the_o...
(The Signpost is the English Wikipedia's community newspaper, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost )
But it is also clear that this Sixth Tone article is designed to support a political narrative. I would not completely exclude the possibility that it was a state-sponsored effort. The apology the user posted (in Chinese) on the English Wikipedia (someone linked it below) does read quite wooden (I had DeepL translate it). On the other hand, this may simply reflect cultural differences.
Let us not validate the concept by embracing the term. It is a weasel word for people who want to promote their own flavor of misinformation.
As far as Wikipedia goes, this shows a loophole that needs to be closed. I'm amused by it - I can also understand why others are not.
"Fake News" is now exactly as you describe: "a term to allow a blanket dismissal of anything made public that political leaders don't want to be heard."
However, IIRC, the original coinage of the term was about disinformation and/or news organizations that consistently traded in misinformation or disinformation.
The speed with which it got co-opted by political leaders as a blanket dismissal was impressive. I'm not sure it even lasted months in its initial meaning.
Correct. I recall it initially as a left-leaning term coined in response to the "alternative facts" incident.
E.g. The CCP recently declared that Hong Kong was never a colony of the UK, but "under ruling of a colonial government" [1]
1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-61810263
Are we aware that in China, people mostly support Russia's invasion to Ukraine because of state level propaganda?
To be clear: The Russian Govt invasion of Ukraine is awful. They are completely in the wrong. Putin needs to go and another strong man duplicate must not replace him. Don’t get me started on how bad the CCP is!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...
Theoretically, this would mean "representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic."
The way that Wikipedia justifies not presenting, say, Russian or Chinese views on global politics as prominently as Western views is that Russian and Chinese sources are simply not "reliable".
But of course, that merely begs the question.
In a way, it would be interesting to read a publication that really does present all the competing narratives, if only to learn what people elsewhere are told by their media.
The downside is that it would contain not just different viewpoints but also an even greater number of outright lies, as one would actively have to abandon any attempt to present the truth to the best of one's ability. :/
1) what it would completely eliminate, though, is lies that are presented with no opposing perspective. And, along with that...
2) it would have more truths. If you're the victim of a lying culture/government, there would likely be truth in one or more of the opposing perspectives, where normally there would be silence.
Is this supposed to be a difference of fact or a difference of perspective? Colonies are ruled by colonial governments.
edit: e.g. if I kidnap a woman and force her to marry me, her family may not want to refer to her as my ex-wife after they get her back.
I don’t really understand the strenuous objection to this. This seems less like “1984-style rewriting of history” and more like completely routine nationalism that you see all around the world.
Are you aware that in USA people mostly supported Middle East invasion because of state-level propaganda? China isn't an outlier here.
“A colony of the UK” vs “under the ruling of a colonial government” are pretty similar.
Given that the basis of the UK’s colonization of Hong Kong was based on a treaty granting it control over the territory for 150 years, after which it was returned to China. The Chinese portrayal seems apt, given that it was a temporary, though long, occupation.
The thing is, in cz.WP they could do that if they want.
> Are we aware that in China, people mostly support Russia's invasion to Ukraine because of state level propaganda?
I cannot say that because of state propaganda I became aware of that. But I sense that you are low key shilling, no offence, so yeah
Because it doesn't scale. Unlike spam / fake news, the effort to take down something like this is smaller than the effort of creating it.
Now sadly when people start using GPT-4 for the same thing, the balance changes, and we're not far from that..I'm much more worried about that.
It may be deemed "vandalism" by seasoned editors, though Arb might chose more salient descriptors.
I don't recall right now what the legal opinion on destruction of data is, ie. irrecoverable erasure in the most trivial case, and I think they wouldn't introduce specific new laws around IT systems if it were that easy. But if it is, then analogies from destruction to somewhat impeding property is well precedented (in .de) even if it's entirely reversable in theory.
1mil words isn't that much work though, so I'd consider this a fairly quick end and not exactly news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi...
There's more or less a competition for them.
Might be wrong, but both the Twilight series and 50 Shades of Gray series were initially fan fiction pieces by housewives who published their work on blogs.
Alternate historical fiction is a very popular genre.
