Stop Wikipedia Vandals

A fake quote attributed to French Composer Maurice Jarre was inserted by Shane Fitzgerald into Wikipedia and fooled newspapers around the world. Supposedly it was intended as a social experiment about globalization and reporter fact checking. While it seems to have shamed the reporters and press somewhat, it is still being reported as a failure of Wikipedia somehow, even though the quote was removed from the article because it had no referenced sources, while Fitzgerald repeatedly added it.

Whenever I tell someone that I looked up something on Wikipedia they often come back with the same crap about how anybody can publish stuff there and it is all wrong. I graciously explain to them that they should always be aware of the potential errors in the source of their information wherever it might be from, and to always read the discussion page on Wikipedia. They can contribute to Wikipedia and make it better themselves as well.

I have heard of other students doing experiments where they added some incorrect content to Wikipedia and how long it stayed up. What do they think they lean from this or what they think they learn from it. Instead of encouraging students to be vandals, how about teaching about adding correct information to an article instead of defacing it, or researching and writing a new one.

Shane Fitzgerald is a Wikipedia vandal. Lazy reporters are bad, but it is also bad to vandalize Wikipedia to make your point. I am so glad the "he was wary about the ethical implications of using someone’s death as a social experiment" - and then still decided to lie anyway.

Am I naive in my hope for people to play nice together in the common areas of the web or is this prank a necessary lesson in journalism and the critical eye with which to read Wikipedia articles?

(via Castro's Favorite Color)

Is Wikipedia dangerous to the conspiracy theory addled mind?

xkcd points out that Wikipedia can be quite a time waster as you click from interesting topic to topic when you get distracted in your search for a bit of useful information.

I used to try to do this with regular encyclopedias (on paper no less), but it is so much easier using hyperlinks on the web. Tabbed browsing doesn't suppress this behavior, it only enhances it. My particular chain took an interesting conspiracy theory/ free mason/ alternate religion path.

I started with the Infamous things that have happened on Saturday Night Live linked to from from a reddit post about the people banned from appearing on SNL, there is quite a list.

That led to looking up what 30 Rock is, because I like that TV show. In this reference though, 30 rock is a nickname for the GE building, from its address, 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

The GE building is a pretty famous landmark in New York and has a sculpture in front that is evocative of William Blake's Ancient of Days.

It turns out that Ancient of Days is another name for God but that different traditions have different meanings. This was my chance to look at all the names for God, but instead I jumped to Esotericism because it sounded interesting and that group has a different interpretation on Ancient of Days.

Esotericism, as Wikipedia reports it, largely overlaps with "hidden knowledge." There was some mention of the ancient mystery religions and a claim that Christianity was one of them and interesting comments about Gnosticism about Hermeticism.

Gnosticism and its hidden knowledge aspect seemed to be too easy a choice so I took the Hermeticism branch instead and fell right into a discussion of Hermes Trismegistus who may or may not have existed but is suggested as the founder of a whole system of beliefs of which The Order of Freemasons and Rosicrucianism are based.

Let's stop here.

My theory is that Wikipedia and the Internet it is a part of are either schizophrenic themselves or are conducive to schizophrenia. My innocent clicking of links led me deeper into an alternate world of secret religions and hidden knowledge and farther from rational discourse and reality. I am lucky that I don't hear voices in my head right now. Maybe the real secret is that there is a conspiracy to make people believe in conspiracy theories and secret societies all of which may or may not exist. I call it the meta-conspiracy theory.