5 ms·

My friends and I had a shameful game in uni where we competed to see who could make the most egregious edits to wikipedia without getting reverted. What was su

My friends and I had a shameful game in uni where we competed to see who could make the most egregious edits to wikipedia without getting reverted. What was surprising was just how easy it was. We started with minor edits in small articles, just adding our own name to some list of notable achievers. Then, due to competition, we would add an entire paragraph that fabricated an event. Like adding ourself as a conquistador of some made-up novohispano population in some made-up location. Imagine how compromised wikipedia must be by people with agendas more lofty than uni students passing some time. Hell, just the other day I removed "See Also: Donald Trump" from one of the major fallacy articles. The history showed that the scathing political commentary was up there for over 8 months and nobody cared.

tptacek 8y ago
"Shameful" is a good word for it. Stuff like this is a major reason --- maybe the major reason --- behind most of the limitations of the Wikipedia platform. It is, for instance, the primary cause of "deletionism": marginal articles are difficult to police, and so the project has to establish a notability cut-off so it can constrain the problem at least to articles where there are sources to tie claims to. I'm not saying you should feel bad about yourself, but it's good if people can recognize what WP is up against.
- yarrel 8y ago
  You are confusing edits with articles. Deletionists tend to confuse their personal ignorance (often of a website called "Google" [yes I know how notability works, no that's not an argument against not bothering to even trivially check whether an article can be improved rather than deleted]) with a mandate to sabotage Wikipedia. People who remove cruft from articles, rather than speedy deleting articles that aren't about Pokemon, are not deletionists and should not be invoked as human shields for deletionists.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    No, you've misunderstood my argument. The problem is that it's difficult for editors to remove "cruft" on articles about marginal topics, because there are so few (usually: zero) reliable sources to draw from. You can't start from a premise that "cruft" can be removed without removing classes of articles; that begs the question that deletionists answer.
    - xelxebar 8y ago
      > No, you've misunderstood my argument. I'm jumping in the middle here, but mind if I make a meta-comment? Phrases like "you've misunderstood my words" can sound quite confrontational and, in my experience, tend to provoke defensive responses rather than Cooperative Idea Sharing TM. I find ideas flow more freely and coopertively by taking the miscommunication blame on myself, "Oh, I must have been unclear. We're on the same page about X, but what I was really trying to say is..." Anyway, that's just my feel on the meta-interaction above. Carry on.
smsm42 8y ago
It is easy to mess up public places. You can spit on the floor in a bus, throw trash on a street, vandalize Wikipedia. Or you can clean the trash and help Wikipedia. The choice is yours. There's no mystical powers coming in and cleaning up after you - just you and people exactly like you. So before complaining "nobody cared" ask yourself - how did I help? What did I do to expect others to clean up after me and feel entitled offense if they did not? Maybe if you and your friends helped instead of messing it up, there would be less need for somebody else to do it.
- abugher 8y ago
  You have a choice. You can engage in conversation with peers as if you might want to understand the reasons for their actions. Or you can preach at them and blame them as individuals for system problems.
  - gnud 8y ago
    Those individuals, and a few thousand more like them, _are_ the system problem.
    - komali2 8y ago
      And the way I see it the only way around it is cultural indoctrination. It doesn't have to be a negative concept. It can be as simple as picking up a can as you walk by it on the street, and otherwise having a completely normal life. People with you can then see "huh, I can contribute just a little bit, feel good about it, without going full hippie high-viz jacket and tongs with a trash bag every weekend."
      - smsm42 8y ago
        Yes. Small things help. Or at least not making it worse. One doesn't have to be a Greenpeace activist to not throw trash on the street, normal everyday behavior would be enough in this case. If only all other societal problems were so easy to solve!
  - deleted 8y ago
madeofpalk 8y ago
Me and my friends did exactly the same when we were 15. One of us added "Hannah screwed her dog" to the Wikipedia article for Paper. I remember being surprised that it lasted for a few weeks.
- tux3 8y ago
  I'm happy to say that wouldn't stay up for long anymore. At least not something that obvious. When the bot doesn't catch those, there's almost always a couple of people looking at every change as they stream by, but that's an uphill battle that mostly catches the obvious bad edits. The rate of change to recent change reviewers is too high to catch the more sophisticated vandalism as it happens, that's when things start staying up for weeks or months until some random person browsing the page notices, and hopefully fixes it.
- llao 8y ago
  > it lasted for a few weeks. Citation needed...
belorn 8y ago
There is a bunch of networks that operate on the idea the the majority involved are good actors and the detection rate of the bad actors is statistical good enough. Take the tor project. It is very easy for a exit node operator to be bad. If you wanted to you could go and compete on who make the most egregious changes to traffic before the tor project bans the node. If the wast majority of operates did this then the project would die. Similar, torrent sites and BitTorrent is easily poked at by bad actors that either insert malware or do other bad things to the network. It too only operates on the basis that the wast majority do not have the intention to bring it down. Of course the same could be said by HN. If a wast majority of users ganged together to push a specific agenda then it would likely take a while before the moderators could intervene. The upvote/downvote and flag system operates on the concept that the majority of users operate as independent agents and do not intend to try bring HN down. In the end however for all the weakness and dependency on the statistical good nature of people, sites like those tend to be resilient in the long run.

