Long-Term Wikipedia Vandalism Exposed

Daveydweeb writes, "The accuracy of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, came into question again when a long-standing article on 'NPA personality theory' was confirmed to be a hoax. Not only had the article survived at Wikipedia for the better part of a year, but it had even been listed as a 'Good Article,' supposedly placing it in the top 0.2-0.3% of all Wikipedia articles — despite being almost entirely written by the creator of the theory himself."

Really? Unconfirmed info on wikipedia?!?

How many times must it be said? Wikipedia is great for researching trivia. But don't believe everything you read there. Your grandma may as well have posted it!!...
http://what-is-what.com/what_is/love.html [what-is-what.com]

Re:Really? Unconfirmed info on wikipedia?!?

Newsflash: You aren't supposed to use ANY sort of encyclopedia as a source of anything. Encyclopedias are there to provide a starting point about a topic, not to be used themselves as part of the school work or whatever.

If you ever cite any sort of encyclopedia in your work, any decent teacher should give you a big fat 0. Only valid use of an encyclopedia is checking an entry for something you're unfamiliar with, to learn a general overview and get leads about what you should research.

Re:Really? Unconfirmed info on wikipedia?!?

Sarcasm or not, you should question everything you read, no matter how trusted the source.

I don't believe this is true at all!

This is why you need multiple sources

Personally I think wikipedia should be treated as any other source, you should have at least one other, independent, source that backs up the first. I've found mistakes in the college text books that I pay hundreds of dollars for, so if your only going by one source your bound to get screwed. What I really like about wikipedia is that it gives you great sources that you can use, check up on those sources as well.

Wikipedia should NEVER be cited

nukem996, you are not wrong in suggesting that people should use multiple sources when writing things, but the truth is people should never cite wikipedia as a source. It's not because the information is wrong, but it's because the information has not been vetted in a process that can be methodically demonstrated. Even peer-reviewed journals can fail, and they do, but the truth is the information contained in those journals is being vetted by people with backgrounds in related fields and the information is being analyzed in a way that is methodically laid out. If Wikipedia was designed in that way -- where the process was highly moderated, then it would be a legitimate source, not unlike how a book or a journal is a legitimate source. (Although old books and journals are wrong in the worst kinds of ways... sometimes)

I've written several articles on Wikipedia on obscure things (Phosphatidylmyo-inositol_mannosides [wikipedia.org]) which was just an exercise in me understanding my own research, but the stuff I've written, even if heavily sourced on Wikipedia is so obscure I could just make up anything about that and it would likely fly. And the truth is, if I write anything that seems correct, for the most part it will last because it seems correct And therein lies the problem that an unmoderated system cannot solve for. Wikipedia assumes honorable and intelligent users and gives enormous privileges to these users, when just one bad apple can go around slowly obscuring fact with fiction.

Anyway, I've ranted here which is not what I really wanted, but my point is simple: Wikipedia is a good starting point, but should never ever be used as a cited source. Find the information you discover in Wikipedia in another source and use that. And, because you should be a good wikipedia user, put that source into the article.

Re:Wikipedia should NEVER be cited

but the stuff I've written, even if heavily sourced on Wikipedia is so obscure I could just make up anything about that and it would likely fly.

People frequently make the mistake of thinking that this problem is exclusive to wikipedia. That is false. That problem plagues every aspect of Academia that it isn't even funny. Everyone who spent his fair share of research hours in any university library already stumbled on contradictory information, incorrections and even outright lies on publications adopted by the libraries and in even cases by the courses themselves. These are publications which were heavily edited and in some cases even reeditions.

Moreover, academic fraud is always popping up. Things like falsifying results and messing up with the research variables pop up from time to time. If that type of fraud happens on academic circles where the scientific method is intensely applied and revered, why does it shock anyone when someone makes stuff up in a wiki? But thankfully in a wiki there may be quite a few eyes monitoring the development and, when necessary, edit the text and correct that. That doesn't happen with a book.

Not terribly susprising

Most of the anti vandalism efforts are directed at kicking the obvious stuff, there is waay too much information out there for someone to check every fact. It's a problem without an easy solution, we can't write a fact checking bot and we don't have enough humans. Go figure. Oh well, it'll make for interesting podcast discussion [wikipediaweekly.com] next week.