Listeners heard a dance band playing languid Spanish numbers in the "Park-Astoria Hotel". The music was interrupted suddenly by a flash. It was announced that a professor in a university observatory in the Southwest had noticed a series of gas explosions on the planet Mars.
They may have covered themselves legally, but it’s highly likely they intended to fool people
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/war-worlds-broadca...
I think you are missing the nuance that radio was a young medium and the radio program was unrealistic and introduced as fiction, so it wouldn't have occurred to anyone what effect it would have on the audience.
The people who were panicking for the most part heard the part about it being a radio production of war of the world' but their brain didn't process those words. Nobody could have expected that.
The audience would have also been less media savvy than they would be today, so would react more naively than the producers might have expected to an early experimental example of a "found footage" program.
That's eg why financial newspapers often stick closer to the truth: their readers want to be able to play the markets, so need something with a bit of a reality check, instead of just playing to their ideological preferences only.
Are you sure?
From my limited experience, there is a huge amount of fictitious narrative in financial news. I just had a look at https://www.barrons.com/ - hard to say how much is just opinions of the journalist, but not much looked fact based.
If a journalist made a random prediction, and market participants believed the prediction, so the market then did what the journalist predicted, how would you know?
If they consistently randomly get lucky, that's fine. Just check multiple stories to get a sense of the distribution.
> If a journalist made a random prediction, and market participants believed the prediction, so the market then did what the journalist predicted, how would you know?
If all you care about whether the prediction is accurate (so you can trade on it), you don't need to worry about the philosophical differences between an accurate prediction and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
History in an ideal world tries to record what happened.
But realistically, history is a tool for politics.
But judging by the heavy downvotes of your comment, that fact doesn’t seem to be popular.
No its because he question to concept of truth itself. Literally everybody knows history writing is manipulated for many reasons.
But in my observation, however in my view historiography is often far more complex then reflecting simply political desires.
To answer the question "is there any other kind" would be enough to provide one [just one] example of a truthful history book (it is ok if it is imprecise in details as long as it is accurate overall--think physics theories within their application domain--we are far far away from history resembling hard sciences).
The example would demonstrate falsehoods you believe in.
Goofy as his methods are, Herodotus is a very compelling read specifically because it's not one coherent narrative, but a collection of points-of-view (none of which may be entirely correct, but reflect what people claimed at least).
I find that in practice, the scary part is that it is not so impressive and that the thousand eyes are largely a lie.
All too often have I seen such things go on for a long time without anyone noticing, or perhaps many noticing, but not being motivated to investigate and call out, or perhaps many even calling out, but their calls going unanswered.
If you work in a commercial publisher, there's less oversight.
Do you? When you say you see such things going on without anybody noticing, presumably you noticed?
[0] I don't generally edit articles on politically-sensitive topics. They are wargrounds, patrolled by tough gatekeepers. I take any information in WP about current affairs with a bushel of salt. But it's still better than, for example, mainstream media.
Consider the situation with XScreenLock in Debian when it was found that the code had a timer in it that bugged people to update when using an unsupported version. Once the timer reached this point and many received this update, Debian immediately patched it to remove it as many found it annoying and it was a controversial move, but to me the most interesting part was that it was in the code, publically; it was added at one point,and no one at Debian knew.
This timer that merely annoyed users into updating could just as easily been serious malware that no one would have noticed that lay dormant to awaken at a set date.
Some people really love to write. She must have gotten incredibly lost in her fictional world. I can only imagine it must have been the case here, and at some point it just happened to be that the medium she used was Wikipedia becuase that's where it all started for unrelated reasons.
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 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.
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.
But an alternative for the wikipedia article I guess would be to just clarify that there was a dish of bread soaked in milk that has been compared to french toast, but that it didn't actually have eggs so it's debatable whether it really counts.
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.
So there is no mention of the eggs, but the thing does have some resemblance to French toast.
No, this sentence is self-contradictory. That would be like saying enchiladas date back to the Roman empire because they often combined bread with cheese.
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.
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.
"The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic."
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/wikipedia-bicholim-conflict...
Or the Amelia Bedelia hoax?
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/amelia-bedelia-wikipedia-ho...
More here:
https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
Admin noticeboard thread:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...
