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."

Is it possible to read deleted articles?

[ymgve]

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.)

Re:Wikipedia should NEVER be cited

[GreatBunzinni]

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.

Re:Openness also leads to better error-detection

[LMariachi]

Just because you haven't availed yourself of traditional encyclopaedias doesn't mean that they aren't available to you.

As to your second point, that's a false dichotomy. No one is claiming that the Encyclopaedia Britannica (or any other traditional encyclopaedia) is 100% accurate, but I think it's fair to say that you won't find entries in the E.B. along the lines of "KLINGON: Klingons are toal fagz omg!"

Veering off-topic, much of the active Wikipedia population suffers from the very same affliction endemic amongst Slashdotters -- in a nutshell, acknowledgedly smart people who nevertheless have a vastly overinflated assessment of their own intelligence, especially with regard to the "soft sciences." Being an accomplished kernel hacker does not make you (for instance) a climatologist or economist, yet there is no shortage of coders who think that nothing more than their specific occupational intelligence qualifies them to speak authoritatively on those subjects. How seriously would anyone take an English major's critique of LISP syntax? Hell, look at all the flak Noam Chomsky catches around here: "He's just a linguist, what does he know about politics?"