How many times...

... does Wikipedia have to be written off as a be-all-end-all 100% accurate encyclopedia? With just short of one and a half million entries, I'm sure there's at least 10,000 partial or even complete fictional articles. Does it affect the encyclopedia as a whole? Not at all. The only people it affects clearly believe *everything* they read on the internet, irregardless of source.

Saying that a certain percentage of articles undermines the whole encyclopedia is likening everybody to criminals just because some of us are.

I just can't believe people are still beating this drum - when will individual cases like this stop making /. news?

Irregardless is not a fucking word

Irrespective and regardless are words.

Re:Irregardless is not a fucking word

Irregardless is not a word

Yes it is, I saw it in wikipedia!

Irregardless is a word [wikipedia.org]

It seems the article has been taken down.

Can someone offer a link to it? I may have missed it??

Not a Hoax

Correct me if I am wrong, but I just read the AfD page and it doesn't appear that this was a hoax or vandalism at all. What it was, was a well written article on a theory that did not meet Wikipedia's notability requirements. It was also written by the creator of the theory which is against Wikipedia's policies on original research.

TFA is not as stupid as you might think

We all know Wikipedia has its flaws. However there is a sentence in TFA that i think quite interesting :

The assumption is that, if they make it as far as Good Article review, they're probably quite good.

I dont blame Wikipedia's admins or users for not having thought about that before...I think i would have probably assumed the same thing in their position.
That's something that could be changed easily. It may be interesting to set up a commitee that is in charge of double-checking the informations in the article before actually allowing people to vote for or against the tag "Good Article" based on the style and the quantity of information in the article (What seems the main criteria to differenciate a normal and a good article).

Proof the system works

I'd say it's more like proof that the system works.

Sure you can create a false article. It's not like scientists have never falsified their research and published it in a journal, for example.

The proof is whether they're caught and the mistakes are corrected. In an obscure subject this may take a while in ANY format.

People need to learn to apply good research skills across the board, not just to wikis.
Considering the source is one of these.

Openness also leads to better error-detection

Nobody's claiming that Wikipedia is 100% accurate. Even closed encyclopedias though can contain errors. The point is that those errors are less likely to be detected since very few people have access.

The creator?

....surely the creator of a theory is the most qualified person to write about that theory?

Re:The creator?

The vast bulk of the page was written by User:ABenis. You can still view that user's contributions here [wikipedia.org].

Is it possible to read deleted articles?

Is it possible to read deleted articles on Wikipedia in any way? I know articles are deleted for a reason, but it seems like a Bad Thing that once an article is judged unworthy, all its history and edits disappear into a black hole.

I know that right now I can use caches or Wikipedia mirrors to access the article, but imagine if somebody ten years into the future want to read the offending article. (It had to have some interesting stuff, since it had been picked out as a Good Article earlier.)

The wikipedia is not a True / False detector

The wikipedia is a very good source for new information, but not trust. So you get here, collect info, and use check that info with facts elsewhere.

Also the wikipedia is not a tool to dectect if something is false. Wrong ideas can be supported there. Seems that people use all encyclopedias to avoid thinking. That iself is wrong.

Misleading Summary

Now I'm just convinced that even the people who submit articles don't read them first. This wasn't "vandalism" per se so much as it was shameless self-promotion by Anthony M. Benis, who invented the same psychological theory that he would later write about on Wikipedia. While his knowledge and authority on the theory are not in question (what with his being the creator of it), the notability of the theory in the field of psychology is in question.

It seems that the true nature of the article is far, far more boring than what the summary leads you to believe.

The Summary is Misleading

The basic complain is that the NPA Personality is not really a widely accepted theory that was promoted on the Wikipedia by the author of the theory himself. Notable or not, the NPA Personality theory was published, thought not accepted. That doesn't make the article vandalism or a hoax. The author is self-promoting on Wikipedia and violates the no primary research rule. It doesn't really say anything about the Wikipedia system. The fact that it was caught and then voted for deletion means the Wikipedia is working. It's not vandalism nor a hoax. It's a long, edited article on an obscured, generally unacceptable theory in psychology promoted by a less than notable author. What's up with people trying to bash the Wikipedia?