As a not-so-far-fetched example, remember that QAnon started out as a similar sort of 'blended reality fiction' (before it was likely overtaken by state-level propaganda agents). The only difference is that QAnon was based on giving a new interpretation to reputable third-party texts, while this goes one step further to actually fabricate seemingly original texts by a reputable source - I'd argue that's even worse.
This is not the full story, she originally said the motive was to win online debates with wikipedia references (created by her alias account)
Scenario simulations based on eu4, hoi4 battles (possibly with mods), both teams would setoff by a historical event, also external events would affect the progress.
It's a somewhat popular online sport & sub-culture in China. People go to extremes for historical "accuracy" or just for the sake of it. Tons of memes are generated without people noticing.
In this example, Zhemao can claim something like "I should have extra 2000 silver starting at my castle because check out this wikipedia article". She surely have played many games in her favor.
Her apology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:%E6%8A%98%E6%AF%9B
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-...
Perhaps proposals from the RFC will be renewed in light of this, though it's not the same situation as the Chinese Wikipedia isn't really small. It's known for questionable circumstances regarding adminship and other user behaviour, though, and is generally quite insular. So, unsurprising that this story hasn't received much attention outside of Chinese Wikipedia or news. On-wiki, the only pages for it currently are that on zhwiki and a corresponding page on English Wikipedia with a brief summary.[1]
Also, enwiki's own newspaper has a more informed article on the Scots incident,[2] also with some discussion (there's also an HN post). By the way, I remember an article or Wikipedia page about how journalism about Wikipedia persistently lacks nuance or understanding of its customs (basically a community-wide Gell-Mann amnesia effect), but can't find it now...anyone happen to just know it?
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Large_s...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fabricated_articles_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
What could this mean? Sometimes people do talk about the health of a language, but that almost exclusively refers to the number of living speakers.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/
In a similar way, if some people online are using they/their/they're interchangeably, and then other people (who are learning the language) learn that they are interchangeable and start using them this way, then English gets hurt by being altered in this undesired way.
Some changes to language are considered desirable (e.g. introduction of new terminology for new concepts, or restructuring either as a natural process or top-down reforms that makes it more clear and thus more useful for communication) and some are not (ones that increase confusion such as the they/their/they're example above), and the latter ones are considered to hurt the language.
The problem is that what you describe in your first paragraph:
> Any people wanting to learn the language using these resources (e.g. learning more Scots from the Scots wikipedia) would mean that they learn the altered/false/different language instead of the actual language, and afterward that changes how the actual language is used in practice
is just a description of how languages change as a natural process. It's not different in any way. Concluding that in this case it is "damage" and "bad" would require you to conclude that all natural language change is also "damage" and "bad", which is admittedly a popular viewpoint. But it's one you're trying to disavow.
If other people speaking Scots would start using them because they simply prefer to do so, I could consider that as part of natural change of language; however, if people who want to learn Scots are mislead and instead get taught examples from effectively another unrelated language ("NotScots"? "StupidScots"?) that are falsely labeled as being Scots, then that has nothing to do with natural language change and is pure damage.
You say that like that isn't a ubiquitous process. Copying the usage of someone who was unfamiliar with some other usage is... almost the entirety of language change. The rest of it is copying the usage of someone who was being deliberately weird.
Real prose in Scots is scarce enough already; if scowiki is used as a corpus for training AI, that is certainly a threat to the language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
I and some others from the Signpost, the English Wikipedia's community newspaper, gave a presentation at the 2015 WikiConference about the lack of good Wikipedia journalism:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Journalism_and_the_o...
That's the similarity.
It's like saying you don't see any similarity between Maradona and Messi, other than both of them being very successful Argentinian players.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...
Regardless, I only posed it being state-driven as a hypothetical anyways. But state media reporting on the matter does little-to-nothing towards disproving that hypothesis.
[1]: https://pracademy.co.uk/insights/ivy-lee-and-the-origins-of-...
(Note that this is not whataboutism, but rather a proof that this behaviour is widespread and pretty much normal, which contrasts with article's rethoric)
Edit: just noticed that you're a self-proclaimed 50 Cent Army member. It's all making sense now - you're an actual propagandist. For anyone curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
Such a fantastical lie wrapped around such utter banality; surely this will warrant her own Wikipedia article.
