The story behind Jar’Edo Wens, the longest-running hoax in Wikipedia history
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
One that I recall was for the Refrigerator entry, which he seemingly innocently updated with a "better quality photo" of his own fridge.
If you examined the photo you'd spot that there was a guitar on one of the shelves[1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Refrigerator&oldid...
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Winners_Don%27t_Us...
Considering the article was an unsourced stub that seems to have owed its longevity to the fact nobody noticed its existence, that's some impressively comprehensive sloppy research.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16793247/ns/technology_and_science...
At the time it was seen as an outrage (in my view correctly so) and promptly banned. Wikipedia has a clear conflict-of-interest policy [1] for good reason. Their most valuable asset is reader trust, and Wikipedia, for all its flaws, has done a reasonably good job of keeping it from being overrun by marketroids.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
I'm not quite clear on where the Wikipedia donation money goes though. But if they have a significant amount left over, they could use it on something worthwhile like fact checking.
People don't like to talk about him because it feeds the troll, but after five years of solid effort the guy is now scoring mainstream press hits.
Wikipedia's (lack of) resistance to hoaxes is an issue for concern, and the WMF needs criticism, but Kohs is deranged.
To give you a fascinating extent to how varied indigenous lannguage groups of Australia are check out this map. We're not talking dialects/accents here, we're talking unique languages where I've be told in many cases people share very little traditionally language except for possibly some similarities with their direct neighbouring lands.
Personal Anecdote: I also remember the time, one of my friends in college told me that she purposely added misinformation to Wikipedia the night before a big test to lower the curve.
That was also the moment I was glad I'm didn't do premed in college, those kids were hyper-competitive and unethical.
That's not true any more, of course.
A friend of mine is a published author. Not massively famous or anything, but he's got a series of four books out, published by an actual publishing house and available to buy across the UK in Waterstones and other physical stores (i.e. not self-published or internet-only).
His page was nominated for deletion a few years ago, and despite protest was deleted. About a year ago I thought I might have another go so another friend and I tried (as a first step) adding a page for the publisher. They've published quite a few books now, and some have been nominated for some quite prestigious literary awards. Not unreasonable one would think.
Within minutes we had someone come along and nominate the page for summary deletion. This person didn't know anything about UK literature, or even what the Booker Prize was, but was very eager to get rid of the page regardless. I looked into what their motivation might be and it seems they were part of a team that effectively exists to get rid of new pages as fast as possible, for any reason they can come up with. They get notified when a new page is made and try to kill it, basically.
Unless you are familiar with all the arcana of wikipedia (my friend was this time) then you have almost no hope of getting past this and getting anything new in.
--edit--
The 'team' I'm referring to is wikipedia's "New Page Patrol". I appreciate it exists to stop spam, hate pages etc from lasting too long, but in my experience the people doing this are over-zealous and far too keen on nominating things for "Speedy Deletion" based on their opinions about notability.
This has not been my experience recently and it appears I am far from alone. I find wikipedia (the resource) very useful indeed and have a lot of respect for the project and the outcome. I just think the community has problems.
My sides!
Even if you're a hard-core atheist who places Yahweh on the same level as the boogeyman (which describes me pretty well), you should still recognize the cultural significance.