tptacek 8y ago

"Shameful" is a good word for it. Stuff like this is a major reason --- maybe the major reason --- behind most of the limitations of the Wikipedia platform. It is, for instance, the primary cause of "deletionism": marginal articles are difficult to police, and so the project has to establish a notability cut-off so it can constrain the problem at least to articles where there are sources to tie claims to. I'm not saying you should feel bad about yourself, but it's good if people can recognize what WP is up against.

yarrel 8y ago
You are confusing edits with articles. Deletionists tend to confuse their personal ignorance (often of a website called "Google" [yes I know how notability works, no that's not an argument against not bothering to even trivially check whether an article can be improved rather than deleted]) with a mandate to sabotage Wikipedia. People who remove cruft from articles, rather than speedy deleting articles that aren't about Pokemon, are not deletionists and should not be invoked as human shields for deletionists.
- tptacek 8y ago
  No, you've misunderstood my argument. The problem is that it's difficult for editors to remove "cruft" on articles about marginal topics, because there are so few (usually: zero) reliable sources to draw from. You can't start from a premise that "cruft" can be removed without removing classes of articles; that begs the question that deletionists answer.
  - xelxebar 8y ago
    > No, you've misunderstood my argument. I'm jumping in the middle here, but mind if I make a meta-comment? Phrases like "you've misunderstood my words" can sound quite confrontational and, in my experience, tend to provoke defensive responses rather than Cooperative Idea Sharing TM. I find ideas flow more freely and coopertively by taking the miscommunication blame on myself, "Oh, I must have been unclear. We're on the same page about X, but what I was really trying to say is..." Anyway, that's just my feel on the meta-interaction above. Carry on.

smsm42 8y ago

It is easy to mess up public places. You can spit on the floor in a bus, throw trash on a street, vandalize Wikipedia. Or you can clean the trash and help Wikipedia. The choice is yours. There's no mystical powers coming in and cleaning up after you - just you and people exactly like you. So before complaining "nobody cared" ask yourself - how did I help? What did I do to expect others to clean up after me and feel entitled offense if they did not? Maybe if you and your friends helped instead of messing it up, there would be less need for somebody else to do it.

abugher 8y ago
You have a choice. You can engage in conversation with peers as if you might want to understand the reasons for their actions. Or you can preach at them and blame them as individuals for system problems.
- gnud 8y ago
  Those individuals, and a few thousand more like them, _are_ the system problem.
  - komali2 8y ago
    And the way I see it the only way around it is cultural indoctrination. It doesn't have to be a negative concept. It can be as simple as picking up a can as you walk by it on the street, and otherwise having a completely normal life. People with you can then see "huh, I can contribute just a little bit, feel good about it, without going full hippie high-viz jacket and tongs with a trash bag every weekend."
    - smsm42 8y ago
      Yes. Small things help. Or at least not making it worse. One doesn't have to be a Greenpeace activist to not throw trash on the street, normal everyday behavior would be enough in this case. If only all other societal problems were so easy to solve!
- deleted 8y ago

madeofpalk 8y ago

Me and my friends did exactly the same when we were 15. One of us added "Hannah screwed her dog" to the Wikipedia article for Paper. I remember being surprised that it lasted for a few weeks.

tux3 8y ago
I'm happy to say that wouldn't stay up for long anymore. At least not something that obvious. When the bot doesn't catch those, there's almost always a couple of people looking at every change as they stream by, but that's an uphill battle that mostly catches the obvious bad edits. The rate of change to recent change reviewers is too high to catch the more sophisticated vandalism as it happens, that's when things start staying up for weeks or months until some random person browsing the page notices, and hopefully fixes it.
llao 8y ago
> it lasted for a few weeks. Citation needed...

belorn 8y ago

There is a bunch of networks that operate on the idea the the majority involved are good actors and the detection rate of the bad actors is statistical good enough. Take the tor project. It is very easy for a exit node operator to be bad. If you wanted to you could go and compete on who make the most egregious changes to traffic before the tor project bans the node. If the wast majority of operates did this then the project would die. Similar, torrent sites and BitTorrent is easily poked at by bad actors that either insert malware or do other bad things to the network. It too only operates on the basis that the wast majority do not have the intention to bring it down. Of course the same could be said by HN. If a wast majority of users ganged together to push a specific agenda then it would likely take a while before the moderators could intervene. The upvote/downvote and flag system operates on the concept that the majority of users operate as independent agents and do not intend to try bring HN down. In the end however for all the weakness and dependency on the statistical good nature of people, sites like those tend to be resilient in the long run.