They do not exist. First a Hungarian aristocrat was hoodwinked by some locals for money in Egypt in the 1930s, then a Hungarian student spending two semesters Cairo in the 1960s rewarmed the issue to prove his worth and successfully sold himself as an expert of all things Arabic in Hungary -- he never managed to get even a degree -- then finally in the nineties a far right weekly dug up the story for nationalistic purposes.
Finally an expedition was sent in 2006-2007 which have found with absolute surety these people do not exist. Their report is linked from wikipedia.
I tried to correct the article, I tried to delete the article, it was refused saying it's notorious enough to have an article on Wikipedia ... ... ... seriously?
Similarly, Hungarian prehistory on Wikipedia is completely outdated. Most of the "primary sources" it lists are completely unreliable, they were not even written with the intent of being reliable history wise (the The Annals of Fulda and The Annals of St-Bertin being remarkable exceptions). It notes "their reliability ... is suspect" ignoring Tamás Hölbling absolutely tearing them apart in 2010 in his two volume massive source criticism book. They are much closer to a comic book today than a historical book. It completely omits all the remarkable archaeogenetic findings since 2008. It completely ignores an absolutely groundbreaking symposium held in 1999 (they brought together researchers Indo-European and Uralic both archeological and linguistic, this was never done before), second edition can be found at https://www.sgr.fi/sust/SUST242.pdf . Overall, the Wikipedia article reflects the scientific consensus of the 1970s or so.
I tried to fix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Abdallah_Jayhani because Gayhani is incorrect, one spelling which could be used is Ğayhānī (eg https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/islm.1998.75....) it got reverted with "The other names in the lead are not supposed to have custom alphabets or whatever they're called." Whatever, eh? But hilariously enough, Wikipedia itself has an article on the romanization of Persian and you can check that article and see for yourself that "G" in itself is never used to transliterate a persian letter no matter which scheme you pick... but whatever!
I gave up on trying to fix Wikipedia.
You should read sources on how the jewish americans helped black americans. The sources flat out state that During the period Jewish American's did nothing to help black americans during the segregation and at times actively encouraged it.
From ~1942 to 1945, there are no entries, for example. I know it's kinda covered in the Timeline of WW2 article, but the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese are not mentioned.
Whitewashing is real on Wikipedia. I know its a tired meme, but you really do need to do your own research nowadays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Japanese_history#2...
Why would you bring that particular topic up out of the blue?
But those illustrations could be full of lies just the same?
For example, I was in a building once when a natural gas leak caused the roof to blow off. I recorded 3 local news casts about it later that evening. They all got major facts completely wrong. They said it was a warehouse (it was an office building). They said the building was cleared before it blew (I was in it when it blew, the firemen never suggested I leave).
Another one is the 737MAX crashes. The popular press consistently misrepresents and misreports it. (I've posted about that here many times.)
And, quite obviously, the mainstream media in the US has been completely misrepresenting current events. Do you think that's a modern phenomenon? I don't. I suspect it has always been happening, it's just that the internet has exposed it.
Relevant in this context inasmuch as many Wikipedia articles are based on press sources.
https://www.google.com/search?q=scots+Wikipedia+brony&oq=sco...
It's working.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/china-explained-sixth-t...
Zhemao said she made most of her fake entries to fill the gaps left by her first couple of entries she edited. “As the saying goes, in order to tell a lie, you must tell more lies. I was reluctant to delete the hundreds of thousands of words I wrote, but as a result, I wound up losing millions of words, and a circle of academic friends collapsed,” she wrote. “The trouble I’ve caused is hard to make up for, so maybe a permanent ban is the only option. My current knowledge is not enough to make a living, so in the future I will learn a craft, work honestly, and not do nebulous things like this any more.”
Is there anything like this?
This is what I am seing on Twitter linking the above article. A good additional information.
I don't think I've ever seen that claim before. It's... maybe true of some articles.
I'm not implying that she intended anything of that sort (although some of the other comments suggest that she may have used the fabrications to her advantage in smaller settings), but that her actions could have ended up producing similar results.
This is decidedly different from deliberate world-building that takes inspiration from the real and mixes it with the fictional, like what Tolkien did. It would have been exponentially harder to get anyone to care about her stories if they hadn't come with the wikipedia veneer (somewhat sadly, it might be easier for her now that she got global media attention).
That might have been the goal all along.