It's gone now, isn't it?

I fail to see how this is a black mark against Wikipedia. The theory is genuine, just not really worth mentioning. If you read the deletion discussion, you'll see that Wikipedia is working just fine. A whole bunch of people had an intelligent, generally respectful discussion about the merits of the piece, then decided to remove it after due consideration. 'Vandalism'? I think not.

Anti-WP?

I have to ask - is this Slashdot Anti-Wikipedia day? There have been three anti-Wikipedia articles in the last 24 hours or so.

Google Cache of the NPA wikipedia page

I was curious, so i figure some of you will probably be too.

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:UZxn8h7HkXcJ:e n.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPA_personality_theory+NPA+pe rsonality+theory&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1&lr=lang_ en&client=firefox-a [72.14.203.104]

Wikipedia should have releases

I read a few comments on the talk pages. It was interesting to see how the problem was approached and dealt with. My conclusion is that Wikipedia needs releases like Linux distros.

The user could indicate in a profile whether she wants stable/testing or unstable pages, maybe even sections/volumes whatever could be separately specified.

The stable version could only be edited by assigned editors and mostly for typos and broken references and such. If an error is found it could be indicated with a note of different color but the original text would not be deleted. (Removal may be necessary in case of a copyright violation.)

The testing version of the pages can be freely edited, but the contributions appear only after a moderation/review.

The unstable version would be what we have today.

For an article to make it to stable it needs to stay in testing long enough without major changes AND reviewed by several authors.

With a system like that the article in question would never made it to stable, probably not even testing.

Matyas

Destroy it all!

I've once found two pages sticking together in a book I got from the library. Burn all the libraries!

since when ideas are bad ?

does every new idea gets published in every "good" magazine ? does every new painting gets sold for 20$mil when its still wet ? every new idea needs time and place to grow, then why wiki is such a bad place for this ? why cant wiki be a place for knowledge to be born and flourish ? ou... its encyclopedia it has to have facts not "ideas".... facts are supported by creditable magazines and so on... ideas are supported by your own understanding and interpretation...

Someone needs to go out more

We're all tired of various "experts" and "specialists" attacking Wikipedia's accuracy.

If a "classic" encyclopedia was to be examined for accuracy, you can be sure you'll find multiple instances of brutal inaccuracy. We're friggin' human, nothing we create is perfect, and we're not perfect, and the world isn't perfect. Deal with it.

Man, there is a LOT OF FUD right now.

Seriously. Wikipedia is going to have growing pains like any other online medium where public input is involved. To pretend that a couple of sources are misleading in anyway is a little silly. 98% of Wikipedia by these standards is an OK source. Most likely, verifiably. Seems like a good working system, and I know it is already, because I USE IT. Now if I want to double check facts, an extra source is never a bad idea, which is why I'm so into project gutenberg (sp?) and other sites like that as well. The more information we have immediately available, the better. Everyone should double check all of their facts anyway if it's about anything really important!

Why don't they teach THAT in schools anymore?

rhY

tagged

Tagged this one under "nevertrustwikipedia" just like the last 4 or so relevant wikipedia articles.

Wikipedia only exposes a long term problem

Some of this is shooting the messenger. The truth is that throughout history much of the information available to human beings has been incorrect, lies, spin, and shameless self-promotion. One reason we have universities and the complex structures of peer review and official publication is to try and establish a gold standard for reliable knowledge and discourse about it, and it is clear from the way that universities have evolved that they have to have political independence to work.

There are two special difficulties with the Internet. First, the sheer ease and untraceablity of publication which makes life so easy for the irresponsible. And second, the growing tendency of even responsible people to quote or link to other information without thinking. And there is a special problem with Wikipedia; the absence of any proper oversight. It's significant (at least to me) that the major on-line newspapers, the NYT and the UK Guardian, both have stringent procedures for responding to reader complaints.

It would be really good if the major world universities would actually get together and produce something like this, perhaps with a clearly delimited three-tier approach:

Highest tier, fact checked academic publication rendered to encyclopedia level.

Second tier: Reviewed and monitored information not from academic sources, like the CIA yearbook.

Third tier: reader contributed unverified information clearly labelled as such.

Commercial fork of wikipedia?

My Observations:
(1) Wikipedia has a tremendous amount of high quality, accurate information.
(2) Wikipedia has a large amount of bogus info, misleading statements, and other problems.

My Opinion:

(3) Wikipedia could be made more accurate/better if articles were systematically reviewed by experts.
(4) The only practical way for (3) to be accomplished is it were organized and run by an extremely well financed non-profit or a private company that could somehow recoup its investment by selling access, advertisements or some kind of product.

Essentially, the private company would start with the current wikipedia and pay real experts in the various fields to go through and prune the bogus crap and misleading statements. I don't know if this is compatible with wikipedia licensing in its current form... but I think an encyclopedia with all of wikipedias content, but peer reviewed and without the crap, would be fantastic. You might be able to actually cite it! (Argue all you want, but there's no way you can cite Wikipedia right now in a real academic article.)

The mirrors

I wonder if all the subtle mirrors [about.com] will be fixed...

I never liked how so freaking many website do more or less subtle mirrors of Wikipedia. Not for licensing reasons -- they have full permissions to do this if obeying the GFDL -- but because Wikipedia is often freaking unverified information. You'd think about.com and the likes would know better!

Spotted quickly when linked to another article

Usually these articles are spotted when the author in question links them to an existing article. See for example this piece of nonsense [wikipedia.org] which is working its way through AfD at the moment. I spotted it when it was linked to the existing Penal Colony article which is on my watchlist.

Rich.

This just goes to show...

This just goes to show you that you should never believe anything you read on Wikipedia. I know this because I read it on Slashdot. :P

This reminds me of the article that appeared in a couple of Australian newspapers today, mentioning Brandt's findings of 142 copyvio's on Wikipedia. By the time the newspaper article was published, Wikipedia admins had located and fixed all articles mentioned, plus another hundred or so. Good work dead-tree press!

Three Wikipedia articles on /. front page?

And all of them negative to some extent. Is this just me, or does this sound odd?

Stop the Press!

Comrade Ogilvy sighted again [online-literature.com]!

Why is anyone at all surprised that Wikipedia is stuffed to the gills with junk and propaganda?

Oh, and let's get rid of another myth. You don't have to believe everything you read on Wikipedia - really? There are at least 965 domains that scrape Wikipedia's content and serve it up with advertising. Chances are, almost any factual subject searched for on Google will include Wikipedia and/or the scrapers.

Most people are unaware of these scraper sites, and they don't realise that they're reading Wikipedia without the visual clues. So what chance do they have? Wikipedia is feeding lies, distortion and propaganda into the body of the Internet, and all we get from slashdotters is -1000 mod points and pointless statements that "other encyclopedias have mistakes in them" as if that made a difference. The real difference between Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica is that EB stands behind its scholarship and if a mistake is discovered, they will fix it. There is no guarantee from anyone at Wikimedia or anyone else as to the veracity of any article.

Call Off The Celebration!

Damn! And in this of all possible years! Can we still celebrate [theonion.com] after such a scandal?

Transparent Process

That's the best thing about Wikipedia: the debates are transparent, down to the boring nitty-gritty. No transparency at all with the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia do with a firmer identity process, even if to just weed out the multitude of sock-puppets.

Mysterious factoids

How do you know if it's a reliable source if no one is an expert on a fictional fact? Think about that one. I bet everyone who monitors that site thought there was someone else who knew what NPA was. There was a great interview on NPR this weekend with the founder/creator of Wikipedia. He said that it is a completely open resource, that is monitored and maintained by people who generally live up to preserving the reliabilty and integrity of article sources. He also mentioned that there are thousands of experts out there monitoring Wikipedia, and that false information for the most part doesn't last that long. Oh well, there was one that got away, so to speak. For a free information resource all-in-all Wikipedia is great. If you guys want a reliable resource get a subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica, where fact finders get paid lots of money to keep a lock down on facts. If that happens to Wikipedia, then you have no reason to complain.

Scrap the whole thing

this one freak incident obviously means the ENTIRE project is utterly worthless. oh well, delete it all.

automatic grading method

I think wikipedia would benefit from an automatic grading system.

Articles that have been there for a long time, that have been edited by a big number of editors, from different IP addresses, at a regular pace over long periods of time should be receive a mod up.

And the opposite: articles that were edited by a few authors, from a few or a single IP address, in a short period of time should be added an automatic warning when displayed.

Contributors can be graded too:

Modifying text in an article would count for an automatic negative vote of the modified sentence, and for an automatic positive vote for nearby sentences. The authors who contributed the moded up or moded down sentences will have their karma increased or decreased appropriately.

FUD

I am immensely surprised that these seemingly endless Wikipedia stories are not called out as FUD. Instead, it's always exactly the same arguments about Wikipedia's rules and processes and "insightful" comments about how you can't trust anything etc. etc. Okay, we're all agreed that Wikipedia's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. So why go over it again and again?

There certainly seems to be an increasingly frequent crackpot/vested interests battle against Wikipedia (and I'm not saying that certain issues shouldn't be addressed). Regardless of whether you think it's 90% accurate or 99.9% accurate, the fact remains that it is an immensely valuable resource. For some people this is a threat. For others, it puts it in the same camp as our omnipotent-Google-master. Most just want to use it for what it is, and fighting the FUD is the best way to ensure that this keeps happening - a sullied reputation will only decrease donations and other help.

Here it is, for your reading pleasure

Some have expressed an interest in reading what Wikipedia called a "good article," the NPA personality theory article. Here it is, grabbed by Wikipedia-Watch from Google's cache, and stripped of junk added by Google: http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/npa.html [wikipedia-watch.org]

w/e

Vandalism? A guy promotes his own theory using wiki and finally gets busted. Htf is this vandalism?

And, besides, having a graduate degree myself and written tons of papers: misinformation, unchecked facts and self-promotions are rife across all libraries. As one of my professors told me, "I discovered, way back, as a student, that I could find a source to make any point I wanted...."

Wiki is the bomb. Lay off it!...

Using encyclopedias as source

IMHO using an encyclopedia article as your only source for research is simply not a good idea, be it Wikipedia or Britannica or any other. Encyclopedias are meant to give an overview about topics and to cite original research, witch is what you should be reading and citing in your own research, not the encyclopedia article. There are of course exceptions to this, for instance if your are citing something fairly trivial and not fundamental to your research. But in general using an encyclopedia as your main source is just wrong.

A year's pretty good, compare with christianity

For 2000 years we've been sold the theory that there was a virgin birth, turns out the whole thing was a mistranslation from hebrew into greek. And millions of suckers out there just continue to swallow it.

 

Article should stay.. unless...

If this guy created a theory, and no one else has done work to collaborate it or contradict it, why is it a problem?

I'd say have a tag or a notice on the page stating that, but otherwise I'd say it's a good resource. There's thousands of doctors and scientists with good (and bad) ideas that will never be heard. This is one way their work might attract attention and interest, and then further work can be accomplished either confirming or denying the theories.

Isn't that how science works? Sure this isn't the same level as peer reviewed publications... it's the same process though, just a different audience.

Dangnabbit!

I am head of HR at a company that recently got an award for our integration of NPA personality theory into the hiring process. Please nobody tell anybody in the HR community about this. Thanks.

Trolling for the trolls

I'm kinda tired of wikipedia stories. Its a neat project but it has taken a bunch of story time recently and I'd rather see more diverse postings. Sorry for being a troll.

From a copy of the article

NPA theory proposes that the baboon is a likely perfectionist-aggressive PA type [answers.com]

Having worked for a baboon, I can tell you this is so true. Nothing is ever good enough for Mr. Jubjub!
And, if he thinks I am going to work for bananas and kiss his red ass for another 2 years, he has another thing coming!

I would not call it 'vandalsim'

This is some scientist, bragging a lot about his idea that no one took seriously.

While I agree it does not belong in Wikipedia, and should be removed, I do not think it is 'vandalism'.